The city was already starting to feel like someone else's memory.
He'd been on the move for three days, sticking to the cracked remains of the old trade roads. The further he got from the smoke and the stone, the more the world seemed to just… loosen up. The cobblestones gave way to dirt, and eventually, the dirt disappeared entirely under the waist-high grass of the plains.
The Clarity was just a dull thrum at the base of his skull now. It only really kicked in when the wind picked up or a hawk drifted too low. It didn't feel like a tool anymore; it felt like a scar, a reminder of a life he was trying to shake off.
By dusk, he hit a small cluster of shacks at the forest's edge. It wasn't much—just some timber leaned together with more hope than skill. No gates, no patrols, none of that suffocating symmetry you'd find in the city districts. Just the sharp scent of pine and the steady thunk of someone splitting wood nearby.
He stopped at a stone well and hauled up a bucket. The water was freezing and tasted like nothing, which was a hell of a lot better than the chemical aftertaste of the city reservoirs.
"You're from downtown," a voice rasped.
An old woman was perched on a porch, her face a map of deep lines that actually meant something—years spent in the sun, not hours spent over a desk. She wasn't looking at him, though. She was staring at his boots. Good leather, city-made, and covered in a hundred miles of grit.
"Used to be," he said.
"Hear the bells finally quit," she said, squinting into the sunset. "Word is the pencil-pushers all cleared out."
He took a long pull of the water, feeling the cold hit his gut. "The paperwork's probably all ash by now. And the bells? They're only ringing if someone's bored enough to pull the rope."
She nodded, slow and deliberate, like she'd been waiting half her life to hear those exact words. "Good. No man needs a piece of iron telling him when to get out of bed."
He crashed into a hayloft that night. It smelled like dry summer and dust. For the first time in years, he didn't wake up in a cold sweat over checkpoints or filing errors. He just dreamed about the way light hits a leaf—messy, random, and perfect because it wasn't trying to prove a point.
But when the sun came up, that old itch in his brain—the Clarity—flickered back to life.
It wasn't a "threat" alert. It was just… a pattern. Even out here, you could see the ripples of the collapse. He saw it in the way the younger guys hovered in the center of camp, whispering about the "power vacuum" like it was a ghost. He saw it in the way they gripped their bows—too tight, too nervous.
The system was dead, sure, but the fear it had beaten into people for generations had some deep-ass roots. They were already looking for a new boss, whether they realized it or not.
He threw his pack over his shoulder. He didn't want the job. He wasn't interested in being the guy who drew the new maps.
"Where to now?" the woman asked as he hit the treeline.
"Further in," he said.
"Nothing out there but the wild, son," she warned. "No rules to keep your head on straight."
He looked back at the little camp, then at the dark, heavy silence of the woods. He thought about his own name—the real one—and the weight of what he still knew.
"The rules never kept us safe," he said quietly. "They just kept us from moving."
He stepped into the trees, and the shadows took him. He wasn't running. He was just heading somewhere where the only thing that mattered was how the moss grew and where the rain fell.
The Clarity hummed one last time, then finally shut up.