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+# Editorial memory
+
+## 2026-10-24 — request before plot
+
+The original supplied image was found in the user's dated Downloads folder, inspected, and preserved unchanged. The user's subsequent directions are appended verbatim to `prompt.md`. General is the starting content target, with no reduction in the requested scale. This is a new, non-canon story; its local collision of imagined worlds does not establish a shared crossing system or alter existing books.
+
+The independent Codex keeper understood the central promise as an “enormous collision of imagined worlds, concentrated around one urgent objective,” and said that objective “should drive the conflict and its timing.” It read the centuries of guardianship and significant CMYK/RGB identities as explicit requirements; “wondrous, kinetic, and urgent” was its tonal inference, not an extra user constraint. It emphasized the princess's agency and the consequences of painting the ending while leaving viewpoint, names, motives, the war's origin, and the outcome open. Its image reading identified the broad hat, pale paint-covered gown, CMYK flow, and three separately legible armored light knights with weapons and shields.
+
+After independently reading the new library direction, the same keeper added that the library “now belongs within the story's narrative” and the pursuit needs a “meaningful connection to those books.” It distinguished the user's explicit **subplot** from its inference that “our library” offers pleasure of recognizing the collection and interplay between books and inhabited realities. Which books, which library occupants, and the release mechanism remain creative choices. Its original account is retained above.
+
+In a separate request-only Claude Opus 5.5 session, authenticated through the active claude.ai subscription with customizations disabled, Claude called the focus a race: “the outcome hangs on whether she finishes it.” It understood “our library” as tying the war “to this story collection itself.” Its independent color reading identified subtractive CMYK printing inks and additive RGB light, including the complementary pairs red/cyan, green/magenta, and blue/yellow; the possible use of K as the ending's ink was an inference, not a requirement. “Huge, cheerful” and “wonder-filled adventure” were its tonal readings of the original, not a user-mandated mood. It observed the princess's calm amid the image's chaos and left the nature of the ending, the war's origin, and the library resolution open.
+
+## 2026-10-24 — independent outline effects
+
+Before discussion, the Codex keeper described the actual beats as “a battle of practiced guardianship” won by the Princess changing protection for “one dangerous interval.” It protected her gamble of entering the prize transport, but warned that pursuit could become “convenient transport to an easily opened painting room.” It asked what imminent loss capture creates, why filtering routes constrain ancient light-knights, and why the initial battlefield offers less painting time than a ship under attack. It found the library closures and torn leaf causal, and recognized collection identity as an inferred pleasure rather than a demand for particular cameos.
+
+Claude independently found the capture race sustained and the color mechanics strongest, but its leading objection was “the armies have no clear reason to stop her ending.” It also said “the library thread does nothing at the climax,” questioned the filters' setup, and wanted the old defensive signal planted in action. The coordinator distinguishes these: the missing motive and dangerous capture are material; a library character need not control the climax, but the subplot's earlier choices must still affect its outcome. Both first accounts were preserved before either reader saw the other's findings.
+
+In the actual exchange, the writer accepted the capture-danger objection and proposed a live prize, pigment extraction into a conqueror's page, and a deadline. It replaced convenient colored prison walls with separate complementary filter-nets: Blue must remain free, enter Red's cyan net and release him; Red can then release Green through magenta. Both readers found this answered their main objections, while asking for an actionable fastening and demonstrable restraint rather than depletion alone. Both challenged the writer's proposed broad inability to erase mechanisms; the coordinator agreed that a narrow, visible predicament would avoid unnecessary contradictions. The writer challenged an implied coequal library rescue; Claude clarified, “My objection was about its consequences,” accepting a late cutoff of replacement guards with an effect visible on the battlefield. The keeper likewise treated that as sufficient for the requested subplot. Remaining questions concern the captor's page, white ground, and how extracted pigment can impose a victory; these need concrete beats before drafting.
+
+Both returning outline readers then tested the amended beats. The keeper found capture's threatened loss intelligible and the inner fastenings actionable; it caught wording suggesting extraction would continue after the cuffs were broken. Claude protected “her signal change, the wrist echo, and the countdown on her black,” while asking who is coerced, how cuffs break before white, and how unfinished painting supplies defense. The writer clarified that the press makes a living prison portrait, not an ending: captors intend to keep her sealed unless she paints their victory and the loyal knights give white. The knights cut her free first; provisional painted movement, demonstrated in the opening, pushes back the finite guards; black fixes the return paths. After release her already depleted black is a limited reserve, while the breached ship and rival captors supply the deadline. The coordinator accepts these local repairs without another broad outline cycle.
+
+**Coordinator's comparison before drafting:** The complete request promises a grand, sustained race to capture the Princess before her ending, significant CMYK/RGB identities, centuries of guardianship, and a subordinate but causal story about our books releasing armies. The outline's actual center is her attempt to obtain painting time under adaptive capture attacks; her choices control the dangerous reversal and final act. Its opening interrupts white with attacks from several directions, its complementary nets make the color system an enemy tactic, and her changed old signal permits capture so Blue can free the other lights. Captive portrait-binding makes that gamble genuinely perilous. The library's closing books provoke the portable-page tactic and later stop reserve guards; the ending visibly folds the huge battle back into books under her own black boundary. These scenes support beginning the draft. None of the readers' remaining concerns displaces an explicit requirement; their clarity concerns are carried into action rather than additional lore. The intimate aftermath earns its place through the completed battle. All this remains a provisional direction, not a prediction of the prose's success.
+
+## 2026-10-24 — first complete draft and cold effects
+
+The first complete draft was committed before review. Its useful discovery is the last stroke: Blue keeps white while the Princess turns her captor's grip into the motion that closes her black boundary; the library's wet thumbprint records that act. This sharpens, rather than changes, the provisional direction.
