But just when the Others thought they had escaped the darkness—that they had conquered the worst the Shadow Drafts and Narrative Wraiths had to offer—something shifted.
A wrongness threaded through the roots of the Tree.
Like an annotation no one remembered leaving.
A change tracked by something else.
Something watching.
Far beneath even the Beneath Between, where thought had not yet hardened into idea and memory could no longer be trusted, there lay a vault.
No one had built it.
No one had locked it.
And no one had dared remember it.
It was called THE AUTHOR'S GRAVE.
But no author was buried there.
Only parts of them.
They called them The Darlings.
Characters cut too soon.
Plots erased for pacing.
Worlds that got one sentence, then nothing more.
They waited, buried in silence. Forgotten not by readers—but by their own creators.
And when the Tree bloomed again, it woke them.
A pulse. A ripple. A glitch in the narrative weave.
They stirred.
And they were hungry.
