The Codex glowed hot now—almost too hot to hold. Its pages throbbed with a gentle light. A single word finally appeared on the last page:
Run.
Yusuf did not tarry.
He spun on his heel the very instant the stones under him split apart. A flood of memory burst up—raw, unvarnished, savage. The world was not just fighting to be restored now—it was fighting back.
The ground behind him burst open, and through the rift crept the first of them—beings made out of smoldering memory, deformed and anguished, like people trapped in scream and reduced to dust. Their lips moved silently, but Yusuf heard their whispers within his mind: fractured pleas, severed goodbyes, memories begging to be forgotten.
They hunted him.
He sprinted down a crooked alley, the walls of stone curving inward as if to suffocate the notion of him. He leaped over a shattered bench, edged past a cloak of flame that hissed like apology, and crashed through the doorway of a collapsed apothecary.
Glass gritted beneath his feet. Memory bottles—the type that shone like perfume—were shattered on the ground, their contents seeping out and whispering names he did not know.The echoes were in back of him.
Yusuf pushed out of the back of the building, panting. His lungs burned. The Codex held in his hand burned wildly now, leaving yarn behind him like breadcrumbs—each one of which was snatched and torn by unseen hands.
He staggered around a corner——and ran into someone.
They fell together, and Yusuf leapt up, prepared to fight—
But the stranger was already standing, sword up. A sword that shone with shards of another person's past—recollections of a family, of a war, of a forgotten holiday.
She moved with the fluid moves of someone who had been surviving off this city for too long."You're real?" Yusuf panted.
"For now," she said, scanning the street. "If you'd like to keep existing, follow me."
Yusuf didn't argue.
They sprinted together through the crumbling district, her sword slicing down echoes as they burst from the walls, from the earth, from the fissures in the sky. Each that died exhaled a breath of memory—one shrieked a lullaby, another a dirge. It was as if the city was killing itself in fragments.
"Name's Rae," she yelled above the destruction.
"Neither are you!"
She grinned. “But I’ve been stuck here longer.”
Together they dove into an abandoned archive—a vast, spiraling tower whose interior shelves spun like clockwork gears. Rae shoved the door shut behind them and threw a rusted lever. A ring of symbols lit around the entrance.
Yusuf collapsed to the ground, gasping. “What was that?!”
“A city that remembers too much,” Rae said simply, cleaning her blade. “So it built an immune system—one that hunts intruders like us.”
Yusuf looked at her, really looked.
Her eyes were tired, too tired for someone her age. She wore layers of memory-thread as armor, old stories sewn into her sleeves. Her weapon pulsed with pieces of other lives.“You’re an archivist,” he said.
“I was,” Rae said softly. “Until this place took my name. My past. Almost took me.”She turned to face him fully.
“You have the Codex. That means you’re trying to restore this place.”
“I… was. Am. It didn’t feel this impossible before.”
Rae walked to a broken window. Outside, the city shimmered—shapes reforming, crumbling, reforming again. “That’s because this one doesn’t want to be fixed.”
Yusuf frowned. “Why?”
She showed him a small thing—a locket. At the center, a circular memory: woman clutching baby. Fire in the glass.
"She forgot," Rae stated. "They all did. The citizens of this city voted to forget their pain."Yusuf stepped forward. "But if I can bring it back—if I can reweave the strand—"
"They'll hate you for it," Rae finished. "The city doesn't want its pain back. And neither do the dead."
A long, long silence.
Then Yusuf opened the Codex again. And this time, it showed not a strand, but a web—dozens of intertwined ways. One burned dark red. The focal point of the destruction.
"They're hiding something in the center of the city," Yusuf said. "A memory that they buried too deeply. That's what's infecting everything else."
Rae's face went cold. "Then we excavate it."
Yusuf looked at her.
"You're accompanying me?
"You saved my life. That gets you one trip into the bleeding heart of hell."
Beyond, the sky broke open. Lightning did not fall—it remembered where it used to and fell there again.
Yusuf folded the Codex under his arm.
And they returned into the city that would rather die than be remembered.
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