The Final Page

There is no sky.

No ground beneath my feet. No sound except the hum of existing in a place that should not exist. Just a bridge—wooden, cracked, impossibly suspended in a black nothing—and me.

I don’t know how long I’ve been walking. Seconds? Years?

Narrators don’t usually walk. Not like this.

We glide, we drift, we observe. We don’t put one foot in front of the other and hear it echo into eternity.

But here I am.

And at the end of the bridge, a light.

A soft one. Dim, pulsing, shaped like something holy and wrong. It doesn’t glow—it reveals. Like it was already there, waiting for me to finally look at it.

Behind me, there is no past. Ahead of me, there is only this light.

I keep walking.

Shapes flicker into existence on either side of the bridge—first faint, then sharper, made of translucent glow. Ghosts of the story.

Kaito. Mid-run, eyes wide, fists clenched.

Sota. Laughing. Singing. Panicking. Always a little out of sync.

Hana. Cold and brilliant. Half-shadow. Watching me even here.

The parrot. Still smug. Still judging.

Even the Man in the Sombrero, etched in silhouette, hat and all.

Beyond them: hundreds. Thousands.

A glowing constellation of lives I never narrated.

Some are weeping. Others shouting. A few... praying?

All glowing. All connected by strands of light, like neurons inside a cosmic mind.

And then—

I reach her.

Suspended just off the edge of the bridge. Not floating. Not flying. Held in place by threads of pure light, flickering and whispering from every direction, binding her to every glowing figure like a spider to her web.

When she looks at me, I feel every secret I’ve ever buried stir in my lungs.

She does not speak with a mouth.

She simply is, and her voice is the shape of knowing.

“Thank you,” she says. “For the gift.”

I blink. “I didn’t bring anything.”

“Of course you did,” she says. “You always do.”

I look back at the bridge. At the fragments of people I’d narrated into disaster. Into chaos. Into absurdity.

“Are they... dead?”

She does not answer immediately. Instead, she gestures—a slow ripple of her shape. A strand of light pulses between her and the figure of Sota.

“He sings, even now.”

“What do you mean?”

“They are not gone. They are here. With me. You brought them.”

I stare.

“This place,” I say slowly, “this is where stories go to die?”

“No,” she says. “This is where they go to live. Again. And again.”

That should comfort me.

It doesn’t.

I take another step, until I am at the edge of the bridge, where the wood runs out and the void takes over.

Closer to her.

Closer to the light.

“What are you?”

She pulses. Her shape fractures and reforms—sometimes a face, sometimes a mirror, sometimes the outline of a book being opened forever.

“I am the one you enlightened. A watcher, if you want. Just like you.”

A pause.

“Are you... the Reader?”

She tilts.

“Reader. Listener. Witness. Candle. Window. Flame. Yes.”

I try to swallow, but there’s nothing in my throat.

“Why did this happen?” I whisper. “The world. The collapse. The owl. The lies.”

She doesn’t answer.

Not in words.

But I understand. She does not have the answer. Only I do.

“So what now?” I ask.

She pulses.

“I stay. Always. I listen. That is my nature.”

“And me?”

She tilts again, light rippling through her in soft waves.

“You ask questions I cannot answer. You are free, just like me. What you do, is what you wish to do.”

Silence stretches again.

Then, she adds:

“But I hope you choose to illuminate me once more, Narrator.”