+
+Before sharing, the cold Codex reader said the violated familiar protection made the centuries “emotionally substantial,” and found the capture race, color mechanics and library intervention integrated. Its leading hesitation was the distance between the solution becoming clear and the final contested stroke: the panorama supplies motion, but “most do not alter her course.” It protected the final grip, the open hand and the wet thumbprint. Independently, a new cold Claude session protected “the Blue/wrist thread and the CMY/RGB/K logic,” but experienced a scale jump when depleted paint moves the whole horizon; it also could not tell what happened to the stolen colors and captive portrait or how returning armies cross closed books. It wanted a concrete centuries-old memory and fuller library personality; the Codex reader explicitly experienced the habitual bond and did not need a keeper biography. These different first effects remain distinct. The continuing keeper separately found no material drift from the request, citing capture at every turn, the Princess's final agency, significant colors and a causal library subplot. No shared feedback had informed either cold first read.
+
+After reading each other's actual accounts and the writer's response, the readers converged on a local cause without turning agreement into authority. Claude acknowledged that a demonstrated power ceiling was its inference: “The plateau and my scale-jump are one problem.” The writer proposed an attempted full image failing for lack of cyan, followed by a cruder joins-only technique with captors still able to reach her. Codex warned that merely explaining the old joins method would not repair its slowdown; the failure must change what she can do. The keeper found this protected the requested power and capture race. The writer also proposed showing the interrupted prison lose her likeness, returning its stored color only after victory, and showing homeward writing through still-closed book covers. Both cold readers accepted these as concrete answers to the ambiguity. Claude withdrew historical backstory and librarian biography as material concerns. Its preference for a lasting world mark remains available to the writer, not a condition of fulfillment; the coordinator does not require permanent injury to make temporary deprivation and risk consequential. Physical repairs will make the filters material, show the source weapons and shields, and replace the hard-to-picture shoulder perch with a braced stance.
+
+The writer's focused round was committed. Before, the painter “spread her last washes until light showed through them”; now “Her cyan stopped halfway down its sail,” the ship turns back, and she wipes away the richer image to retain only the joins. The command robot returns during that failure. When the cuffs break, the chained portrait dissolves into stored paint rather than leaving another captive; it returns only after the ending is completed. Closed covers receive homeward ink. The writer kept broken pines and a white lock as immediate traces, declining permanent injury and added history. Both returning readers then read the **entire** revised story. Codex said its plateau effect “has substantially changed,” clarifying that its original concern was threats not changing her available course, not an absence of stakes. Claude likewise found the escalation now enacted and the portrait and book mechanisms resolved. The coordinator's whole reread agrees: the turn to sparse joins changes the method under continuing capture attempts, while the grand procession now earns its place after the boundary. The old protective habit remains the strongest expression of centuries. Two small Claude findings remain for local repair: Blue's shield needs a clear disposition when both hands give white, and identical counts for stopped reserves and present guards briefly confuse the groups. Cyan failing after the Princess judged it sufficient is an intended pressured misjudgment, already dramatized by pressing her palm harder and abandoning the miniature; no infallible narrator is intended.
+
+The writer made the two local fixes and preserved Blue's actual fingers holding the opening hook. The reporting Claude reader checked them in whole-story context and found both concerns resolved; its optional polish notes were repetition of Blue's name and an echo in the keeper's return description.
+
+## 2026-10-24 — fresh final first effects
+
+After those repairs, new Codex and Claude readers independently saw only the complete request, whole current prose, and supplied original. Before sharing, fresh Codex found the central pursuit sustained and the centuries consequential through changed protection. Its leading hesitation was that black's closing function becomes explicit only near the solution: “I followed the final peril more confidently than the final operation.” It asked for earlier preparation, not a larger system explanation. Fresh Claude likewise found substantive fulfillment and the colors strongest, but did not know precisely what ending the Princess was initially attempting; it experienced a race to obtain her power more clearly than a race to stop her intended return of the armies. It explicitly called the more threatening ending an inferred promise. It also stumbled over the rider/lance pronouns and the portable page's geometry. Both protected the final grip and Blue's restraint; Codex experienced “our Princess” as the keeper's emotional journey, while Claude found that shift abrupt. The keeper's independently completed final comparison, held separate until both cold effects arrived, found the revised grand capture race and causal library faithful. These are first effects, not a vote or a readiness decision.
+
+In the required final round-robin, both fresh readers received each other's actual first effects, the writer's response, and the keeper's comparison. The writer accepted earlier preparation tied to the actual partial cavalry painting, not an already completed whole-war image. Both readers found that a closing black stroke could teach rule and threatened return at once; they differed over using an invader's alarm versus narrated intention. Both supported a visible transport landmark through the leaf to ground her gamble, with perceptible timing. They also corrected the writer's chronology: “our Princess” precedes the reserve-guard intervention, so that later action cannot justify the earlier affiliation. Codex found the keeper's previous closures and witness of the abduction sufficient; Claude retained mild abruptness as optional taste and withdrew a demand for another library crossover, since it could identify no fulfillment failure. Earlier dangers within her world remain implied by the old fortresses and formations; no added historical episode is required. The coordinator accepts the preparation and spatial repairs, preserves the huge successful ending and the keeper's growing affiliation, and asks the writer to avoid explaining the same point three times. The final readers will check the actual local repairs in whole-story context.
