Chapter 7 – The World That Forgot Itself

Part I: The Unwritten City
Yusuf fell without landing.
No impact. No shudder. Only a gradual dispersal, as if a thought had wandered out of his mind while he was speaking.
When sensation returned, he stood at the edge of a city.
Or—what remained of it.
There were outlines of buildings, some unfinished, others frozen like fixed afterimages, flickering like substandard projections. A street ran forward—but only a few meters before it broke down into white fog. Windows alone without walls. Lamps hanging from nothing. It all looked like half-remembered dreaming.
"What is this place…" Yusuf panted.
The Codex thumped against his ribcage.
He flipped it open.
Blank.
Every page.
He turned faster. Still vacant. No threads. No glyphs. Not even the usual golden seal on the first page.
Panic spiked in his chest.
Then—like a breath that had come too long—ink reappeared.
But the letters were distorted. Backwards. Written in a script he could almost—but not quite—read.
"No anchor," he said. "No shard. What am I even going to fix?"
He turned in a slow circle.
Then he saw him.
The faceless child.
Standing further than ever before, at least twenty meters away, hidden in distortion. His body flickered like a bug in the system. The stone beneath him twisted out in coils, in reverse ripples.Yusuf tried to step forward.
The earth beneath him pulled back—literally withdrew, folding up like paper.
"Don't!" the voice of the child shouted—not from his form, but everywhere.Yusuf halted.
This spot rejects you," the child told him. "It isn't shattered. It is unmaking itself."
"Why?"
The child took a step forward—and with it, three other pieces of the city unmade themselves into mist.
"Because recollection would be too painful."
Yusuf continued walking.
The city realigned itself step by step. A signpost appeared to his side—it said "Market of."
 before the letters unraveled and vanished. The wall it was fixed to followed shortly after.
He passed through a doorway that did not exist. In the room, there was empty space, a series of ticking clocks—no hands, no numbers, simply ticking.
At a distance, a whispering voice spoke—not to him, but about him.
"It's not time. He shouldn't be here. Pull him back."
Yusuf turned about to find the speaker.
The Codex struggled in his hand. Leather glowed softly. Threads wanted to bind—to then disintegrated in midair, like nerves shaking before death.
He continued on.
He found himself in a courtyard.
Or maybe a plaza.
There were building shapes, park benches, incomplete statues. Central, a fountain—a cracked bowl filled with ink instead of water. Floating in the ink was a book.
A real one.
Yusuf approached it with caution.
The cover was burned soft cloth. The pages were buckled with water and filthy.
He opened it.
"This is the history of a people who begged to be forgotten."
Page after page blurred, illegible.
But one thing came through, chiseled into the last page.
"Erasure."
The faceless child stood beside him again, this time closer—though still not quite steady.
"This place would not support its pain. So it burned its name. Its histories. Even its gods."
Yusuf looked at him. "Can that really happen?"
The child did not answer.
The fog rolled up between them in waves, as if a lung breathing.
Then a low, twisted voice sounded in the air—not that of a person, but of the stone.
"You do not belong here, Weaver."
"I won't hurt you," Yusuf said, slowly turning. "I just want to remember."
"We chose to be lost."
The wind buffeted Yusuf in the chest.
It wasn't wind.
It was memory being purged.
The fog grew more dense.
A flicker of movement—a girl in a red scarf running through an alleyway, vanished the instant she was perceived.
Yusuf trailed behind her on instinct.
"Wait—!"
He turned the corner. Vanished.
The alleyway became a corridor. Then a passageway. Then a staircase.
All changing.
Behind him, the mist crept up, devouring where he had stood an instant previous.
The Codex blazed hot now—to hot to be grasped. Its pages emitted a faint radiance. One word finally scribbled on the back page:

"Run."