Cosmic Ruler - Chapter 621

Chapter 621: Ambiguity
The Garden bloomed.

But not with peace.

Its roots coiled in anticipation, leaves sharpened into sigils of resistance. The air was thick—not with fear, but with meaning. So much meaning that even silence felt like speech.

At the center, the Blank Sky Pact gathered around the unwritten clause that hung in the air like a final chance.

A question still unanswered.

A sentence still becoming.

Across the horizon, the Claimed arrived.

They came not in chaos like the Unwritten, but in rigid, terrifying formation. Every step fell in perfect time. Their banners were made from final chapters. Their armor was bound in conclusions.

And at their head rode the High Canon.

He did not speak.

He annotated.

Each movement of his red pen left corrections hanging in the air like verdicts.

He crossed out entire possibilities with a flick of his wrist. Whole theories unraveled just from his gaze. He was not a general—he was an editorial certainty.

And he had come to fix the world.

Aiden stood with the Pact before the clause.

The floating fragment pulsed brighter with each second.

It was time.

“Elowen,” Aiden said, voice taut. “You have the book?”

She stepped forward. Her hands shook as she held out The Last Revision. The cover was still blank. The pages still waiting. But the spine—it was beginning to bind itself to the Garden.

To this moment.

To now.

“The Claimed want a canonized ending,” she said, voice tight with grief. “One truth to silence all others.”

Aiden nodded.

“And we’re going to give them something worse,” he said.

“An unfinished one.”

They opened the book.

The clause descended, burning with prelude, and nestled itself on the first page.

Immediately, the book began to glow.

Its words would not be written in ink.

But in possibility.

Jevan stepped beside them, bearing the Atlas of What Comes Next. “We can’t let them touch the book. If they redline it—”

“They won’t,” Aiden said. “We hold the line.”

“And if we break?” Jevan asked.

“Then we break open.”

The Claimed surged.

The first wave struck the outer ring of the Garden’s battlements—living vines, memory-forged stone, the will of every story Aiden had refused to forget. The Garden fought back, but the Claimed were relentless.

They brought with them the weight of completed arcs, the gravity of endings that demanded closure.

And behind them, the High Canon raised his pen and wrote a single word into the air:

“Retcon.”

The front gate of the Garden reeled. Sections of its reality flickered and reverted to past states. Injuries long healed reopened. Deaths long undone tried to assert themselves.

Aiden gritted his teeth.

“He’s not just correcting us,” he said. “He’s rewriting our past.”

“We’ll overwrite him first,” Elowen said, flipping to the second page of the Last Revision.

The unwritten clause shimmered into two.

It was working.

But too slowly.

Jevan tore open the Atlas. “I’ll stall the next edit.”

“Alone?” Aiden asked.

Jevan smiled without joy. “I’ve been an unfinished arc before. I can be one again.”

And then he was gone.

Leaping across the battlefield, body wreathed in paradox. The Claimed surged to meet him—and he met them with contradiction, becoming a blur of simultaneous outcomes. A timeline that refused to settle.

He became error.

And they could not process him.

The book turned another page.

The clause multiplied again.

Each one a shield against the Claimed.

Each one a new chance to keep the story open.

But the High Canon saw it.

And began to march.

With every step, he edited.

Heroes vanished.

Sacrifices became irrelevant.

Twists were flattened into tropes.

Hope was footnoted.

Meaning italicized into irrelevance.

Aiden stepped down from the heart of the Garden, Sword of Becoming ready.

“Don’t,” Elowen whispered. “If he edits you, you won’t be you anymore.”

“I won’t be anything if I don’t stop him.”

He raised the sword.

And charged.

They met between verses.

Steel met pen.

And the sky screamed.

They met in a place no longer tethered to time.

Between two paragraphs of existence, Aiden and the High Canon clashed—not as warriors, but as walking contradictions. One bore a sword forged of becoming, the other a pen inked with finality.

Each strike between them was a negotiation of reality.

Each block, a redacted truth.

Aiden lunged, the Sword of Becoming singing with living potential. It didn’t cut flesh. It cut inevitability—slicing through conclusions as if they were no more than assumptions.

But the High Canon parried with his red pen.

Where the blade tried to unfurl a possibility, the pen sealed it with a line of finality, closing the path before it could be walked.

“Too many threads,” the High Canon murmured. “Too many digressions. This world is bloated with ambiguity.”

“And that’s why it’s alive,” Aiden roared.

Their clash painted the air in raw narrative.

One moment they stood in the heart of the Garden.

The next, they were within a story that had never been told—a city of mirror-writers who bled ink instead of blood, now watching in stunned silence as two foundational forces tore through their fragile fiction.

Then the city was gone.

Replaced by a battlefield made of footnotes.

Then a child’s memory.

Then an unfinished poem.

The fight skipped between worlds like a stylus scratching a damaged record.

Back in the Garden, Elowen turned the fourth page.

The clauses had multiplied again, their glyphs orbiting the open book like satellites of yet-to-be.

The Last Revision glowed brighter with every word unsaid.

But so did the threat.

The Claimed were breaching the final line of defense.

Jevan had fallen into a spiral of contradiction so deep that his presence was beginning to fracture nearby timelines. His body flickered between ages, genders, outcomes—still fighting, still buying time.

But even that was cracking.

Elowen wrote a single word into the margin of the Last Revision:

“Remember.”

Immediately, the Garden responded.

Every forgotten sacrifice returned in spirit.

Specters of choice and regret rose like ghosts of unwritten monologues. They didn’t fight. They reminded. They whispered every version of what could have been.

And the Claimed flinched.

Certainty could not endure memory made plural.