Crossing into a Canon felt, Elias would later try and fail to describe to people who hadn’t done it, like being read.
Not like reading — like being *on the other end* of it, every part of him scanned and translated and reassembled according to rules that weren’t his own.
One second he stood in a stone archway in the Margins with three other Proofreaders and Priya’s last instructions ringing in his ears; the next, he was standing ankle-deep in wheat under a sky that was very slightly too golden, too saturated, like a filter someone had forgotten to turn off.
“Okay,” Mira said, turning in a slow circle, hand already near the strange bone-white knife at her belt.
“That’s disorienting every single time and nobody warns you enough.”
“Where’s Toby?” Dorian said.
A stalk of wheat rustled ten feet to their left, and Toby emerged from it upside down, having apparently landed in the crossing and rolled.
“Sky’s *very* yellow,” he reported, righting himself.
“Ten out of ten farmboy energy. I love it here already.”
Elias wasn’t listening.
He was looking at the horizon — at a village rendered in loving, cliché detail, thatched roofs and a windmill and smoke curling from a chimney in a way that was *exactly*, down to the adjective, how he used to open chapters.
He felt something in his chest that wasn’t fear and wasn’t nostalgia, something with no good name, standing in a world built out of the parts of himself he’d been embarrassed enough to abandon.
“You’re doing the face again,” Mira said, quieter, just to him.
“What face.”
“The one from the briefing room.”
He didn’t get to answer, because that was when the screaming started — not far, not close, coming from the direction of the village, a single high note of pure animal terror that cut off wrong.
Not silenced.
*Overwritten* — the sound simply stopped mid-scream and restarted from the beginning, like a skipping track, like dialogue that shouldn’t repeat.
Dorian was already moving, sword-shaped Ink-light gathering at his hand — some small active Fragment he’d apparently already earned, which explained the swagger.
“That’s the instability. Come *on*—”
They came over the last rise together and stopped as one.
The village square was full of people, dozens of them, and every single one of them was performing the exact same three seconds of motion, over and over, like a scene stuck in a loop — a woman forever dropping a basket that never hit the ground, a child forever mid-laugh that never finished, a dog forever leaping at a bird that never landed.
And in the center of it, untouched by the loop, stood a boy of maybe sixteen in farmboy homespun, glowing sword already in hand exactly the way the cover art had shown him, staring down at his own hands like they belonged to someone else.
He looked up.
He looked directly at Elias — not at Dorian, not at Mira, not at Toby.
At *him*.
“You’re not supposed to be in this chapter,” the boy said, in a voice that cracked halfway through the sentence like it belonged to two different ages at once.
“None of you are. I haven’t been *written* that far yet.”
And then, all around the loop-frozen square, every single villager turned their head — not as part of their looped motion, but new, deliberate, all at once — to stare at the four of them standing at the edge of the wheat.