Shattered Soul

 Another week pass by before anything else happens. I obsess over the diary, flipping through the pages fervently, trying to figure out what memories are not with me anymore, even if that diary was not mine, but the other Aya’s. By now, I know I’ve lost more than I can count.

At first it was little things: the brand of my old shampoo, the ring tone I used to hate, the color of my first backpack. Harmless, laughable, easy to brush off. But now the gaps are gaping wounds, and I can’t pretend anymore.

I don’t remember my mother’s face.

I don’t remember the sound of my father’s voice.

I don’t remember what it felt like to have a best friend.

Whole years blur together. My high school? Gone. College? A smear. My favorite food? Cardboard on my tongue. When I try to summon the world I came from, it’s like staring through a fogged window that keeps fogging no matter how hard I wipe.

The library reflects it back at me in cruel honesty. Pages I once filled with desperate scribbles about home are ruined. Sentences collapse into white streaks. Names I swore I’d never forget rot into black smudges, like mold spreading through paper.

And the worst part is: I know they’re missing. I feel the outlines of what I’ve lost, jagged and raw, like phantom limbs. But the memories themselves? They’re smoke. They’re gone.

I grip the quill tighter, half-tempted to smash it against the desk just to make it stop draining me. But I can’t. Because if I stop writing, if I stop fighting… Then this world dies.

So I sit there, staring at the empty spaces in my diary, and wonder if I’m the empty space too.

I force myself to remember and my brain gives me nothing but the shape of a memory, the hollow outline of something that used to fit perfectly inside me. I try to press it back into place: the smell of hot chocolate on a winter morning, the shape of my father’s nose, the stupid nickname my first crush used to call me. The harder I squeeze, the more the edges crumble, until all that’s left is a grainy residue on my tongue and a pain behind my eyes.

I sit with the diary open on my lap and watch the white space mock me. Where there should be sentences about a life someone else lived, there are blanks, or ink blurred into unreadable shadows. Almost as if this world’s Aya is fading too as I fade. I trace the ghost of a word with my finger and it’s like trying to follow a scar with a fingertip: it’s there, it hurts, but it tells you nothing.

Footsteps on the old wooden floors. Voices in the kitchen. Yusuke whistles as he cooks, Martha hums a tune while she dust the shelves. They move through the day with the steady rhythms of people who have roots, who remember what and who they are. Their normalcy around me is a kind of cruel punctuation to the way my world keeps erasing itself.

Yuki comes in first, silent as an arrow. She pauses when she sees the diary, then the look she gives me is not pity so much as alarm.

“Aya?” She asks, quietly. Her voice has that edge it gets when she’s trying not to bark orders - worry folded into control. She steps closer, reaches out as if to touch my temple, and then pulls back, uncertain. “You look… thinner.” Not in weight. In something that matters less and eats more.

“Don’t worry.” I mutter, closing the diary and looking up at her, being careful so Yusuke and Martha don’t listen in. “I didn’t use it.”

Yuki nods, somewhat relieved, and I look past her when I see a glint of armor in the sun.

Dalylah watches from the doorway, hands on her hips, chin lifted in that way I know means her brain is sorting through strategies. She doesn’t come closer. Her expression is unreadable at first, a deliberate armor, but the way her fist tightens on the hilt of her sword tells me she’s thinking in a way that has very little to do with me and everything to do with what this might mean for Lysteria.

If I am fading, what does that mean for the magic protecting the village? The magic she is responsible for in the mind of the public, but something she knows it’s a result of my efforts? For Dalylah, this is already personal, even though she doesn’t really like me.

“She needs rest,” Martha says, coming from the kitchen, voice warm and immediate. “Maybe some soup, a nap.” Her worry is the simple, human type: hands-on, practical, motherly. She moves in with the instinct of someone who kisses wounds better and sings lullabies.

“I’m bringing her broth.” Yusuke adds, distracted but kind. He’s still cooking as usual, still clinging to the ordinary because it keeps the extraordinary at bay.

I look around me, and I sigh, tired but grateful. It seems it does takes a village, after all.

Yuki stays. She sits on the other side of the table, elbows on her knees, watching me like someone watching the horizon for storm clouds. Her eyes are steady.

