The sky fell apart.
Not like an ending storm, but like a shattered mirror, each fragment revealing a different world. Flames, ruins, oceans of black ink, screaming faces—each shard was a window into something that should not exist.
And through the cracks, Clara saw words. Endless words, scrawled in languages older than thought, threading themselves into the fabric of the broken sky.
The colossal eye blinked once more—and then was gone.
In its place stretched a boundless void, filled with fractured timelines colliding and bleeding into each other.
Clara's ink bled uncontrollably from her fingers, pooling beneath her. She clutched her scripts, but the words melted before her eyes.
"No… no, no, no…" Her voice cracked as tears streamed down her face. "These aren't my writings. They never were. I didn't… I didn't create them—"
She looked up at Yurin, who stood at the center of the unraveling chaos, crimson chains holding the world together like stitches in a corpse.
Her voice broke, almost a whisper.
"You wrote them, didn't you?"
Yurin didn't answer immediately. He simply watched her, eyes calm, smile faint.
And then he said it.
"Of course."
Clara fell to her knees, the weight of betrayal crushing her. Every spell. Every scripture. Every page I thought was mine…
Damien, his flames burning hotter with every passing second, bared his teeth. "So that's it. You forged history, you forged her power, and you forged this whole damn world!"
Yurin tilted his head, chains tightening with a sound like bones snapping. "Forged? No. I corrected it. I refined it. Your world was always broken—I just gave it structure."
Damien roared in defiance, fire spiraling into a dragon behind him. "Then I'll break it again!"
He lunged forward, flames carving through reality itself—yet every strike left Yurin smiling.
Behind Yurin, Evelyn's serpentine form coiled protectively, shadow tendrils weaving into a cathedral of darkness around them. Her countless eyes locked on Clara.
"You poor little scholar," Evelyn hissed, her many voices overlapping like a choir of mockery. "You never wrote a single word. You only ever remembered what Crimson placed inside you."
Clara's scream tore through the battlefield. Her ink surged, defying her control, forming jagged letters across the ground:
WHO AM I?
The words burned black fire, the letters screaming as if alive.
The fractured sky opened further, shards of other realities raining down like meteors. In one shard, Clara saw herself kneeling not before Yurin, but beside him—writing scriptures at his command.
In another, Damien burned entire kingdoms in Yurin's name.
In another still, Evelyn was no monster but a crowned queen of shadows, her throne at Yurin's side.
Every shard was a possibility. Every shard was a memory.
Clara clutched her head, sobbing. "Am I… am I just your echo?"
Yurin's expression softened—not with kindness, but with something worse. Recognition.
He stepped closer, crimson aura flaring, chains vibrating with truth.
"You still don't see it, Clara. You've never been separate from me."
Her tear-streaked face lifted, trembling. "W-What…?"
Yurin extended his hand toward her, crimson light reflecting in her broken eyes.
"You are my pen."
The fractured sky screamed as if agreeing, shards shattering into dust. The void howled.
Damien froze mid-strike, Evelyn bowed lower, and Clara's body convulsed as the ink inside her erupted in violent waves.
Her last scream was swallowed by the black tide.
[Chapter Eleven — End]