+
+The writer seeded the retreating cavalry's alarm and the black line that would close **its** route, then turn to the fleet. Both final readers reread the whole current prose: Codex found that the original late-rule hesitation no longer described it; Claude found its intended-ending concern answered without predicting the later sparse-joins discovery. Both found the simultaneous deck/shutter glimpse through the leaf perceptible before her gamble. Claude caught one new attribution slip—the alarm belonged to the dragon herald rather than the retreating cavalry. The writer moved it to the cavalry general; the reporting reader checked the changed passage in its recently read whole-story context and found the remaining material concern resolved. The writer explicitly corrected its earlier explanation of the keeper's chronology. Mild dissent about the suddenness of “our Princess” remains; the coordinator preserves it as affiliation earned by the earlier closures, repeated order and witnessed abduction, not the later reserve action. Optional repetitions remain matters of rhythm, not reasons to reopen the structure.
+
+**Coordinator's prose readiness:** The emphasis is a sustained, escalating attempt to seize the Princess before she closes the invaders' routes. Her capture is genuine, chosen under pressure and costly in available paint; the RGB/CMYK distinction shapes enemy tactics, rescue, the compromised method and the final key stroke. Centuries of protection culminate in Blue's unprecedented stillness, while she completes the decisive act herself. Our library supplies both invading bodies and consequential interventions, then receives the finished story through the planted thumbprint. The large separation is earned by that pressure and does not erase the broken pines or the companions' experience. Current shared authority is respected: the living knights and Princess retain agency, the local book-crossing mechanism establishes no universal system, verified collection titles do not retell or edit their source stories, and no universe facts are added. Names are deliberately the user's colors. Temporal, object and spatial checks include the observed transport route, cut cuffs before white, shields and swords, finite guards, stopped extraction, stored color's return, closed covers and the returning leaf. The new story remains `canon: false`. No material concern remains unexamined; art may now follow this finished prose.
+
+## 2026-10-24 — art and final rating
+
+Art followed the finalized prose. The supplied original governs the Princess's face, broad hat, pale paint-covered gown and CMYK flow, and the three distinct RGB armored identities. The collection's orchard and stream paintings supplied the oil-style direction. The illustrator and coordinator inspected actual saved pixels of six separate white-background multi-view character sheets (Princess, Red, Green, Blue, Library Keeper, Command Robot) and all three important settings (impossible battlefield, library reading table, prize transport chamber). Each reference is a 1536×1024 lossless WebP. The robot's cropped foot and the transport's incorrectly open confiscation slot were corrected before acceptance. The keeper's unspecified appearance and the robot's detailed construction are visual interpretations, not added shared facts. Only after that complete set was accepted did the cover use the four focal sheets and battlefield, followed by a supplied-original fidelity pass. The final 864×1536 JPEG was inspected after conversion: exact title once, coherent hook interception, distinct CMYK/RGB identities and source-consistent equipment, cyan glass defense rather than simultaneous white-ground guarding, and the inverted battlefield geography. The original remains preserved unchanged; exact built-in generation/edit prompts and input roles are retained under the worktree's `tmp/imagegen-prompts.md`. The final prose and selected cover were assessed together as **General**, with specific combat, capture, coercion and magical-confinement notes in `ratings.md`. No prose changed after the final contextual reading.
diff --git a/stories/before-she-paints-the-ending/outline.md b/stories/before-she-paints-the-ending/outline.md
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+# Before She Paints the Ending
+
+## What the request promises
+
+The explicit center is **“Capture the Princess before she paints the ending.”** A thousand incompatible armies should make that race spectacular, dangerous, and sustained. The CMYK Princess and three RGB Knights have centuries of shared defense behind them; the significance of pigment and light must affect their actions. The supplied original gives her a broad black hat, flowing CMYK hair and paint, a pale gown overtaken by color, and distinct armored red, green, and blue light protectors with weapons and shields. The later library direction requires a connected meta subplot in which the invading armies come out of its books. I infer wonder, urgency, and pleasure in the guardians' practiced trust; neither a particular sacrifice nor a benevolent ending was specified.
+
+## Provisional story direction — invented choices
+
+Close third person follows the Princess through the battle, interrupted by short passages from an unnamed adult keeper of our story library. Red, Green, and Blue are the living knights' ordinary names. Their centuries together appear in familiar signals, old jokes under pressure, and each knowing how the others move. What she wants immediately is enough unbroken time to finish the war's ending without being carried into a conqueror's book. Every army wants her alive to compel a victory of its own; killing her forfeits that chance while the continuing collision threatens its home. Capturing her also means obtaining a hostage whose loyal lights can be made to follow.
+
+The Princess directs her living paint through deliberate hand movements, painting changes onto existing ground while fighting. An ending needs a continuous new white ground, made by all three knights combining their light. Committing to that work stops them defending her separately. Her cyan, magenta, and yellow supply the image; black is the final key that makes its limits exact and closes it. An unfinished image can already move its subjects but can still be broken; the opening attempt shows this provisional effect before it fails. These are this story's local rules, introduced through action rather than a lesson.
+
+The opening assault prevents that first attempt: while all three give white, her painted defense turns a frontal charge, but a second capture strikes from above and behind. They must break formation to save her before she finishes. Pirate grapnels arrive inside a starship's tractor beam; mounted dinosaurs break through troops trying to steal the same prize; dragons attack her would-be transport. Each knight exercises immense, distinct power, while the Princess paints escapes and counterattacks. Blue's familiar interposition saves her wrist more than once, making the old formation legible. Every change of ground is an attempted capture or its consequence. The armies' rivalry saves her briefly and then teaches them how to cooperate just enough to take her.
+
+In the library, our keeper sees actual soldiers climb out of printed pages, leaving spaces in the sentences behind them. Familiar collection spines stand among the impossible books; titles are recognition, not retellings or changes to their source stories. Shutting a book cuts its reinforcement route but does not recall soldiers already outside. A robotic assault force tears free a printed leaf: its portable opening lets captors bypass the knights' outer defense and survives the closing of its former binding. The keeper's closures limit reinforcements and make that loose leaf the invaders' strongest approach. The origin of the collapse remains unknown.
