Chapter 14 — The Weight of What’s Forgotten

Yusuf fell back, sand pouring from beneath his boots.

"My father…"

He splintered. "He wouldn't—he couldn't—"

The Watcher's shape shook like a fractured mirror slammed with a stone. Its distorted face revealed not only his father's eyes, but now fragments of Yusuf's own: his mouth working to shape words he had not said, his fingers reaching when he had not moved.

"He left you here," said the Watcher. "Not your body, not your name. Only the weight. And the weight is mine to claim."

The Codex throbbed with anger in the faceless child's hand, its pages spinning until they settled on a line:

Erasure Attempt Detected.

The air grew heavy, tugging at Yusuf's head. They were peeling away from it—his schooldays, the creak of the museum archive door, the touch of paper on his fingertips. All lost fragments made him more emptied and lean, as though his very self was draining like smoke.

"No!" Yusuf wailed, cradling the shard that Rae had given him. It shook in his palm, a discordant beat against the vacuum pull. The Watcher recoiled, as if the shard burned its ever-changing skin.

The faceless child addressed him, his voice sharper than ever before.

"Fragments despise the devourer. Use it!"

Yusuf brandished the shard in the air, its frigid light pouring over the sand. The Watcher twisted, its shattered form screaming like a thousand pieces of glass breaking at once.

"You carry that which is not complete!" it screamed. "Incomplete, imperfect! A shard cannot stem the river!"

And then, amazingly, the sand itself built it—dozens of misplaced items piling up to stand. The small boy's boot, the torn diary, the comb. They glowed and took shape as misshapen human figures, hollow-eyed and empty, staggered toward Yusuf like a horde of memories with nothing to fill them.

The Codex clapped shut again:

Trial of the Shore. Stand against or be drained.

Yusuf breathed with gasps. His stomach demanded that he flee, but the faceless child gripped his sleeve, unyielding and immovable.

"Don't run. Remember."

The words hit him like a command. Yusuf clenched his teeth, struggling to maintain his hold, not his terror, but what he had left. Rae's shard, still warm. The inflection of the child's voice, holding him. The warm pulse of his father's words—broken, distant, but real.

He held the shard aloft, and remembrance flooded in. His mother's manuscript. Scent of rain. Creak of the archive door. The Watcher mourned as if each restored recollection was a pain it could not bear.

The nothing-filled silhouettes staggered, their outlines dissolving into dust.

But the Watcher grew more keen even so, its shattered face twisting so Yusuf could behold his own visage staring back at him in crystal clearness.

"You wrestle well," it spat, its grating voice awed and on the edge of being. "But all shatters, Archivist. Even you."

It dissolved into the dusty sand and vanished. The inhabitants of nothing scattered to ash.

Silence asserted itself again.

Yusuf knelt, cradling the shard as if it was the sole thing anchoring him to the world. The faceless child knelt beside him, head tilted.

"You did it," they breathed. "You remembered."

Yusuf stood up and saw the receding ripples of sand where the Watcher was disappear into nothing. The words remained in his head, even more weighty than the nothing that buzzed around them:

Even you.

And despite having sent the Watcher away, Yusuf knew better—he was no victory. It had only tested him. And the next time, it would cost him dearly.