[Kang Min Mana: 0%]
[Kang Min HP: 28%]
[Fable Architecture: 5 pillars overloaded — imminent failure pending trigger]
[World-Eater: ACTIVE — Closing]
[Other climbers: status unknown]
The desk had survived the coil impact.
I didn't know why. The same strike that had sent me three meters sideways had passed close enough to the desk's position to have shattered it. It sat intact, the pen still resting in the inkwell at the same patient angle, the page still on the surface with most of its bottom quarter blank.
I sat down.
The World-Eater's coils tightened their arrangement around the desk. The sensory organs that weren't eyes tracked me with the specific quality of something that had understood what I was doing and had chosen to give me the opportunity to try it, because it was confident I would fail, because the fable had no ending in any of the 847 cultural versions I had written, and a story without an ending was a story that couldn't be concluded.