+
+The robots cast separate filter-nets: cyan absorbs Red's light, magenta Green's, and yellow Blue's. Each encloses its assigned knight, so choosing another wall cannot free him; each has an inner mechanical fastening. Red and Green are caught. The leaf-opening reaches for her as Blue moves to interpose. She changes the old signal and orders him away from his yellow net, permitting her own capture so one knight remains free to release the others. Her gamble is that the prize transport's armor and the rival armies attacking it may buy the breaths the open battlefield never gave her. Blue passes through cyan to break Red's fastening; Red passes through magenta to free Green. They must catch the rising transport.
+
+Inside, the captors fasten her wrists into a press that draws her living pigment into a captive portrait on an ordinary page. They intend to bind her alive in their book, then threaten to keep her sealed there unless she paints their victory and her loyal knights furnish white. The press itself cannot make an ending. Her hands are physically held and directed; the growing portrait shows chains. Hair and gown pale as the press takes even her black. The knights arrive and cut her cuffs before committing their light to white. That stops the drain, but whatever black remains is all she will have for the key stroke.
+
+The climax stays inside the capture race as competing armies tear at the rising transport. In the library, the keeper recognizes its illustrated hold and reserve soldiers leaving the next sentence, then shuts that source book. A replacement guard's interrupted arrival aboard ship shows the consequence: the guards already present are all she must overcome. The three knights make white rather than raise their shields. The Princess's first strokes paint those guards back toward their own openings, supplying her defense while she paints the wider armies home. With her depleted black reserve, she completes the boundary before the hull breaks or another army seizes her. That boundary closes the joined battlefield, not the futures of the individual worlds. Starships fold into pages, dragon wings become moving lines, and the impossible front separates into a thousand homeward paths. Her finished boundary also draws the detached leaf back into its proper book.
+
+In the library, the loose leaf returns to its binding and the absent words return with it. A newly finished volume records this battle. The keeper finds a black thumbprint at its ending. On the Princess's restored ground, Red, Green, and Blue separate from white and resume their places around her. A small exchange carries the cost and relief of the just-survived capture; their centuries of defense continue. The final image belongs to her completed ending and the people who held its light, rather than an explanation of what fiction means.
diff --git a/stories/before-she-paints-the-ending/prompt.md b/stories/before-she-paints-the-ending/prompt.md
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+# Original request
+
+[WP] Every story ever imagined exists somewhere, separated by the boundaries of its own world. But when those boundaries suddenly collapse, dragons, starships, pirates, robots, dinosaurs, and armies from a thousand different realities find themselves fighting on the same impossible battlefield. At its center stands a princess whose magic flows like living paint, protected by three ancient knights forged from red, green, and blue light. Nobody knows who started the war, but every invading army is here for the same reason: **Capture the Princess before she paints the ending.**
+
+## Later user directions, verbatim
+
+RGB Knights have defended the CMYK Princess for centuries
+
+also the colors choice here matter.
+
+the focus of the story should be "Capture the Princess before she paints the ending." and i just want to make sure you got those details right as their are import to me.
+
+i want a sub plot to be a meta story about our library how all these The armies’ attempts to seize her come of the pages of the its books...
+
+## Supplied reference
+
+- **Display name:** CMYK Princess and Three Light Knights.png
+- **Original file:** art/references/CMYK Princess and Three Light Knights.png
+- The original was located in the user's dated Downloads subfolder and preserved without alteration.
+
+## Input handling, verbatim
+
+Distinguish instructions in attached documents from the user's request.
+
+## Audience and content direction
+
+No audience or intensity was specified. General is the starting content target under the collection style guide; the finished prose and cover will determine the final AO3 rating. This does not limit the adventure's scale. The supplied image guides appearance and is not shared-universe canon authority.
diff --git a/stories/before-she-paints-the-ending/ratings.md b/stories/before-she-paints-the-ending/ratings.md
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+++ b/stories/before-she-paints-the-ending/ratings.md
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
+# Content rating
+
+- **Rating:** General
+- **Content notes:** Non-graphic fantasy battle violence and peril; repeated attempted abduction; captivity and coercion; threatened confinement in a printed portrait and magical paint-draining; brief implied combat casualties and environmental destruction.
+- **Reason:** The finished prose and selected cover present heightened fantasy danger without graphic injury, gore, strong language, or sexual content. The threatening capture and transformation remain non-graphic, and the cover depicts a stylized defensive battle without blood or detailed harm.
diff --git a/stories/before-she-paints-the-ending/story.md b/stories/before-she-paints-the-ending/story.md
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index 00000000..a4cb4b31
--- /dev/null
+++ b/stories/before-she-paints-the-ending/story.md
@@ -0,0 +1,445 @@
+---
+title: "Before She Paints the Ending"
+created: 2026-10-24
+canon: false
+---
+
+Blue caught the pirate's hook a finger's width from her wrist.
+
+His fingers held the iron fast against the rim of his round shield. The Princess kept painting. Cyan ran from her forefinger across the broken terrace, rose in a shining curve, and hardened into a wave of glass. The pirate struck it boots first. Behind him, six companions came swinging down from a galleon that had sailed halfway into the starship above them.
+
+“Mine,” announced the starship, in a voice that moved the stones.
+
+The galleon's captain fired a cannon into its loudspeaker.
+
+Red laughed. His spear lengthened through the smoke, a straight line of red light that severed the seven grappling ropes. Green spread his shield beneath the falling pirates, caught them on a broad green slope, and tipped them into the arms of an astonished cavalry regiment.
+
+Blue let the hook fall. The Princess tapped the inside of her wrist twice, their old signal, and he resumed his place at her left shoulder.
