The night stretched on, the air thick with the scent of damp earth and the distant whisper of rustling leaves. The fire between them flickered, casting soft soothing shadows that danced across the ground, licking at the silver glowing grass before vanishing into the night. The sky, vast and endless, bore no blemish save for the silver glow of the moon, which hung like an eternal watcher above them.

  Emma sat still, her silver-white eyes half-lidded, thoughts stirring in the depths of her mind. The weight of realization settled in her chest, its presence neither light nor suffocating... just there, pressing.

  So the moment I entered that book... that entity’s cosmology...

  Her fingers curled slightly against her knee, the roughness of the fabric grounding her.

  He became the reality… a being from a higher level, the creator, the author of that world.

  A slow inhale. A measured exhale.

  While I... I became the fiction. A character beneath him. A mere extra in something he had written.

  The thought settled like an imprint on the surface of her mind.

  Emma’s grip on the hem of her skirt tightened for a moment before she released it, her fingers rexing as her mind moved to something else.. something deeper.

  Her gaze shifted toward Luna, who sat opposite her, the glow of her pale skin reflecting the fire’s warmth, though her presence remained untouched by it, otherworldly in its stillness.

  A question had begun forming in Emma’s mind, bubbling beneath the surface, pushing to be voiced.

  She hesitated for only a breath before speaking.

  “Luna, uhm…” She paused, licking her lips as she tried to piece the words together. “Does that mean… there are levels even lower than the one we reside in?”

  Luna met her gaze, her expression calm, unreadable. Then, she nodded.

  “Yes, there are,” she answered smoothly. “But I will only mention three of them. The rest… are not very useful to you.”

  Emma nodded slowly. There was something in the way Luna spoke that made her feel the weight of what she was about to hear.

  Luna’s posture remained poised, her hands resting lightly on her p, fingers slightly curled. The fire’s glow danced in her luminous glowing eyes as she began.

  “First thing to note,” she said, her voice steady, " In this yer we are, which is the Fruit..... we are not bound by time and casualty, we are outside all of that, we dictate our own time and cause of events, unlike the lower yers which most are bound to it or have transcended above it," she said, her voice light, calm as she expined...

  After a few moment, Luna continued, “There is a level beneath this Fruit of Narrative, though it is not exactly ‘lower’ in the way you might think. It is simply beneath it in structure.”

  Emma’s brows furrowed slightly, but she remained silent.

  Luna continued.

  “It is called the Roots of Narrative.”

  She let the words linger for a moment before eborating.

  “The Roots of Narrative are the primal source of all stories within and below the Tree of Fiction. They do not merely hold the stories... they produce them.”

  A faint breeze stirred, lifting the edges of Luna’s gown, making it billow as though weightless.

  “These roots extrude narrative potential as a viscous substance... ink. A raw, untamed force, neither solid nor liquid, yet pulsing with meaning.”

  She lifted a hand slightly, as if tracing invisible lines in the air.

  “Higher entities... those who have ascended and are outside the Tree Of Fiction, most especially Authors and Narrators, molds this ink into archetypes, epilogues, genres, and tropes. The things that shape all stories. The very foundation of fiction.”

  Emma listened, the words stirring something within her... a strange familiarity, yet distant, as though she had heard them before in a dream she could not recall.

  Luna let her hand fall back to her p, the momentary silence stretching before she continued.

  “Beneath the Roots, we move into the true lower yers.”

  She leaned forward slightly, her hair shifting like silver silk as she did.

  “This is where we reach the Pnes.”

  Emma’s fingers twitched.

  Luna’s voice remained smooth, deliberate.

  “The Pnes are meta-multiverses, but unlike the yers above, they do not function on the same principles of individuality.”

  The fire crackled. A faint ember lifted into the night, vanishing into the darkness.

  “Instead,” Luna said, “they are governed entirely by narrative logic.”

  Emma’s eyes narrowed slightly. The words meta-multiverse, plot, narrative…

  They felt like puzzle pieces she had seen before, pieces that should fit, yet...

  Luna continued before the thought could fully form.

  “In the Pnes, everything dissolves into something higher entities call plot devices and archetypes. Time bends, space shifts, and individual identity is nothing more than a role, waiting to be filled by a force beyond its comprehension.”

  Emma exhaled slowly. The words were understandable, but not.

  They fit within her mind, yet something about them felt old. As if they had been told to her before. As if they had always been there, buried beneath yers of thought she had yet to unravel.

  A blurred fragment of something she should remember.

  Something..

  She swallowed, steadying herself.

  No. It didn’t matter now.

  She pushed the thought aside, coming to a quiet conclusion.

  It was better to learn anew.

  Luna exhaled, her breath almost blending with the ambient glow around her. Her voice, calm yet carrying an unshaken weight, broke the silence. “Now, for the st one I’ll tell you about,” she began, her glowing white eyes reflecting the flickering firelight, “it’s called the World Tree.”