The city pretended nothing had happened.
That was the first thing I noticed the morning after the Rite.
Stalls reopened. Bells rang for commerce instead of remembrance. People complained about trivial inconveniences—late deliveries, rising prices, the weather turning sour. The execution plaza was cordoned off behind freshly erected barriers, guarded by men in white-and-gold cloaks who stood too straight and watched too carefully.
The statue was gone.
In its place stood a temporary monument: a polished slab of marble bearing the same inscription, the same lie, rendered in cleaner lines and brighter stone.
No cracks.
No hesitation.
History, I learned, healed quickly—so long as it healed wrong.
I watched from across the street, hood pulled low over my face, the borrowed cloak Elias had thrown at me hanging awkwardly on my shoulders. It smelled faintly of ink and old paper.
He was gone.
His workshop was sealed when I returned hours later—door intact, locks unbroken, interior scrubbed so thoroughly it felt like the room had never existed. Not abandoned.
Corrected.
I exhaled slowly and forced myself not to linger on that thought.
People passed through me without noticing. Literally.
A man bumped my shoulder, frowned in confusion as though he'd struck an invisible wall, then continued on without a second glance. A woman glanced directly at my face, eyes sliding away a heartbeat later as if my features refused to settle in her mind.
The Rite had worked.
Mostly.
I still existed—but loosely. Unmoored. Like a sentence that didn't quite fit the paragraph.
I turned away from the plaza and headed deeper into the city, following instinct rather than memory. The coin Elias had given me rested heavy in my pocket, warm against my thigh. I could feel it when my thoughts began to blur, anchoring me, reminding me that I had been someone.
Even if the world disagreed.
As I walked, I paid closer attention to the subtle distortions around me.
They were everywhere, once I knew how to look.
A street sign flickered between two names depending on who read it. A mural depicting the Final Hour showed different scenes to different passersby—some saw fire, others light, others nothing at all. A beggar muttered prayers under his breath, and for a moment his words overlapped, multiple versions spoken at once before collapsing into the sanctioned verse.
Memory enforcement.
Not absolute.
Just aggressive.
I stopped near a canal, leaning against the stone railing as water flowed sluggishly beneath. My reflection wavered in its surface, features blurring whenever I tried to focus on them.
"Pull yourself together," I muttered.
The reflection did not repeat the words.
It lagged.
That was new.
I straightened, heart thudding. The delay vanished the moment I looked away.
Fine, I thought grimly. We'll add that to the list of concerns.
A presence brushed the edge of my awareness—sharp, cold, deliberate.
I moved without thinking.
A blade passed through the space where my neck had been an instant earlier, slicing air with surgical precision. I spun, grabbing the attacker's wrist and twisting hard.
The figure grunted but didn't cry out, momentum rolling with the motion as they wrenched free and leapt back.
White and gold.
A Warden.
Up close, the uniform was more unsettling than impressive. The fabric shimmered faintly, threaded with runes that shifted when not directly observed. The mask obscuring their face was smooth and featureless, save for a single vertical slit glowing pale blue.
"Existence anomaly detected," the Warden said, voice echoing strangely, as though spoken by several people at once. "You are not authorized to persist."
I almost laughed.
"Is anyone?" I asked.
The Warden raised a hand. The air thickened, pressure building like an oncoming storm.
I felt my thoughts tug again, harder this time—memories fraying at the edges, details slipping away. My childhood home flickered, then vanished entirely.
I snarled and crushed the coin in my fist.
Heat surged through me, not power exactly, but clarity. One memory flared bright and unyielding: standing beneath a broken sky, choosing to step forward when everyone else stepped back.
The pressure eased.
The Warden hesitated.
"Correction failed," it intoned. "Escalating—"
I didn't let it finish.
I moved.
My body remembered how to fight even if the world wished it wouldn't. I closed the distance in a heartbeat, ducking beneath a second conjured blade and driving my elbow into the Warden's chest.
There was resistance—not physical, but conceptual. Like striking an idea instead of a body.
The impact sent ripples through the air.
The Warden staggered, rune-light flickering wildly. For a moment, the mask cracked, revealing something beneath that made my stomach drop.
There was no face.
Just layered symbols, spinning and rearranging themselves endlessly.
A construct.
A story given legs and authority.
I shoved it back, breaking contact, and bolted down the nearest side street. Shouts rose behind me—not panic, but procedural alerts, voices overlapping in sterile harmony.
I ran until my lungs burned and the city blurred into an abstract smear of stone and sound. When I finally ducked into an abandoned warehouse near the docks, I collapsed against the wall, gasping.
My hands shook.
Not from fear.
From anger.
"So this is how it works," I whispered. "You remember something hard enough, and it becomes real."
The warehouse creaked softly around me, timbers settling with age. Dust motes drifted lazily in the dim light filtering through cracked windows.
I pressed my back against the wall and slid down until I was sitting on the cold floor.
"Fine," I said aloud, voice steadier now. "If history is a lie that breathes…"
I closed my eyes.
"…then I'll learn how to suffocate it."
Outside, the city carried on, unaware that one of its most carefully buried truths had just decided to fight back.
The warehouse remembered less than the rest of the city.
That was the first reason I stayed.
The second was that it was already dying.
Its beams sagged under the weight of salt air and neglect, wood darkened by years of moisture seeping in from the docks. Old crates lay stacked in uneven towers, their markings faded to near-illegibility. Rats skittered freely, unafraid of human presence because humans no longer came.