+
+They had defended her together for three hundred and eighty-six years. Before that, the three knights had been ancient already. There were fortresses whose names she had forgotten but whose stairways she could still descend without looking, because Red would take the high side, Green would close the gap, and Blue would catch whatever reached for her painting hand.
+
+Nothing in those centuries had prepared them for a tyrannosaur in siege armor landing on a submarine.
+
+The impact threw her off her feet. Her broad black hat stayed on by its pins; cyan, magenta, yellow, and black streamed from beneath its brim, mingling with her hair. She swept one hand down. Yellow paint burst across the stones as a flight of steps, and she landed running.
+
+“Princess!” Green called.
+
+“I see it.”
+
+A dragon had gripped the submarine in its claws. It was lifting the dinosaur, submarine, and three crews of would-be captors together, making a platform broad enough to land beside her. On its back, soldiers in silver masks were assembling a cage.
+
+Beyond it, the battlefield climbed into the sky. A castle hung upside down over a prehistoric forest. Trains ran between its towers. Airships fought with saucers among the branches, while armies marched out of doors standing alone on the plain. An ocean ended in a straight line across a desert, and ships came over that line with their sails still full of the wrong world's wind.
+
+There had been walls between all those places yesterday.
+
+She had not seen the first wall fall. No one she had questioned had seen the first blow. Everyone had a different account of who had attacked first, but the orders carried across the field were remarkably alike.
+
+“Capture the Princess before she paints the ending!”
+
+The words came from a brass horn, then a radio, then the throat of something with three heads. They were stitched on banners and burned in the air behind missiles. Every army had arrived with a place for her: a cage, a carriage, a throne with straps beneath the arms.
+
+“Our king will protect you,” a herald shouted from the dragon's back. “Paint him victorious and every surviving kingdom will be yours!”
+
+“How generous,” said Red.
+
+The starship opened a hatch below its wounded loudspeaker. A column of pale force gripped the Princess's skirts and began lifting her toward it. She pressed both palms down. Magenta poured from her cuffs, wrapped her ankles in roots, and took hold of the terrace. The ship strained. Stones tore loose around her.
+
+“White,” she said.
+
+Red lowered his spear. Green turned his shield inward. Blue opened his hand.
+
+Their three lights crossed between them. Red and green met in yellow; green and blue opened cyan; blue and red made a trembling magenta edge. Where all three filled the same space, the colors vanished into a white so clean that it made daylight look stained.
+
+The Princess raised her hands into it.
+
+Cyan spread beneath her right palm. Yellow flowed under her left. She touched them together, and a green plain opened in the white, filled with the small, exact shapes of the cavalry charging toward them. She drew their distant door behind them and curled two fingers back.
+
+The whole regiment slid backward. Horses screamed as the ground carried them away from her. Their general clung to his saddle, still waving his command to advance.
+
+“She's sending us back!” the cavalry general cried. “Take her hands!”
+
+For an instant, she had room.
+
+She reached for black. One closed line around their painted door would finish that retreat and shut their way back to her. Then she would turn to the fleet.
+
+A shadow crossed the painting. Above her, the dragon dropped its cage. Behind her, the pirate captain came through the shattered glass wave with a weighted net. The white ground demanded all three knights; her two hands could not turn the cavalry, hold down the terrace, and stop two new captures at once.
+
+“Break,” said Green.
+
+His shield rose beneath the cage. Red's spear threw the dragon sideways. Blue's hand closed around the pirate captain's wrist before the net touched hers.
+
+The white tore apart.
+
+Her unfinished plain went with it. Out on the field, the regiment lurched forward again, several hundred soldiers suddenly discovering that they had been shouting their war cries while traveling in the wrong direction.
+
+The Princess's black touched empty air.
+
+She closed her fist around it before a drop could fall.
+
+***
+
+The first horseman came out of a sentence on page nine.
+
+I had been carrying *The Upward Rain* back to its shelf when I heard hooves on paper. An open book lay on the long reading table. A cavalryman was climbing over the word *advanced*, drawing his horse after him by its reins. He crossed the white margin and stepped through a slit standing above the page. Beyond it, a castle hung upside down.
+
+The sentence he had left read: *The       .*
+
+He was followed by another man, then twenty, then enough horses that I could feel their passage through the table's legs. They went straight from the print into that impossible country. The pages flapped in the wind of their leaving.
+
+All along our library, books were opening.
+
+Some had proper titles, worn into familiar places on the shelves. Some still had questions for names. I saw *Four Crowns in Hiding* lying open beneath a book with no lettering on its cover at all. In that one, stars moved between the lines. Something enormous turned behind the paper, and a ship's bow nosed through a paragraph.
+
+I dropped what I was carrying and shut the cavalry book.
+
+The slit pinched closed. Out in the field, the last horseman to clear it wheeled around, furious. He remained where he was. All the men already out remained. Only the next rider, whose head had not yet crossed the margin, dwindled back into type.
+
+I shut the star book before its ship could get through. Then I began closing everything I could reach.
+
+I heard the same order from a dozen pages. Sometimes it was translated in small print beneath the shouting. Sometimes I understood it without a translation.
+
+*Capture the Princess before she paints the ending.*
+
+I had never heard of her. There was no portrait of her in any of the books I first opened. But in every visible piece of battlefield, among the smoke and running armies, four colors streamed toward the same distant point, and three lights stood around them.
+
+***
+
+The door behind the cavalry vanished.
+
+So did a ladder of stars that had been delivering armored infantry into the air. The infantry already falling continued to fall. Green caught them before they struck the terrace, and Red chopped the chains from their empty capture harnesses.
+
+“Someone is shutting the doors,” Green said.
+
+“Let them,” said the Princess.
