To fall into a book is not to fall through pages, but between them—into the gutter, that binding void where the left and right hemispheres of narrative meet and bleed into one another. Veyne tumbled not through paper but through the margins, that blessed white space where the text had not yet colonized thought, where the reader's pencil might venture a question or an exclamation of doubt.
He landed in the Senator's counter-narrative, and the first thing he noticed was that the grammar was wrong.
It was not written in the Indicative—the mood of fact, of tyrannical certainty that characterized the official histories of the Necropolis. Nor was it the Imperative, the command-structure of legal code and religious dogma. This text flowed in the Optative, the mood of wishing, of might-be, of revolutionary potential. Every sentence began with "May" or "Would that" or the subversive subjunctive "If only." It was a biography written not as history, but as hope.
Veyne stood in a cathedral of conditional clauses. The walls were built from sentences like "Would that the Twelve Radicals were not roots but chains" and "If only the Author were truly dead." The floor pulsed with the rhythm of "May the Husks return to their owners." It was architectural sedition, a fortress built of forbidden desires.
He reached out to touch a pillar—If the Lexigraphers did not own the Genitive—and his hand passed through, not because it was immaterial, but because it was conditional. It existed only in the probability of a better world.
"This is the Senator's heresy," Veyne whispered, and his voice did not echo. In the Optative, sound was merely a suggestion.
He waded deeper into the manuscript. Here were the Marginalia—not footnotes, but weapons. Scrawled in the white borders of the text were annotations in crimson ink: corrections to reality itself. The Senator had not merely written a book; he had prepared an edit, a global track-change that would rewrite the operating system of the universe. He proposed that the Twelve Primordial Radicals were not the building blocks of creation, but the bars of a prison. THAN-, VIV-, MEM-—these were not roots but shackles, preventing humanity from evolving into a language without syntax, free from the tyranny of meaning.
And there, at the center of the cathedral, lay the Final Punctuation: not a Period, which ends, nor an Ellipsis, which trails off into cowardice, but a Tilde (), the wave, the symbol of approximation, of approximate freedom, a punctuation mark that refused finality.
If activated, it would transform reality into a collaborative manuscript. Every human would become co-author. The Necropolis would dissolve into a workshop.
Veyne reached for it.
The text rebelled.
The margins tightened. The white space shrank, compressing him between the lines. The Optative sentences began to transform into the Imperative—"You will understand"—"You shall obey"—the Senator's hope turning into a new tyranny, for all radical texts contain the seeds of their own authoritarianism. The Tilde pulsed, not with freedom, but with the chaos of a million voices screaming in ungrammatical cacophony.
Veyne grasped his quill—the bone warm, the tooth-nib hungry. He tried to write a defense, a cage of syntax around his mind, but the counter-narrative was rewriting him, inserting him into its bibliography, making him a reference in its thesis. He felt his biography changing: Veyne Ashenford, who became a believer, who gave up his doubt in the Genitive...
"No," he gasped. He invoked his price, his lack. "I have no reflection. I am not here to be cited."
He used his absence as a shield. The text could not claim him because he could not be fully seen, could not be fully possessed. He was a blank spot in the index.
A hand grabbed his collar—his coat of pages—and yanked him backward, out of the book, out of the Subjunctive Stacks, into the harsh, declarative reality of a stone chamber that smelled of beeswax and stale laughter.
Veyne hit the floor gasping. The book—substantial now, leather-bound—slammed shut beside him, trapping the Senator's rebellion between its covers.
"Careful," said a voice like a rim-shot. "That book has commitment issues. It wants to change the world, but it hasn't figured out how to change itself."
Veyne looked up.
She was a nun, or the satire of one. Her habit was not black but the white of a blank page, stained with fingerprints where readers had touched her without permission. Around her waist, instead of a rosary, hung a string of canned words—buttons of compressed phonemes that clicked when she moved. Her face was young but her eyes were old, the eyes of someone who had heard the punchline to existence and found it lacking.
