Her arms are real.
That is the first terror.
Not metaphorically real. Not narratively solid. Real in the way gravity is real. In the way pain is real. Her fingers dig into your back and leave heat there—heat that does not translate into language. It simply exists. The alphabet-dust on the ground recoils from her touch as though ashamed.
Behind you, the wall seals itself.
Not gently.
It sutures shut with a sound like wet paper being stapled to bone.
The Scribe's scream fractures mid-phoneme, clipped as if the sentence itself has been censored. The chamber you escaped folds inward, crushed into a single footnote that smolders briefly before evaporating.
Silence follows.
Not the careful, curated silence of edited prose.
The raw kind. The kind that arrives when something fundamental has been severed.
You are kneeling in a space that should not exist.
A blank margin.
Not empty—unwritten.