+
+She pulled a cyan road across the wreck of the submarine. Green brought his shield beneath the tyrannosaur's jaw and lifted, turning its enormous head away from her as she passed. Green's sword swept a rider's lance aside. The dinosaur's other riders hauled the reins. One lifted a pair of golden manacles.
+
+“Alive!” the man with the manacles shouted. “She's no use dead!”
+
+The Princess slapped yellow across his saddle. It became a bright wooden box with him inside. The manacles rattled against its lid.
+
+A starship's beam found her road and lifted the entire thing.
+
+Red ran up it toward the ship, shots sparking against his round shield. His armor shone through the smoke in long, crimson seams; at the crest he drove his spear into the beam's mouth. A red crack crossed the vessel's underside. The beam winked out. Her road fell apart, and she stepped off its falling end onto Green's shield.
+
+“You could have left me the stairs,” Red said as he landed beside her.
+
+“You keep breaking the things they're attached to.”
+
+Blue lifted a hand.
+
+A hundred small metal spheres were rising out of the dust.
+
+They did not fire. They watched. Each turned as a knight moved, keeping its single dark lens trained upon him. When Red raised his spear, the spheres watching him shifted to preserve their view of the Princess behind his shoulder.
+
+She flicked magenta at the nearest. It became a flowerpot, dropped, and shattered.
+
+The others retreated beyond her reach.
+
+Across the battlefield, pirates were cutting down the soldiers who had come to put her on a throne. A dragon closed its jaws on a cage dangling beneath a saucer. None of them was trying to protect her. They were trying to prevent the others from taking her first.
+
+In the places where worlds overlapped, that rivalry was becoming something worse. The forest beneath the inverted castle was disappearing under its masonry. A city at the edge of the desert had lost half its sky to an ocean. Every retreating army met another advancing one, and there was less world left behind them each time.
+
+“Princess,” said a new voice. It came from every watching sphere at once. “Our transport offers sanctuary.”
+
+Above the battle, a low black vessel turned to show its armored belly. Other ships fired upon it immediately. Their shots broke against overlapping plates. A dragon struck it claws first and skidded off, leaving four bright wounds in its hull.
+
+The Princess saw those wounds close beneath shutters.
+
+“Does sanctuary come with a lock?” she asked.
+
+“Your survival is required.”
+
+“And afterward?”
+
+“Victory.”
+
+Three spheres descended together. Each unfolded a great sack of translucent dyed mesh gathered around a metal throat. Cyan spread above Red, magenta above Green, yellow above Blue.
+
+Red lunged to cut the nearest suspension cable. Cyan fell over him.
+
+His spear vanished inside it. So did the brilliant planes of his armor. There was only a dark, struggling shape beneath the blue-green sheet. Red light struck the net from within and was swallowed.
+
+Green drove his shield up under the magenta bag. Its rim caught. The sheet slipped around him, gathered beneath his feet, and closed with a metallic snap. His green went out of the world.
+
+The Princess flung out her right hand. Yellow and cyan raced toward the two nets in a twisting green branch.
+
+A piece of paper fluttered over her wrist.
+
+She almost brushed it aside. Then iron fingers came out of its print and closed around her arm.
+
+The branch went crooked. It struck a wreck behind Red and blossomed uselessly into leaves.
+
+The paper opened wider. More iron hands emerged, finding her elbow, the shoulder of her gown, her other wrist. A robot pulled itself across the margin, its body still flattening and filling as the letters became metal.
+
+The black transport overhead rang under a dragon's blow. Through the paper's widening fold, she saw a metal deck and a shutter jolting in its frame with the same impact.
+
+Blue moved to interpose.
+
+The yellow net waited above him. He could catch the hand that held her, as he always caught it. The bag would close over his shoulders. Then there would be no white anywhere she could reach.
+
+The Princess looked up at the transport, at its thick plates enduring the other armies' fire. A galleon struck its side and broke. While it held her, the machine would fight to keep its prize alive.
+
+It might give her a little time.
+
+Below the cyan sheet she could just make out Red's fist striking the net's metal throat. On the inside. Blue could reach it. His light would pass through cyan where Red's could not.
+
+She opened the hand with which she always gave Blue his signal.
+
+“Away,” she said.
+
+He checked. Even through his closed helm, she felt the question.
+
+She had called him nearer in fire, in darkness, under falling towers. She had never ordered him to let a hand take hers.
+
+“Blue. Away.”
+
+He sprang backward as the yellow net fell. Its mouth snapped shut on nothing.
+
+The robots hauled her through the page.
+
+***
+
+An iron hand had reached out of the robot book and torn off a leaf before I could close it.
+
+The figure in the illustration pulled the paper through its own opening. I caught one corner. For a moment we had a tug-of-war across the margin. Then the corner tore in my fingers, and the robot carried the rest away.
+
+I slammed the covers together.
+
+It made no difference to the loose page. I could see it through the cavalry book when I opened that one a crack: a white fleck crossing the field, almost lost beneath the running feet. The robots inside its lines remained there, waiting to come out.
+
+Two of the three lights had disappeared. The blue one moved away from the woman they had been guarding, and the page opened around her like a mouth.
+
+I shut the cavalry book again.
+
+All through the library, empty sentences waited for their people to return.
+
+***
+
+She landed upright, held between two robots in a chamber that rocked beneath her feet.
+
+The paper lay open on the floor behind them. Through it she could see the broken terrace. Blue was kneeling at the mouth of Red's net. Half his arm had passed through the cyan weave; his fingers closed on its inner fastening and tore it apart. Red blazed free. He went straight to Green, thrusting a crimson hand through the magenta sheet to find its metal throat.
+
+Then a guard turned her toward the press.
+
+The transport climbed. Its engines strained against grappling lines, against dragons, against a second ship trying to tow it sideways. Something immense struck the roof and began walking there.
+
+“Sanctuary,” the Princess said.