"You are..." Veyne coughed, expelling residual text from his lungs. Tiny words scattered across the flagstones: would that, if only, may.
"Sister Mirth," she said, curtseying with the irony of a professional. "Order of the Stillborn Laugh. I harvest the Husks of jesters, comedians, and political satirists. The ones who died mid-set. The ones whose final words were setups without punchlines."
She helped him up. Her hands were ink-stained—the black of comedy, carbon-based, the color of the void that laughs back.
"You were inside the Senator's dissertation," she said. "The Alimentary of Sorrow was his decoy—his wife's memoir. This—" she tapped the book with a fingernail painted like a exclamation mark—"this is the Rhetoric of Escape. Dangerous reading. It rewrites the reader into a revolutionary."
"I noticed," Veyne said, adjusting his coat. The pages were fluttering, agitated, still trying to parse the conditional grammar they had absorbed. "You pulled me out."
"I did," Mirth said. "Not out of charity. But because I need a straight man." She looked at the door of the chamber. "And because you brought company."
The door exploded—not in wood and iron, but in syntax. The Embalmer had arrived.
But no—Veyne checked his internal clock, his narrative chronology. The Embalmer was Chapter 5. This was still Chapter 4. The explosion was premature.
Sister Mirth stepped forward, her habit rustling with the sound of turning joke-pages.
"Stay behind me, Necrocurator," she said. "This is a matter of timing."
Through the smoke and grammatical debris stepped a figure—not the Embalmer, but an agent of the Archive, a Bibliognost in the robes of the Censorship Bureau. He held a noose made of red tape, and his eyes were two identical periods, marking the end of all sentences.
"Sister Mirth," the Bibliognost intoned, his voice the flat monotone of an index. "You are charged with possession of proscribed humor. Section 4, Paragraph 2: No jokes may be told within 500 words of a Restricted Stack. You will come quietly, or you will be redacted."
Mirth smiled. It was a terrible smile, symmetrical, predatory, the smile of a shark that had studied at a seminary.
"Officer," she said, "do you know why the Necrocurator broke up with Death?"
The Bibliognost blinked. His period-eyes dilated. "I do not acknowledge rhetorical questions."
"Because," Mirth said, her voice dropping into the register of a bass drum proclamation, "he thought she was too clingy, but really, he just couldn't commit to the end of the relationship."
Silence.
The joke hung in the air like a pendulum at the peak of its swing, pregnant with potential energy.
The Bibliognost did not laugh.
His face remained a flat text, unindented, without bullets or numbering.
Mirth's smile widened. "Oh, dear. You didn't get it."
The Bibliognost clutched his chest. His period-eyes bulged. He gasped, trying to draw breath, but the joke had entered his bloodstream like a semantic embolism. He was suffering from Acute Humorless Failure, a condition wherein the heart, denied the catharsis of laughter, seizes up in shame.
He fell to his knees, then to his face, dead.
Not just dead—embarrassed to death. His corpse was blushing, the blood pooling in his cheeks, the ultimate indignity.
"Vaudeville assassin," Veyne said, not without admiration.
"Comedy is just tragedy plus timing," Mirth said, stepping over the body. "And grammar. Mostly grammar. The poor fool died of a dangling modifier—he couldn't connect the setup to the punchline, so his heart short-circuited."
She picked up the book—the Senator's counter-narrative—and tucked it into her habit, where it nestled between her ribs like a second heart.
"We need to move," she said. "The Embalmer comes next, and he doesn't kill with jokes. He kills with preservatives. He'll pickle us both, label us, and shelve us under Misfiled."
"Where?" Veyne asked.
"To the Catacombs of Commerce," Mirth said. "If the Senator wrote a revolution, someone bought the copyright. We need to find the Publisher before the story goes to print."
She led him through a secret door, and as they fled, Veyne looked back at the dead Bibliognost. The man's hand was twitching, spasming, writing something on the floor in his own blood.
It was a single word, a correction to Mirth's joke: "Actually..."
Even in death, the Censors edited.