The rain tasted like forgotten memories.
Elara pressed her palm against the cold window, watching droplets race down the glass like tears from a sky that had cried too long. Beyond the blur, the city stretched endlessly—a maze of steel and shadow where dreams came to die, or worse, to be forgotten entirely.
She should have been asleep. Normal people slept at 3 AM. But Elara had stopped being normal the night she discovered she could hear them—the whispers. They came in fragments, like broken poetry scattered across the darkness: phrases that didn't belong to anyone, words that tasted of longing and loss.
Tonight, they were louder than ever.
"Find me..."
The voice slithered through her mind, soft as silk, sharp as broken glass. Elara's breath hitched. Her therapist called them auditory hallucinations, prescribed pills in little orange bottles that lined her bathroom shelf like soldiers guarding against madness. But pills couldn't explain why the whispers always led her somewhere. Why they always knew.
Three months ago, a whisper had guided her to a burning building. She'd saved a child. Two weeks later, another whisper led her to a bridge where a man stood on the wrong side of the railing. She'd talked him down, watched hope flicker back into his hollow eyes.
But no one believed her. How could they? In a world that worshipped logic and reason, voices in your head were symptoms, not salvation.
"The clocktower... find me at the clocktower..."
Elara's eyes snapped to the old district across the river. The clocktower—that Victorian relic everyone said was cursed. It had stopped working twenty years ago, its hands frozen at 11:43, marking the exact moment when... when what? She couldn't remember. Nobody could. That was the strange part. The tower stood there like a question mark against the skyline, yet no one seemed to remember its story.
She grabbed her jacket, heart hammering against her ribs. This was insane. She knew it was insane. But the pull was magnetic, irresistible, as if invisible threads were wound around her bones, tugging her forward.
The streets were empty, slick with rain and possibility. Her footsteps echoed too loud in the silence, each step a choice between sanity and surrender. The rational part of her brain screamed warnings: dangerous neighborhood, middle of the night, following voices that probably meant she needed to increase her medication.
But another part—the part that had always felt slightly out of sync with reality, the part that dreamed in colors that didn't exist—that part knew this mattered.
The clocktower loomed ahead, Gothic and defiant against the bruised sky. Its shadow stretched across the cobblestones like a dark promise. The gates were chained, rusted with years of neglect, but Elara found herself moving forward anyway, her fingers finding purchase on wet stone.
Climbing shouldn't have been easy. The wall was slick, ancient, crumbling. Yet her hands knew exactly where to grip, as if muscle memory guided her through a path she'd never taken. Up and up she went, rain-soaked and trembling, until she tumbled over the top and into an overgrown courtyard.
The whispers exploded in her mind.
Voices—dozens of them—overlapping, urgent, desperate:
"Remember us..."
"Don't let them erase..."
"The dreams, the dreams, the dreams..."
Elara clutched her head, knees hitting wet grass. It was too much, too loud, like standing in the center of a hurricane made of human longing. Tears streamed down her face, mixing with rain.
"Stop," she gasped. "Please, I don't understand—"
"Then look."
This voice was different. Clearer. Real.
Elara's eyes flew open.
A boy stood before her—no, not a boy. Something wearing the shape of one. He couldn't have been more than seventeen, with silver eyes that reflected starlight that wasn't there and hair that seemed to move like smoke. He was beautiful in the way broken things are beautiful: sharp edges and haunting angles.
"Who are you?" Her voice came out barely a whisper.
"Someone who used to exist." His smile was sad, infinite. "We all did. Everyone you hear—we were real once. We had names, families, dreams. But we made a choice, and the world forgot us."
"What choice?"
He extended his hand toward the clocktower door. It swung open silently, revealing stairs spiraling down into darkness that felt thick enough to drown in.
"Twenty years ago, we tried to save something precious. We failed. The cost was our existence—erased from memory, from records, from time itself. But echoes remain. You hear us because you're like us. You dream in frequencies others can't perceive."
Elara's mind reeled. "This is impossible—"
"Is it?" His silver eyes held her captive. "You've always felt it, haven't you? The wrongness. The sense that reality has gaps, like pages torn from a book. We're those missing pages, Elara. And if you don't help us, what happened to us will happen again. The world will forget more people. More dreams. Until humanity becomes nothing but shadows pretending to cast light."
The whispers rose again, but this time Elara understood. They weren't random. They were a chorus of the forgotten, singing their truth into the only ears that could still hear.
"What do I have to do?"
The boy's smile widened, and for the first time since the voices began, Elara felt something besides fear.
She felt purpose.
"Come down the stairs. Remember for those who cannot. And whatever you do—" his form began to fade like morning mist, "—don't let them make you forget too."
Then he was gone, and Elara stood alone in the courtyard with rain falling like questions and a doorway to impossible truths yawning before her.
She took a breath. Then another.
Then she stepped forward into the dark, where forgotten dreams waited to be heard once more.
And deep below, in the shadows that whispered, something ancient stirred. Something that remembered when Elara didn't. Something that had been waiting for her all along.
The hunt for lost memories had begun.