“You can’t keep doing this by yourself.” she says. Not a plea. A fact. “If you’re bleeding memories every time you write, then stop writing long enough to heal.”

I almost laugh. Stop writing. As if it were that simple.

My mind narrows to a single, terrible thought and I whisper it like a confession I’m not ready to make out loud: If I forget everything that came before this, then what is left of me? Isn’t that what Roderick wants from me, if not to unmake the me that existed before Lysteria?

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe the Demon Lord, the Lord of Perfection, would prefer a world populated by things that never remember what they were once. A world of flawless, obedient pieces. A tidy gallery of statues. If I lose my past, I become tidy, too.

“If I forget my past…” I murmur, my fingers tracing the diary. The words are small and intimate and terrible. “Then what will be left of me? I don’t want to become like the one he ‘healed’.”

Yuki swallows and reaches across the table, palms flat, bridging the gap. Her fingers are calloused and warm.

“You won’t do it alone.” She says again, softer this time. Dalylah’s jaw works in the doorway; she says nothing, but her shoulders look less like plate armor and more like someone trying not to let anything fall apart.

I want to tell them I’m terrified. I want to tell them that the quiet is full of lost names, of dinners I can’t taste, of photographs I can’t summon. I want to tell them I’m afraid that if I keep writing, I will finish drafting myself out of existence.

Instead, I tuck the diary closer, fold my hands over it, and let Yuki’s squeeze be an anchor for a moment. The library hums in the around us, its silence a promise and a threat at once.

As the day goes by, the presences around me filter out. First, Yusuke, with a warm hand on my back and promises to bring more food tomorrow morning. Then, Yuki and Dalylah, the first with a squeeze in my hand and the other with a simple nod, going out to patrol the borders. And lastly, Martha, that looks at me so much like a worried mother that it makes my throat close and my eyes water.

“Will you be alright, dear?” She asks, her voice soft as I accompany her to the door. “You know you can always come and stay at my place.”

“I know.” I answer, my voice hoarse. “But I think I need some time alone, for now. Thank you Martha. Really.”

I don’t tell her I’m scared shitless of Roderick coming and attacking us at night, killing her too just because she was aiding me.

I close the door after her and lean my forehead against the wood for a breath, two, three. It feels like I’m holding myself together with chewing gum and borrowed time. My fingers still ache from gripping the diary too hard.

The quiet settles in like dust, heavy and inescapable.

And then I hear it.

A… hum?

No, not a hum. A kind of mental static, like when you're half-asleep and the TV is on in the background, playing white noise and static. It pricks at my skull like a migraine brewing.

I turn. The library is shifting again.

Not physically - or maybe physically, but in that way this place does, where reality forgets to act normal. One of the corridors stretches longer than it should. The shelves buckle inward like they’re bowing. And then, just between two rows of bookcases, something… appears.

Two enormous, thick-lensed glasses float midair.

Not attached to a face. Not even anchored to a shadow. Just… there. Hovering. And inside each lens, reflections swirl. Not of the room. Of other places. A hospital hallway. A blackboard covered in calculus. A phone lock screen flashing 1:34 AM.

I blink.

The reflections change.

A train station. A college dorm. The silhouette of someone I can’t name waving goodbye at an airport gate.

“Oooo…. Kay?” I say out loud, voice hoarse. “That’s new.”

Then the rest of him forms.

They build themselves from the outside in. A long, too-fluid cloak that doesn’t settle on a color. Limbs that seem human-shaped until you really look, and then you realize you’re just being tricked by symmetry. Skin pale as rendered paper. Long blue hair, and eyes that never seem to focus on the present, but on the constant feed of information the glasses seems to give him.

And yet his gaze remain constant. Watching me.

Not kindly.

Not unkindly.

Just... Like I’m a particularly interesting data point.

I know him. He once rejected me at a Tea party. Now, Knowledge himself stands before me, in the middle of my library. Of Failure’s domain.

“Does she know you’re here?” I ask, confused.

He grins softly, but doesn’t answer me. However, he does speak.

“Statistically, you should not exist.”

I stare.

“Wow. Charming.”

