Code. Epilogue

As Ayu brought her hand close to the Book, the pages began to whisper.

They were not words. They were the voices of everyone who had ever read it — and not just it. The voices of all those who had held this world together with their attention. They spoke a language that possessed no single alphabet, yet shared a solitary rhythm: the rhythm of a heart beating for the very last time to give life to a new heart.

“Do you know what will happen if you begin to write?” I asked.

“Yes,” Ayu said, and her drawn contours became almost solid for a fleeting moment. “I will cease to be human.”

“And if you don’t?”

“The world will cease to be.”

“But you don’t know what will happen if you do write.”

“No one knows what will happen when you begin to write,” she replied, her voice echoing the voices of everyone who had ever stood before a blank page.

“But if you don’t begin, there will be nothing at all.”

Ayu raised her hand. Her fingers trembled like a shadow upon water.

Would what she wrote bring life or death? What would become of her, what would become of me, what would become of the Book, what would become of the voices of those who once lived within its pages?

But Ayu already knew: if she didn’t try, everything would vanish. Even the world that was already dead.

I watched her hand — pale, thin, suspended in the air like a moth deciding whether to take flight or to fall. And then, I did the only thing that still made sense in this vanishing world.

I extended my own hand to her.

Glossary →
← Code\Coda
← A Road of a Thousand Years
← Paths
← The River
← The Observer Effect
← The Battle of Bun’ei