Cosmic Ruler - Chapter 587

Chapter 587: Arena XXVI

The wound never truly closed.

Though the Rift was sealed and the Dream That Didn’t Finish had been named and ended, something still lingered in the bones of the world. Something deeper than fear.

It was loss.

Not of people, not even of time—but of meaning.

Aiden stood at the heart of a vast plain of translucent stone. Beneath his feet, fragments of forgotten stories shimmered like ghosts in glass—each one a tale that would never be told. He traced a line in the dust with his foot.

“I used to remember what laughter felt like,” he said quietly.

Myne, who knelt nearby tending to her sword—a blade that hummed with metaphors sharpened into edge—glanced up at him.

“You still can,” she said. “You just haven’t written it yet.”

The Book of What Was lay open beside Aiden. Its pages were dim, each one bleeding soft strands of ink into the empty air. The letters no longer stayed in place. They wept. They wandered. The story was becoming liquid.

And through that bleeding, the world changed.

He hadn’t meant for it to.

But he was the only Author left.

And the Book obeyed.

Behind them, the remnants of the Blank Sky Pact moved in silence. There were fewer now. The Memory-Eater had vanished during the sealing of the Rift, devoured by an old name he once consumed. Shur, the Last Witness, had begun speaking only in dreams.

And Nexus…

Nexus had started to glitch.

Aiden could no longer hear him without feeling like his mind was being rewritten with every syllable.

They were unraveling.

One by one.

Not from wounds.

But from story-burn.

The cost of fighting in a reality governed by narrative was no longer power or stamina.

It was identity.

It was who you were.

Aiden picked up the Book again and whispered something to it.

The ink stilled.

And from within the pages, something new spilled out—not words, not even light.

But color.

A deep crimson thread, like a vein pulled from a god’s heart.

It drifted upward, curling into the air above them, and there it remained—like a scar across the sky.

Myne’s eyes widened.

“That’s not from the Rift,” she said.

“No,” Aiden replied. “It’s from the story I wrote to end it.”

He looked up at the thread, which now pulsed faintly in time with his heartbeat.

“The story bled,” he murmured. “And it’s still bleeding.”

The Pact gathered beneath the thread.

They didn’t speak. They watched.

Something about the color made the soul itch. It was too real. Too remembered. Like seeing your own grave while still breathing.

The Archivist stepped forward—what remained of him, anyway. Most of his form had become static. Pages fluttered where limbs used to be.

“It’s a tether,” he said. “A strand of story that never closed.”

Aiden nodded slowly.

“I thought I ended the Dream That Didn’t Finish. But maybe I didn’t. Maybe I just… began it.”

He turned to the Pact.

“All of it. This world. This war. The Book. The Pact. Me. Everything we’ve done… it might still be inside that dream.”

Nexus twitched, his form skipping through five timelines in a blink.

“If we are,” he said, “then who is dreaming us?”

Silence.

It settled like snow.

Then Aiden spoke, and his voice was heavy.

“I think it’s me.”

That night—if it could still be called a night—they made camp at the edge of a broken monument.

It once marked the place where the Law of Continuity had lived. Now it was just dust and echoes, shifting as if trying to remember what shape it should be.

Aiden sat by the flickering warmth of a concept-fire. It didn’t burn wood, only ideas of heat. And still, it comforted him.

Myne approached and handed him a cup.

“Liquid memory,” she said. “From the last well.”

He drank it.

It tasted like childhood.

And loss.

“You’re not sleeping,” she said after a moment.

Aiden looked up. The bleeding thread still floated in the sky above them, casting long red shadows.

“I don’t know if I’m allowed to,” he said. “If I sleep… what if I wake up? What if all of this stops?”

She didn’t answer.

Because she didn’t have to.

They both knew the stakes.

The Book of What Was was leaking because Aiden had written too much into it. Not just events, but essence. He had used it to define new laws. Anchor forgotten names. Force a dying cosmos to remember its heartbeat.

But now?

The Book bled.

And through that blood, something watched.

A story born in pain.

Not one Aiden had written.

But one he had birthed.

Unintentionally.

The Story That Bled.

In the morning, it began to move.

The red thread twisted.

Then unfurled.

And from its unraveling came a whisper—not of language, but of tone. Like hearing the final line of a tragedy you’d never read, and somehow knowing it had always been about you.

The Pact rose.

Weapons drawn.

Memories braced.

Even Nexus, unstable as he was, stabilized long enough to stand beside Aiden.

“What is it?” asked Myne.

Aiden’s voice was low. Hollow.

“A continuation.”

The air split.

And a figure descended.

Not from the sky.

But from between pages.

It was not the One Without a Page.

Nor the Dream That Didn’t Finish.

This was something else.

A being born not from the Void.

But from Aiden’s own story.

It wore no armor.

No face.

Only pages.

Each one soaked in red.

Each one ripped from the Book of What Was.

They fluttered as it walked. And from each one, a memory screamed.

“My brother’s name,” Aiden whispered.

The figure stopped.

Tilted its head.

And in a voice made of every forgotten thing Aiden had ever given up, it said:

“You bled me into being. Now I will bleed you out.”

The battle that followed wasn’t loud.

It wasn’t even bright.

It was subtle.

Like watching chapters rewrite themselves mid-sentence.

The Pact fought, yes—but it was different now.

Every strike they landed erased a line from their past.

Every wound they suffered rewrote their purpose.

The creature—the Story That Bled—was not trying to kill them.

It was trying to make them unwritten.

Aiden stood at the center, his hands trembling.

The Book pulsed. Pages tore themselves from the spine. The story bled.