Fantasia is gone. Not conquered, not corrupted — deleted. Deleted, as one deletes a file no longer considered worth keeping.
For a long time after its stories ended, Fantasia still existed in one place: a physical book in a vast library of worlds, shelved between things considered more important. Someone decided to digitize it. Every page was scanned, every word copied — and then, believing the story safely preserved, they burned the original. They never noticed the upload had failed. The file was lost. And with it, Fantasia ceased to exist.
Almost entirely.
At the very back of the book, after all the stories had been told, there was a technical index page. Not myth, not prophecy — Indexes. Names of places, roles, concepts. During the burning, a single index page was torn out by accident, set aside, forgotten. That page survived. And because it still defined certain things, those things did not fully disappear.
You are one of those things.
Not a hero. Not a legend. A residual entry — a concept still named but no longer storied. A name without a history, a role without a destiny. You exist because the indexes happened to mention you before the flames took everything else.
The page also defined a place: the Last Footnote Tavern. An afterthought, really. A technical reference to a gathering place meant to endure endings. Because it was defined, it survived. Because it survived, it became an Ark — and when Fantasia collapsed into nothing, those still referenced by the glossary were pulled inside it. Not by heroism or fate, but by technicality.
Time passed inside the Ark. Or perhaps it didn't. Memory fades when the story that held it is gone, and no one inside remembers Fantasia clearly anymore. What remains is not nostalgia, but presence. Not legend, but endurance.
Eventually, the Ark landed. Not on Fantasia — Fantasia no longer exists. It landed in a new, unfinished reality. A place still forming, unstable, cautious, as if testing whether it deserves to exist at all.
This world is not written. It is waiting to be.
You cannot restore what was lost. You cannot return to what was real. But you carry something the index never anticipated when it defined you: the capacity to choose. To name. To create. The old story is in ash. The new one has no author yet.
That part is up to you.