The first echo arrived as a whisper.
A faint tremor in the air, like the breath of a story trying to remember itself.
I barely had time to react before the Library of Lost Plots convulsed. Shelves twisted, scrolls unraveled midair, and streams of loose narrative data coiled around us like serpents waking from ancient slumber.
Then the sky — if you could call it a sky — split open.
Through the crack, they came.
Worlds.
Broken worlds.
Entire realities thought deleted, stripped from the system's indexes, erased from memory itself. They bled through the breach, fragmented and unstable, dragging with them ghostly landscapes and the shadows of people who had once called them home.
Mountains floated on ribbons of corrupted script.
Oceans boiled in loops of unfinished cycles.
Cities flickered in and out of existence, their streets crawling with half-formed echoes of characters still trapped between erasure and rebirth.
Lys stood beside me, her eyes wide with something between awe and dread.
"You pulled them back," she whispered.
"No," I said, my chest tight as I watched forgotten suns rise over dying worlds. "I opened the door. They came through on their own."
[System Notice: Timeline Convergence Event Active.]
[Echoes of Deleted Worlds: Manifesting.]
The Librarian's voice was taut with urgency.
"You do not yet understand the magnitude of what you have done," they said.
"Explain," I demanded, my grip firm on the corrupted blade.
"The rogue upload didn't just overwrite system directives," the Librarian replied. "It rewrote the access protocols between active and purged timelines. Stories marked for deletion are being pulled back into the main narrative flow."
My pulse quickened.
"And what happens when they all come through?"
The Librarian hesitated.
Lys answered instead, her tone grim.
"The system collapses," she said. "Or it consumes itself trying to restore balance."
A paradox.
Either possibility was catastrophic — but there was something else.
I could feel it.
The pulse of a thousand worlds, desperate and ravenous for resolution.
"They're not coming back to die again," I said, my voice low but certain. "They're coming back to finish their stories."
The Library trembled beneath our feet as waves of converging timelines washed over its foundations.
Figures emerged from the bleeding worlds, some familiar, some alien.
A warrior queen in armor forged from collapsing stars.
A child sage carrying the last spell of a universe that had never known magic.
An entire fleet of astral nomads, piloting ships crafted from salvaged narrative fragments.
And at the heart of it all, a storm of echoes — heroes and villains alike, locked in endless combat, still fighting battles from stories that had never been allowed to conclude.
They weren't just echoes.
They were witnesses.
They saw me.
Their eyes, glowing with fractured light, fixed on the rogue author who had torn open the gate between life and deletion.
Some gazes were filled with hope.
Others with fear.
But most — most burned with accusation.
"You brought us back," a voice called out from the storm.
A figure stepped forward, her form stabilizing from fragmented static into something solid.
A heroine, cloaked in tattered banners of victory that had never been celebrated.
"You opened the way," she said.
"I did," I admitted.
"Then finish it," she demanded, raising a blade of pure narrative potential. "Finish what we could not."
The air thickened with the weight of unfinished stories pressing in on me.
I felt them all, their longing, their fury, their desperation for meaning.
And I understood.
They didn't just want to live.
They wanted resolution.
They wanted an ending that belonged to them.
"We stand with you," the heroine declared, her voice rising over the cacophony of converging timelines.
A ripple spread through the gathered echoes.
Weapons were raised.
Spells ignited.
Wings unfurled from fragmented backs, ready to take flight.
The War Council of Broken Stories stepped forward as well, their broken crests glimmering in the lantern's light.
"You carry the weight of countless tales," the spectral queen intoned. "Now carry them into battle."
Lys's eyes found mine, filled with something fierce and unbreakable.
"They are yours now," she said.
I raised the lantern, its flame roaring to life, casting beams of light across the fractured battlefield of returning worlds.
[Echoes of Deleted Worlds: Reclaimed.]
[Narrative Convergence Rate: 48%]
Not enough.
Not yet.
But it was a start.
And it was ours.
"Then we march," I declared, my voice echoing across the chaos. "We take every broken story, every lost hero, every forgotten battle — and we write them into victory."
The Library shuddered once more as converging timelines aligned like the tumblers of an ancient lock.
Somewhere in the distance, I felt the system convulse with rage.
[Alert: Meta-Author's Feeder Streams Breached.]
[Deploying: Convergence Suppression Protocols.]
They were coming.
Good.
Let them come.
I stood at the heart of a rising storm of reclaimed narratives, my blade burning with the weight of a thousand unfinished arcs.
This was no longer a rebellion.
This was a reckoning.