Chapter 4 – The Echo in the Archive

The Codex pulsed quietly in Yusuf’s satchel as he sat alone in the ruins of Varnhale, the wind shifting ash across silent stones.

The city was whole again—but he wasn’t.

Kael had forgotten him. The warmth of their friendship, forged in fire, now belonged only to Yusuf. Everyone here had moved forward. But he carried everything.

He reached for the Codex, expecting another broken city.

Instead, he found a thread.

Not golden like the others.

This one shimmered silver.

And it didn’t point outward.

It pointed backward.

He didn’t fall through space this time.

He simply blinked—

—and found himself standing in a room he hadn’t seen in over a decade.

His father’s study.

Old jazz played softly from a battered speaker on a corner shelf.

Books filled every wall, from cracked leather-bound tomes to dog-eared field notebooks. Yellowed papers covered the desk in organized chaos. A chipped coffee mug—black, no sugar, no milk—sat next to a wax-sealed letter.

The air smelled of ink and dust and a lifetime spent looking at the past.

Yusuf hadn’t remembered how tall the shelves were. How cold the light felt.

“Do you know why the Nine Tablets were destroyed, Yusuf?”

He turned.

The man sitting behind the desk looked up at him.

Dr. Amin El-Amin.

His father.

The memory of him was vivid. Sharper than it had any right to be.

The white streak in his beard. The way he rubbed the bridge of his nose when he thought. His voice—measured, clipped, authoritative.

Yusuf felt like a boy again.

“Because people feared what they said,” the younger Yusuf replied, seated in front of the desk—almost twenty years old in this memory.

His father closed the book in his hands with a soft thud.

“No. They weren’t destroyed because of fear. They were destroyed because people forgot how to read them. And instead of admitting ignorance, they declared them dangerous.”

He leaned forward.

“That’s what happens when emotion distorts the record.”

Yusuf remembered this conversation.

He remembered how it ended, too.

“You think history should be stripped of meaning,” his younger self said.

“I think it should be preserved without sentiment,” his father replied. “Once you start editing memory to suit emotion, you stop recording truth. You start writing poetry.”

“And what about the people in those memories?” Yusuf snapped. “Don’t they matter?”

“The dead matter only as data,” his father said flatly. “It’s the living who keep rewriting them.”

Silence bloomed between them.

Then Yusuf rose from his chair.

He didn’t raise his voice. Didn’t cry.

He just stood, picked up his coat, and said:

“Then I’m going to remember things differently.”

He left the study.

He never came back.

Until now.

Yusuf stood among the books, older, heavier, aching with a thousand memories. He turned to the man behind the desk—the one who had vanished without a word when Yusuf was just twenty-four.

“You left us,” he said aloud. “You didn’t even say goodbye.”

The man didn’t react.

A fragment. A frozen memory.

But then—

His father blinked.

And looked directly at him—not the boy in the chair, but Yusuf now.

“You followed the threads,” he said quietly.

Yusuf stepped back.

“How are you speaking to me?”

“Because I never left. Not truly. The Codex brought you here for a reason.”

Yusuf’s throat tightened.

“Where have you been?”

His father’s eyes—worn and tired now—dimmed.

“I walked the memory paths. Like you. I thought I could fix what time forgot. But I went too far.”

“You vanished,” Yusuf said. “You left Mom. You left Tariq. You left me.”

“I tried to return. But the thread... frayed.”

His voice was softer now. Older.

“The world I landed in... it collapsed. I became part of it. Stuck.”

“So you’re still alive?”

A pause.

“Somewhere.”

The room flickered.

Dust turned to ash. Books dissolved into smoke.

Yusuf could feel the memory unraveling.

“Wait—don’t go.”

“I remember a bell,” his father said. “A river of smoke. Names carved into light. That’s all I see now.”

He looked at Yusuf one last time.

“You think remembering is enough, Yusuf. But memory without love is just a list of names.”

The walls crumbled.

The light cracked.

Yusuf landed hard in another temple. Not his father’s. Not a city he recognized.

Just darkness and a Codex, pulsing in his hand.

But something had changed.

A new thread shimmered at the edge of the page. Thinner than the others. Flickering.

It didn’t lead to a broken world.

It led to a person.

He clutched the Codex tight.

“You’re still alive,” he whispered. “Somewhere.”

And for the first time since this journey began, Yusuf didn’t feel like he was just wandering.

He had direction.

A name to follow.

A father to find