Elara’s question was a heresy. It was not a story, but an inquiry—a dangerous tool in a world built on narrative assertion. The Elder Storytellers, whose voices had laid the city’s foundations, cautioned her against it. ’There is no “beyond,”’ they whispered, their voices like the rustling of dry leaves. ’There is only the story, and the story is all.’ But Elara’s voice was different. It carried a note of dissonance, a yearning for the silence between words. She began to seek out the city’s frayed edges, the places where narratives ended abruptly, where characters were left half-formed. She called these places the Unwritten, and in their silent, undefined spaces, she felt a new kind of story beginning to form—not one of words, but of possibility.