Volume 2 – Chapter 10: No Echoes of the Past

The city was silent except for the soft, steady cadence of our breaths passing through dark alleyways, our shadows swallowed up in the vast blackness around us. With each step – darkness loomed, the darkness of the unknowing. It tasted of metal, of iron.

So far so good, but every turn we took felt like it was pushing us deeper into our own maze. I kept looking over my shoulder, expecting the figure to reappear, to urge us to come along. But it was still early in the night, and the world itself was waiting. It was hauntingly silent, like the moment just before the storm. But that storm had already hit here. It was just hidden, lurking at the periphery of our vision.

“What do you think it meant?” Rika’s voice broke the silence, quiet but taut. As we walked, her hand brushed against mine, just for a moment, and it anchored me like nothing else could. It reminded me that no matter what, we had to beat this together.

I didn’t really know what to say to her. I don’t know what just happened, I don’t know what the figure said. “No turning back.” The words echoed in my mind like a dark mantra, a feeling darkening my gut. And that figure, whatever it was, hadn’t just been a chance passing. It had known something. About us. About what it was we were escaping.

“What it meant,” I said gently, “we can no longer concern ourselves with. We just need to keep moving.” But as I spoke those words, I wondered whether that was really true. What were we running from? What exactly were we fighting for? Were we capable of escaping this knowledge that was arriving?

The idea gripped me like the fog that hung low over the streets. As if the city had turned into a crypt. The wreckage that surrounded us — the evidence of the fall, of the catastrophe that had descended after the floodwaters — was proof. It was a city holding on to the past and not wanting to let it go.”

And yet there was something about this place — something familiar, like we had been here before, even though I knew we hadn’t.

I paused, gazing down a narrow street littered with broken glass and smashed windows. There was something slippery about it, a dim echo of memory that I couldn’t quite grasp. Footsteps echoed distant and muffled, enough that they started to sound like something from another time, years before I’d left that place behind.

Rika looked at me, her forehead creasing in confusion. “What’s wrong?”

“I … I don’t know,” I said softly. “It’s just this place. It feels… familiar.”

She stepped closer, her features softening. “We’ve been through a lot. Maybe we’re just tired. It’s getting to us.”

I wanted to believe her. But in my heart, I knew the way I felt wasn’t mere exhaustion. It was something deeper than that, something spun around the past, to the flood, to all the things that brought us to here. The city had secrets, and I was starting to suspect that we were about to uncover them,

“Let’s keep moving,” I said, swimming the unnerving feeling away. “We are not very far from the outskirts. We’ll be safe there.”

But as we wandered farther, the city scattered beneath our feet, as if it were a jigsaw puzzle taking shape again, guiding us to a path we were not walking. It was a little quieter, as if the remnants of a memory embedded in oblivion, but it was there. The alleys seemed skinnier, the buildings taller. It felt as though the streets themselves were changing, coming together in a new shape, a menacing shape.

A wind began blowing, bracingly cold, and I pulled Rika closer, as if it could preserve our warmth, the coldness seeping into my bones. We walked by what seemed like an abandoned building, the doors draped open, and I felt an almost magnetic draw to it. There was something in there, something beckoning me, though I couldn’t have told you why.

“Wait,” I said, freezing in my tracks.

Rika turned toward me, anxiety etched across her features. “What is it?”

“I don’t… know,” I said as a weird sense of déjà vu coming over me. “I think we should get indoors.”

Her gaze flew to the darkened door frame. “Are you sure? We’ve been running, Kaito. We need to keep moving.”

I nodded, even though the decision appeared made for me. “We have to. Something’s… calling me.”

Reluctantly, she followed me toward the building, tentative, but sure steps. As we crossed the threshold, the air inside was different — thicker, colder. There was an ancient smell in the air, faint, steeped, as the smell of ancient memories. The place was in shambles, as was the rest of the city, but there was something... off about the place. It was too quiet. No sounds of life, no clues of recent habitation. Just the quiet, the silence.

My eyes adjusted to the low light as I glanced around. Debris was strewn across the floor; some of it appeared to had once been furniture, papers, personal items. But everything was abandoned. The worst had apparently not even touched the building itself, as if it had been frozen in time.

And then I saw it.

There was a door at one end of the room, ajar, and through the crack I saw the flicker of light — soft, pulsing, a heartbeat fading. My heart skipped a beat. There was no intellectual urge to go toward it, no excuse to so much as interact with it. But that draw, that nagging tug in the back of my mind, refused to be ignored. It was that same feeling I’d experienced before, the same déjà vu feeling. Something had led us here. The city was trying to communicate something to me.

“This is a mistake,” Rika said, her voice wound so tight with fear.

“I know,” I muttered. “But we have to monitor the other side of that door.”

I straightened and took a step and then another through the thick quiet air until I found the door. The light past it flickered again, more brightly now, and I took the handle.

But just then, as my fingertips brushed against the cold metal, a voice, low, gravelly, spoke from the shadows behind me.

“You were never supposed to come here.”

I turned around, heart racing, and no one was there.” There was an audible intake of breath from the room, the silence stretched awkwardly long.

Then I saw, out of the corner of my eye, it — a figure, rising from the darkness.

It towered, seemingly impossibly, the features erased by shadows, but its movements put every hair on the back of my neck to attention. It didn’t walk, it glided. It felt as if it were crafted from shadows themselves, a thing that did not belong in this world.

I froze, the air stuck in my chest. For a moment I didn’t know whether to run or face it. But something in the figure — the sheer evilness of it, in the stillness — told me there would be no stretching to run from this thing.

“I told you,” the figure said again, and its voice was low and smooth, like the whicker of dead leaves. “You came to the wrong place.”

Rika held my arm tightly, fingers pressing into my skin, as she whispered to me, “So what do we do now?”

I didn’t have an answer.

What I did know was that the secrets of the city had flourished from whispers in the wind. They were real. And they had found us.