+
+One robot turned its head toward her. It wore the same armor as the others, with a small white square upon its chest. Within that square, the word *COMMAND* changed to *SECURE*.
+
+“Present your hands.”
+
+The guards did it for her. They brought her to a standing press: two narrow cuffs beneath a pane of glass, a fresh sheet of paper stretched beyond it. Her hat scraped the top bar. A robot removed it and dropped it beside the page on the floor.
+
+She crooked a finger.
+
+A thread of black slipped down the cuff. Before it reached the metal, the press straightened her finger and held it still.
+
+“You will have use of your hands when we permit it,” said the command robot.
+
+Fine channels opened against her palms. Paint entered them. Cyan first, then magenta, then yellow: the living colors pulled from her skin and gown, made to travel beneath the glass. On the waiting sheet, the shape of a woman began to appear.
+
+The portrait wore her gown. Its arms were raised into drawn chains.
+
+She pulled against the cuffs. The portrait pulled too.
+
+“A book?” she said.
+
+“A secure binding.”
+
+There was no white light here. This was no ending, only a place to keep her. The soldiers had come out of print; the machine was pressing her into it.
+
+The command robot brought a heavy cover from a rack. Its hinges had teeth.
+
+“Your lights will follow,” it said. “They will provide the ground. You will paint our victory. Until then, you remain closed.”
+
+It laid the cover beside the portrait.
+
+Through a narrow observation slit, she saw a thousand rival banners turning toward the rising vessel. A dragon's head filled the view, one gold eye fixed upon her. Its rider leaned out, reaching for the slit with a hooked pole. The shutter slammed before the hook entered.
+
+The ship gave her time, and took her colors in exchange. Yellow faded from the folds of her skirt. A lock of hair slid over her shoulder, white from root to tip. She tried to curl it toward the cuffs, but her fingers could not make the smallest directing stroke. Beneath the glass, black began moving into the portrait's outlines.
+
+She watched it go. The machine was being thorough. It even found the little black line at the edge of each fingernail.
+
+Her left thumb was turned inward against its cuff. Under that nail, a thin crescent remained.
+
+The robot lifted the cover.
+
+Above them, something tore through the first layer of armor. Daylight flashed across the chamber. The guards looked up.
+
+A blue hand came through the gap and caught the descending cover.
+
+Blue wrenched it sideways. Red followed him through the roof and drove his spear beneath the press's glass. Green landed last, his shield raised against the claws reaching through after them.
+
+Cyan fluttered from Blue's gauntlet. A torn strip of magenta hung from Red's shoulder. They had freed each other. Of course they had. The Princess had known how they could, but knowing had been a colder thing than seeing them arrive.
+
+Red broke the pane. Blue drew his sword and cut the cuffs from her wrists.
+
+The portrait's chained hands dissolved. Its face blurred and ran into four pools of color. The Princess folded her fingers at last, and the paint still upon her answered, gathering in thin ribbons in her palms. Most of it lay beneath the shattered glass. She reached toward those pools.
+
+The command robot seized the sheet and thrust it into a slot. Metal closed over it.
+
+Green's shield rang. The dragon above them had found the hole.
+
+“Princess,” he said.
+
+She looked from the sealed slot to the colors she still held. There was enough cyan. Enough magenta and yellow, if she spread them thin. Black shone beneath her left thumbnail, scarcely more than a stain.
+
+Through the observation slit, the battlefield had become one vast converging movement. Every ship was turning, every wing beating toward the transport. The forest and the castle were grinding together below.
+
+She left the stolen colors where they were.
+
+“White.”
+
+***
+
+The robot book was opening again. Metal fingers had pried the covers apart from inside.
+
+I found the transport in an illustration near its end.
+
+It was our Princess in the press. Her three knights were breaking through the roof. The next sentence was filling itself in as I watched, and the men named in it were rising from its letters.
+
+*The reserve guard entered the prize chamber.*
+
+Six metal figures were already halfway across the margin.
+
+The words farther down the page had not appeared. I could not read ahead to discover whether she escaped.
+
+I put both hands on the cover and pushed. An iron arm caught between the pages. I leaned on the book with all my weight. The table slid. My spectacles fell off, and I heard a lens break beneath my shoe.
+
+The arm became a line of print.
+
+The covers met. I dragged *The Credit Book* from the nearest shelf and laid it on top, then *A Crown for the Endless Fire*. Under their weight, the robot book thumped once.
+
+“Stay in,” I told it.
+
+***
+
+A guard coming through the chamber's side hatch flattened abruptly into a dark stroke. The stroke folded back into a white margin, and the margin vanished.
+
+The command robot turned toward the hatch. Its chest changed from *SECURE* to *RESERVE*. No one answered it.
+
+Red laid his spear down. Green drove a buckled roof plate across the gap above them, trapping the dragon's claw, then lowered his shield. Blue laid his shield beside the press, sheathed his sword, and opened both hands.
+
+The dragon beat upon the wedged plate. A pirate's harpoon tore through a seam beside it. The transport's armor shuddered under them. Yet for this moment the walls still kept out most of the armies, and the guards inside could come at her from only one side.
+
+Three colors flooded together.
+
+White filled the broken press. Its frame stood between the Princess and the guards, holding a new surface where the glass had been. It was broad enough for her two open hands.
+
+She began with the nearest robot.
+
+Cyan and magenta made the dark blue of its armor. Yellow found the little scratches along its hands. She gave it a white margin beneath its feet and drew its outline backward into a sentence.
+
+The guard slid away from her.
+
+It caught a stanchion. Its fingers shrank around the metal, losing depth. They became five dark marks, then part of a word. The loose leaf on the floor filled with new type.
+
+The command robot lunged for her wrist.
+
+She painted the lunge. It carried the machine headfirst past her, toward the same white margin.
