Chapter 10 – The River That Remembers

Ash clung to Yusuf’s clothes long after they’d left Elarra. He kept brushing at his sleeves, swiping at the stubborn soot, but it wouldn’t leave. It felt like the world itself had marked him, refusing to let him step clean into the next place. The Codex’s shifting light carried him and the faceless child forward, but the smell of smoke still lingered in his nose, the ghost of fire following.

The child moved ahead without a word, cradling the Codex against its small frame. Yusuf didn’t ask this time. He couldn’t. Rae’s smile still lived behind his ribs, broken and wrong, a stranger’s eyes layered over her face until he didn’t know which image hurt more.

The fog thinned, and a river appeared at their feet.

At first glance, it was quiet, almost gentle—the kind of still water you’d expect to hear frogs in. But beneath the glassy surface, things moved. Faces. Places. Fragments. A woman’s laugh drifted past, quick and sharp before vanishing. A boy shouted somewhere beneath the current. A spire toppled, crumbled, and dissolved before he could blink. All of it carried away like scraps of paper caught in a tide.

“The River that Remembers,” the child whispered.

Yusuf crouched at the bank. The surface trembled when he reached for it, and suddenly his father’s face was there, staring up at him. Lips forming words he couldn’t hear. Gone before Yusuf could react. He nearly pitched forward after it, but the child yanked at his sleeve.

“Don’t. It only shows you what’s already lost.”

His hand clenched uselessly. He took a step back. “Then why bring me here?”

The child tilted its head, unreadable as ever. “Because sometimes… the river gives something back.”

A glow appeared across the water. A boat slid out of the mist—long, narrow, with a single lantern swaying at its bow. The figure steering it wore a deep hood. No face inside. Just the light.

The voice that came out of it was rough, wet. Like water trickling over stone.
“Those who cross must pay. A memory, left behind.”

Yusuf’s chest tightened. “And if I don’t?”

“Then you remain,” the ferryman said, “until all of you belongs to the river.”

The child’s gaze didn’t move. Just waiting.

Rae came back to him then—the shard in his palm, her insistence that he remember. He wanted to hold on to every single thread of himself, guard each fragment like treasure. But he wasn’t naive. This wasn’t a place you could stand still.

So he closed his eyes. Let one thing slip.

It wasn’t much, not compared to everything else he carried, but it still cut deep. His mother’s handwriting. The loops in her letters when she left him notes as a boy. He could almost see them peeling away, curling off into nothing, like ink bleeding off a page until it was blank.

The ferryman gave a single nod. The boat drifted closer.

Yusuf climbed aboard, unsteady on the wet wood. The child followed without sound.

The river moved them onward, the hull whispering with each current. Faces rose and fell beneath, eyes wide and lips moving, pleading or warning—he couldn’t tell which. He clenched his teeth and looked away, only to catch something else stirring deeper down.

Not memories. Not echoes. Shadows.

They moved with hunger.

The child’s fingers dug into his sleeve. “They’re coming.”

The boat groaned. Arms of liquid shadow tore upward from the water, clawing at the planks, scraping at Yusuf’s legs. The river boiled and hissed around them, not just remembering anymore, but reaching.

Yusuf clutched the shard Rae had given him. It throbbed faintly in his palm, alive.

And then the shadows lunged.