“And yet, here you are, Aya. An anomaly. A statistical artifact. A miscalculation that insists on persisting. Curious.”

“Yeah, well. I’ve always been bad at math.”

He chuckles.

“I know. One of the many reasons you are not my chosen.”

One of the books behind me lifts into the air, its pages fluttering as if caught in wind. When it opens, I don’t even need to look to know it’s mine, my handwriting smeared and vanishing like wet ink in rain. The entries about my childhood. The pages about Earth.

Gone.

“Redundancy removal.” He says casually. “System optimization. Irrelevant variables to the system are being… Deprecated.”

“Irrelevant?” My throat burns. “That was my life.”

They tilt their head. “Incorrect. That was a context. You are now operating in a new one. Old data degrades.”

I clench my fists. “You mean memories. You’re talking about memories like they’re corrupt files.”

“I am talking about you like what you are.” they say, and their voice shifts again, now cold, clinical. “An unstable line of code that refuses to resolve. A user without a system. A paragraph that never ends.”

“Get to the point.”

The glasses flash. Something like amusement. Or maybe just a screen refresh.

“What is lost can still be… Anchored.”

I freeze.

“What did you say?”

Knowledge doesn’t step closer, but the space between us feels tighter.

“Anchoring.” He starts. “When data fragments, it may still be tethered to a stable node. A backup. A witness. A chosen.”

“A chosen?” I whisper. He just tilt his head again, as if looking through me. Not into my soul - or what’s left of it - but into the probability of my existence.

“You’re saying I need someone to remember me. To hold me here.”

“I’m saying.” He replies, his voice a bit peeved from having to explain. “That without a narrative, you collapse. Just like the history that is written in books is rarely the history of the losing side.”

I stare at Knowledge, and every part of me wants to make a joke. Crack a line about floating glasses and identity crises and maybe stall just long enough for the fear in my gut to settle.

But I'm tired.

“You know…” I mutter. “For a god of Knowledge, you sure talk like a tech bro.”

His smile twitches.

“You attempt sarcasm to maintain coherence. A defense mechanism.”

“Well, it’s that or scream. And I’m trying really hard not to give you that satisfaction.”

“I do prefer sarcasm. It is… Refreshing.” He says, ending our banter with a smirk. Then, he tilts his head again, one lens flashing with something that might be amusement or just a corrupted data packet.

“You rewrite yourself with every page, Aya. But you do not record. You overwrite. You are unraveling and pretending you’re not.”A pause. “You are data with no checksum. History in the making with no historian in sight.”

That stings. More than I want it to. I bite back the words bubbling in my throat, then spit them out anyway:

“So what do I do, huh? Stop writing and let everyone die?”

Knowledge blinks slowly, like he’s reloading my question for optimal rendering.

“No. But you can… Anchor.” They say the word like it’s both sacred and tedious. “What is lost can still be held. If another subject chooses to carry your narrative, some data may remain persistent.”

I narrow my eyes. “Carry. My. Narrative.”

“Yes.” He replies, tone now fully clinical. “When a singular unit destabilizes, a secondary node can serve as a stabilizing memory cache. A witness. A tether. A—”

“An anchor,” I finish, the word suddenly too heavy in my mouth.

“Correct.” A nod. “Soul structures are memory-dependent. When a core identity weakens, tethering to another can delay entropy. The link must be strong. Voluntary. Formed through mutual conviction and proximity.”

I exhale slowly, head swimming. “You mean… someone has to remember me, so I don’t disappear.”

“Yes.” They smile again, and this time there’s the faintest trace of warmth in it. Or maybe it’s just a better rendering of empathy. “Consider this information my apology.”

I blink. “Apology for what?”

“For what happened at the Tea Party.” He says, as the glasses fade from the air. “And… For what comes next.”

And then they’re gone.

The silence that follows isn't peaceful. It's loaded. My heart thuds like it’s syncing to a new beat, one I didn’t know I’d been hearing all along.

An anchor.

Gods help me, I already know who it could be. Who, in all rights, should be - not because of how they feel, but because of the sheer relevance of what, of who she represents.

But I don’t know if I’m ready to ask her to carry me. Not when she still somewhat hates me.

Not when I barely know if I deserve to be remembered.