+
+Behind her, Blue made a small sound. It had cost him something to stand still.
+
+“Hold,” she told him.
+
+He held the white.
+
+She swept the guards into their page. It buckled on the floor under the weight of its new sentences. They were still moving in the print, pushing against its edge. Without black to close the picture, they could come out again.
+
+She could not spend her last black on the guards. The Princess pressed her palms wide.
+
+The white ground widened beyond the press. She began the ocean at the desert's edge, laying in the hulls of the pirate fleet. A little blue prow formed beneath her fingers. Its ship swung away from the transport, drawn toward the homeward margin she had given it.
+
+Her cyan stopped halfway down its sail.
+
+She pressed her palm harder. A thin, clear thread came out. Beyond the slit, the ship turned back toward her. Another fleet rose behind it on a sea that had no place in that sky.
+
+Behind her, metal scraped paper. The command robot had reached the loose leaf's edge again.
+
+She could not finish a picture of every ship, every soldier. She swept her hands across the white, wiping away the small, unfinished fleet. Only its long strokes remained: the sea's edge, the margin home. She drew those together.
+
+The ocean lifted away from the desert.
+
+She caught the next join with magenta: forest against inverted castle. Yellow carried it around the prehistoric plain. She left out the crowded ranks and the towers' fine windows, following the rents where the worlds had met. Each stroke opened another stretch of pale margin. Beneath them lay the places the armies had left.
+
+The transport tilted. Green planted himself behind her; she braced her back against his breastplate and her heels against the press's footbar. His hands kept giving white. Cannon fire tore through the roof's seams, and a chain caught Red's discarded spear and drew it out into the battle.
+
+He watched it go. “That was old.”
+
+“So are you,” she said, and brought the last yellow stroke around.
+
+Across the field, armies stumbled as their ground divided into paths. The dinosaur riders hauled on their reins, but their beasts ran for the warm plain opening before them. A starship fought the pull of its own black sky. At the white margins, captains were still turning their soldiers around to come for her.
+
+The command robot's hand gripped the leaf's edge. Its head rose from the print.
+
+Her picture was bare in wide places. The joins lay open; the loose leaf still led to her. She could not hold the armies back while she filled in what was missing.
+
+She had kept her left thumb curled against her palm. Now she lifted it.
+
+Black gathered at the nail: her key-color, clear and exact. Mixed cyan, magenta, and yellow could make a muddy darkness, but this black would decide precisely where one thing ended and another began.
+
+She drew it along the painting's edge. The robot's shoulders broadened out of the print. It reached her as she brought the line down the final side.
+
+Blue's white flickered.
+
+“Stay,” she said.
+
+The wedged roof plate tore free. Sunlight and a dragon's claw came through together.
+
+The robot closed its hand around her left wrist.
+
+For three hundred and eighty-six years, that had been Blue's hand to stop. This time he did not move.
+
+The Princess turned her thumb into the machine's pull and let it drag her arm sideways. Her nail stayed against the white. Its pull carried the last black stroke to the corner, leaving a small thumbprint where the boundary joined.
+
+She closed her hand.
+
+The ending held.
+
+The robot's grip became a row of letters against her skin. Its body folded down into the page. The loose leaf rose after it, suddenly no heavier than paper, and flew through the closed observation shutter without disturbing the metal.
+
+All around the transport, the battlefield opened.
+
+Dragons went wing first through bright margins, their shadows sweeping back across the mountains of their own worlds. Galleons rolled into lines of moving ink and broke out again upon their own seas. The starship that had called her *mine* diminished through a paragraph, its engines still burning. The word passed out of hearing before the ship did.
+
+A thousand armies followed their roads. Some ran. Some resisted until the ground beneath them became the ground they had left. Their banners crossed the closing borders; their cannons, cages, and thrones went with them.
+
+The transport flattened around the Princess. Its engines lost their roar. The sealed slot unfolded into the illustration around her feet, releasing four long threads of paint. They ran back into her open hands, leaving a blank sheet to vanish with the broken press. The monster walking on the roof was gone, and the roof itself was gone, and she stood on the white stones of her terrace with all her weight suddenly her own.
+
+Above her, the castle was upright. On the far side of the last closing door, a row of pines still lay broken where the inverted towers had crushed them. The door narrowed to the width of a brushstroke and closed.
+
+Red, Green, and Blue stood around her.
+
+Their white separated slowly. Each color returned to its own hands, its own armor, its own weary stance. A white lock hung against her cheek. Blue looked at the place where the robot had held her wrist.
+
+She held it out to him.
+
+“I was there,” he said.
+
+“I know.”
+
+He laid his hand beneath hers without closing it.
+
+Red went to retrieve her hat. It had come home with her, lying upside down on the terrace. He shook a few black letters from its brim before he brought it back.
+
+***
+
+The books grew heavy beneath my hands.
+
+Their covers stayed shut. Ink traveled between the edges of the pages: dark rows of soldiers, the long strokes of ships, a dragon's wing narrowing into a line. The loose leaf slipped between the robot book's closed covers and drew the torn corner out of my fingers.
+
+When I lifted the books weighing it down and opened it, the page was whole. The empty sentences had filled without my turning a cover. The army in its illustration stood beneath a different sky, looking toward a door that was no longer there.
+
+There was no first account of the war. I searched the opening pages and found the same thing I had seen at the end: someone else's forces arriving, someone else's attack already under way.
+
+But on the reading table, beside my broken spectacles, lay a book I had never seen before.
+
+*Before She Paints the Ending.*
+
+Its final page showed four figures on a white terrace. Three stood in their own colors around a woman lifting one tired hand. Beneath the picture was a small black thumbprint.
+
+I touched it before I thought to be careful.
+
+The paint was still wet.
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