Chapter 42 — Postscript: A Margin Left Blank
This chapter was never supposed to exist.
That mattered.
If you searched for it in records, you wouldn't find it. Not because it was hidden—but because no one agreed it needed to be written. Some accounts skip from the epilogue straight into silence. Others insist there was always one last page, thin and easily torn out.
Both are correct.
Long after Arthur stopped being anyone worth naming, a child asked a question in a classroom that no longer followed a standardized curriculum.
"Who decides when a rule stops working?"
The teacher paused.
Not because the answer was forbidden.
Because there were too many honest ones.
"Well," she said finally, "sometimes rules end because they're broken. Sometimes because they're cruel. And sometimes…"
She smiled, a little uncertain.
"Sometimes because people stop asking them to make sense of everything."
The child frowned. "Isn't that dangerous?"
"Yes," the teacher said. "And also necessary."
That was the world, now.
Danger and necessity sharing space without demanding hierarchy.
Elsewhere, in a market that sold three different calendars and trusted none of them, an old man repaired a chair with practiced hands. He took his time. When a leg didn't quite align, he adjusted the floor instead.
Someone watching asked, "Isn't that wrong?"
The old man shrugged. "It holds."
That answer passed.
Far above, no archive stirred.
No ledger updated.
No gaze returned.
The great systems that once demanded coherence had learned a quiet lesson:
Meaning does not require permission.
Order does not require ownership.
And endings—true endings—are not events.
They are absences that stop hurting.
If you listen carefully, even now, you might notice something missing.
No hum behind the eyes.
No pressure to resolve the unresolved.
No voice insisting this moment must matter more than the next.
Just the sound of people living inside questions they don't rush to close.
That was the legacy.
Not a revolution.
Not a warning.
Not a doctrine.
A blank margin.
Left deliberately empty.
So that whoever came next—
and there would always be someone next—
could write nothing at all.
And mean it.