The room didn’t have the grand, cold architecture of the Mothership or the frantic, cluttered energy of Aris’s basement. It was a space of quiet, mid-afternoon shadows and the steady, rhythmic *clack-clack-clack* of a soul being transcribed.
I looked at the man. He wasn't a god. He wasn't a monster. He looked like someone who had spent too many nights staring at a screen, his eyes etched with a fatigue that mirrored my own. But as he handed me that blank page, I felt a surge of fury that burned hotter than the violet root ever had.
"A blank page?" I whispered, the words trembling with a decade of simulated grief. "You put me through thirty years of 'Source' harvesting, you let me watch my father die in a golden cage, you let me fall in love with a man made of obsidian and shadows... and
