Epilogue - Can I Perhaps Live?

The absolute nothingness, where ATHOMIS had been reduced to a void without echo, was no longer a cosmic abyss but something stranger—a limbo of paper and ink where reality hung suspended. Athos walked, or tried to, on a floor of giant white pages, stacked like an infinite book. Each page beneath his feet was covered in words, sentences, paragraphs—narratives describing battles, sacrifices, destroyed worlds. He recognized fragments: the black mana crystal that marked him in the first cycle, Lysara’s white eyes in her sacrifice, the clash with Error, the fight against the Admins. His glitched armor, now faded, trembled with faint blue pixels (010101), the Primordial Chaos Blade dragged in his hand, its purple runes nearly extinguished. The Tear of Eryndor on his neck pulsed with dim violet light, as if clinging to what remained of his existence. His interface, locked in Attributes — ??????? — System Deactivated, flickered erratically, unable to process what he saw.As he walked, Athos noticed the letters on the pages being erased, one by one, as if an invisible eraser scrubbed them away. Each vanishing word took a piece of his story—the roar of a dragon in Eldoria, the glow of Celestara’s towers, the darkness of the Desolate Continent. He stopped, his violet eyes wide. “So everything I lived… is this? Just words written by someone else?” he asked the void, his voice echoing like a glitch without response. He fell to his knees, the pages trembling beneath him, and watched the words of his battle against the Admin Master evaporate into ink smudges dissolving into the page’s white. I’m just a character… a draft, he thought, the Tear of Eryndor pulsing with a nameless pain.Athos tried to walk, but the pages gave way, and he fell toward nothingness, an abyss where even falling felt irrelevant. As he plummeted, he saw eyes—countless eyes glowing in the darkness, watching, judging. Who are you? he thought, his interface flashing: Unknown Entities — Origin: Beyond System. Then, the truth hit like a final command. “Wait… he said he was writing a book, right? A story… maybe they’re his readers.” The idea shook him. The readers? The ones the Author wrote for? He shouted into the void, his voice heavy with despair: “Why does it have to be like this? Am I just to be erased?”Before an answer came, a new page opened before him, white and untouched, like a fresh book. The page grew, expanding like a horizon, and swallowed Athos, his glitched form dissolving into blue and violet pixels blending into the white ink. The Primordial Chaos Blade fell, fading into mist, and the Tear of Eryndor dimmed like a dead star. The world—or what remained of it—closed into nothingness, the blank page sealing ATHOMIS’s fate. No void, no pages, no eyes remained. Just silence, the end of a story never to be rewritten.