Chapter 9 — Ashfall’s End

The earth swallowed him up like water—cold, heavy, and unshifting. Yusuf sank to his knees, gasping ash from his form. The faceless child descended beside him in silence, cradling the Codex as if it would vanish.
The pseudo-phantom of his father was absent. Rather, the air rang with something formless—shadows stretched into the shape of a man, but its edges dissolved into nothing. Two eyes that were like broken mirrors glared at him.
"You… are not from here," it panted, its voice a thousand voices rolled together.
The Codex blazed in the child's hands. A word coalesced on its unrolled page:
"Memory Eater."
The creature's form wavered as it crept forward, and with each creep, Yusuf lost something from his mind—nonsense, insignificant things at first. The smell of rain in springtime. The slant of his mother's lettering.
Rae's voice shouted out behind him, frantic and desperate. "Yusuf! Go!"
He whirled around—and froze. Rae was no longer the same. Elarra's final memories wrapped around her like strands of burning vines, and they were pulling her toward the Memory Eater."They can't have you," Yusuf advanced.
But Rae turned to him, a tiny smile on her lips. "They already do. They've had me for so long."
The faceless child's head tilted. "She knows."
The Codex's pages twitched violently, landing on a half-finished entry:
Rae — Last Archivist of Elarra (erasure imminent).
Rae shoved past him, pressing something hard and small into his palm—a fragment of a glass strand. "You came to save this place. You can't, not truly. But you can save yourself. Take this. Remember."
Before he could protest, she pressed both hands against the Memory Eater's chest. Light flowed from her, filling it with fibers of Elarra's remaining intact memories. The creature reeled back, but its shadow consumed her.
The light expired. She was deceased.
And Yusuf—
in the same square, still. But Rae in front of him, alive and intact, with a stranger's eyes.
"Who. are you?".
He could not speak. His throat was packed with dust.
The faceless child tugged at his sleeve. "We have to get out. The thread is breaking."
They ran, and ash began to fall like snow on what remained of the city. The Codex snapped shut in the child's hands, and when Yusuf attempted to open it once more, the thread of Elarra was sealed, written in black ink:
Incomplete.
At the page's bottom, a new word had been written in faint, barely legible script:
Shard.
Yusuf gazed at the fragment Rae had given him. It emitted a soft glow from his palm.
"What's a shard?" he asked.
The young boy's blank face met his. "Pieces of the Codex… broken before you arrived. Find those, and you might find out who broke it."
The words chilled him—not from the mystery, but because subconsciously, he already dreaded the answer.
They walked into the ashstorm together, leaving Elarra in ruins. Somewhere within that storm, the next thread waited.