CHAPTER 87.

Chapter 87 – The Dreamer's Claim

The stars had vanished.

In their place, a script stretched across the heavens—glyphs written in moving ink, etched into the very air. The world below felt distant, muffled. Jean stood at the heart of a circle that pulsed with the light of two swords: Eclipsion, ancient and solemn, and Solstice, radiant and defiant.

The Codex, bound not in her hands but in her soul, surged with pressure.

Reality folded once, like a page turning mid-sentence.

And Jean was no longer in the world.

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She landed on a sea of parchment.

Above her: ink pouring from an unseen quill.

Below: stories—some unfinished, others screaming to be read.

Ahead: a citadel of ink and stone, pulsing with impossible gravity. Doors floated in the sky. Stairs grew sideways. Words bled across the air.

This was The Dreamer's Archive.

The realm of Aza Roth.

Here, history was not written—it was.

And she stood in the center of it.

> "Jean Luther."

A voice—quiet, omnipresent, as if the realm itself had spoken.

Aza Roth.

Not a figure. Not a face.

Just a presence.

> "You carry what was mine."

Jean raised her eyes. No enemy stood before her. But the sky above bled with names—names erased mid-sentence. Her knees almost buckled. This was not a battlefield. It was a tomb—for stories.

> "I am not here to surrender it," she said.

> "You misunderstand." The voice was velvet, ancient. "I do not take. I rewrite."

Suddenly, books around her burst open. From their pages climbed creatures of lore—half-formed dragons, forgotten gods, shadow knights whose names had been lost to time.

> "Each story ends in ink."

They rushed her.

Jean's eyes flared gold. Solstice blazed, Eclipsion whispered.

And she moved.

Each swing was a defiance of fate. Each strike a chapter refused.

She tore through them—not as a warrior, but as an author of her own path.

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In the sky above the Archive, Aza Roth observed. A quill the size of mountains floated beside him, scribbling words faster than thought.

But then the ink paused.

The Codex within Jean had stirred.

Its glyphs no longer flickered. They burned.

> "You have learned to write," Aza murmured. "But can you erase?"

He opened a new page in the heavens.

Jean's name was there.

And below it—a blank space, where her fate had yet to be written.

The battle was no longer for survival.

It was for authorship.

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