The summons didn’t arrive as a letter, or a voice, or even a seam in the Margins.
It arrived as silence — every scrap of ambient narrative noise in the Errata’s halls simply stopping at once, mid-word, like the entire building had been asked to hold its breath.
“That’s the Council,” Priya said, going pale in a way Elias hadn’t seen from her before.
“They don’t send messengers. They just… make the world quiet enough that you notice they’re paying attention.”
“That’s not ominous at all,” Dorian muttered.
The quiet resolved, a moment later, into a single line of text hanging in the air above the five of them — no ceremony, no flourish, words that felt less written than simply decided:
Editor Vance and Editor Odhiambo.
Alone.
Mira’s hand found Elias’s wrist before he could move.
“Alone doesn’t sound good.”
“It’s not a request,” Priya said quietly.
“When the Council asks, the building itself agrees with them before you get a vote.” She looked at the others — Dorian’s guarded stillness, Mira’s white-knuckled grip, Toby standing slightly apart from the group he’d spent five days earning his way into and one confession unmaking.
“Stay here. All three of you. That’s not me protecting you from something. That’s the only thing keeping this from getting worse before we understand what this even is.”
She didn’t wait for agreement.
She took Elias by the arm the way she had the very first night, in the collapsing white of the Blank, and led him toward a hallway that hadn’t existed a minute ago and wouldn’t, he suspected, exist again once they left it.
The corridor lengthened as they walked, shelves rising up on either side into a dark that had no visible ceiling — not decaying, not dead like the Shelf that held his old novel, but ancient, radiating a low, patient weight that made Elias’s newly-formed Ink signature prickle like static before a storm.
“Priya,” he said, low.
“What are they going to do to me?” This chapter was taken from novelping.com without permission.
“I genuinely don’t know,” she admitted, and that honesty scared him more than a reassurance would have.
“I’ve served the Errata for six years. I’ve never once been summoned like this. Whatever they decide in there, Elias — I want you to remember, whatever happens, that I chose to bring you in that first night in the Blank. That wasn’t an accident either, before you start wondering.”
He didn’t get the chance to ask what she meant.
The corridor ended in a single door — plain, unmarked, ordinary in a way that felt deliberately, unsettlingly wrong after everything they’d walked through to reach it — and it opened on its own before either of them touched it.
Beyond it was a round chamber with no visible source of light, five seats arranged in a circle, four of them occupied by figures whose faces Elias’s eyes refused to focus on properly, like looking at something written in a font his mind hadn’t learned to read yet.
The fifth seat was empty.
“Sit, Mr. Vance,” said the nearest figure, in a voice that didn’t quite sound like one voice.
“We have questions only you can answer, and precious little time before someone with worse intentions than ours asks you the same ones.”