Places like this—abandoned, unwanted, unremarked—sat at the edges of remembrance. Not forgotten enough to vanish, not remembered enough to matter.
A limbo.
It suited me.
I sat there for a long time, back against the wall, breathing slowly as my pulse settled. Each inhale scraped slightly, lungs still adjusting to the indignity of being used again. I flexed my fingers, watching the faint tremor pass through them.
I was shaking because I had almost lost something important.
Not my life.
My continuity.
When the Warden had reached for me, it hadn't attacked my body first. It had reached for my past. That alone told me everything I needed to know.
This world did not kill threats.
It edited them.
I closed my eyes and focused inward, carefully, the way one approaches a half-remembered dream.
Memories rose reluctantly.
Some were intact—sharp, vivid, anchored deep. Others felt… frayed. Like pages torn from a book and sloppily glued back in.
I searched for my name again.
Nothing.
Just the ache where it should have been.
I exhaled slowly through my nose. Panic was a luxury I couldn't afford.
All right, I thought. Let's establish rules.
Every system, no matter how divine it pretended to be, followed rules. The Mnemosyne Doctrine wasn't magic in the traditional sense—it was governance. A structure imposed on reality to keep it stable.
Elias had said it plainly: collective memory shaped causality.
Which meant—
"Belief," I murmured, "is infrastructure."
The thought clicked into place with uncomfortable elegance.
Roads existed because people agreed they did. Borders held because enough minds accepted them. Gods endured because they were prayed to, named, repeated.
And villains…
Villains were useful.
I leaned my head back against the wall, staring at the cracked ceiling.
They needed me to be the Black Remnant because a world-ending catastrophe without a villain demanded uncomfortable questions. Accountability. Complexity. Sacrifice.
Those didn't sit well in songs.
So the Doctrine smoothed it over.
One evil act.
One execution.
One lie told often enough that it hardened into stone.
The warehouse creaked again, and I tensed—then relaxed when I realized it was only the tide shifting outside.
Focus, I told myself.
I drew the coin from my pocket and turned it over in my palm.
It was warm.
Not physically—at least, not entirely—but with a quiet insistence, like a thought that refused to be ignored. When I closed my fingers around it, one memory surfaced immediately, vivid and anchored.
Not the Final Hour.
Earlier.
I stood in a candlelit hall, younger, unmarked by grey or exhaustion. The air smelled of wax and ink. Four figures stood before me, their faces tense, hopeful, afraid.
"We need someone," the Oracle had said softly, eyes already distant, "who can be removed."
Removed.
Not killed.
Not mourned.
Removed from the story.
I opened my eyes sharply, breath hitching.
The coin cooled slightly, the memory retreating but not disappearing.
"One memory," I whispered. "Just enough."
Enough to keep me me.
I tucked the coin away again, more carefully this time, and rose to my feet.
If the Wardens could sense anomalies, staying still was suicide. I needed information. Context. A way to move without being immediately corrected.
Which meant I needed someone who lived between memories.
Someone unnoticed.
The docks were a good place to start.
I slipped out of the warehouse and into the maze of narrow paths that ran between warehouses and piers. The smell of brine and fish hung heavy in the air, mixed with rot and tar. Sailors moved in loose clusters, shouting to one another, arguing over cargo and coin.
No one looked twice at me.
Good.
I drifted toward a small tavern tucked beneath a leaning watchtower, its sign crooked and half-rotted. The name had been scratched out so many times it was impossible to tell what it was supposed to be.
Inside, the air was thick with smoke and low conversation. Lanterns cast uneven pools of light across scarred wooden tables. This was a place for people who didn't want to be remembered clearly.
I took a seat in the corner and listened.
"…telling you, the tide froze for a second yesterday."
"Liar."
"Swear it. Right near the plaza."
"That's Rite aftershock. Happens every year."
"Not like that."
I leaned in slightly.
"—my sister says she forgot her own birthday for an hour. Just blank. Then it came back, but wrong."
A low chuckle. "You worry too much. Memory sickness passes."
Memory sickness.
Interesting term.
A man slid into the seat across from me without asking.
He was thin, sharp-featured, with eyes that never quite settled. His clothes were unremarkable in the deliberate way of someone who knew how to disappear in plain sight.
"You don't belong here," he said casually, lifting my mug and taking a sip. "But you're not a Warden."
"That obvious?" I asked.
"To me." He smiled faintly. "Name's Corin. I trade in things people don't want anymore."
I raised an eyebrow. "Like what?"
He leaned closer. "Forgotten debts. Half-true stories. Faces that don't match records."
I studied him carefully. "And why are you talking to me?"
Corin's gaze flicked briefly to my shadow—where it lagged just a fraction behind my movements.
"Because you're loud," he said quietly. "Not in sound. In absence."
I felt a chill run down my spine.
"What do you know about the Doctrine?" I asked.
His smile vanished.
"That depends," he said, "on whether you want to survive it—or break it."
I didn't hesitate.
"Both."
He laughed softly, shaking his head. "Figures."
He gestured for me to follow and slipped toward the back door.
As we left the tavern, a sudden pressure swept through the docks. Conversations faltered. Lantern flames bent toward the city center, as if drawn by an unseen pull.
I felt it too.
A gaze.
Ancient.
Curious.
Far above the clouds, beyond the spire and the bells and the lies carved into stone, something was paying attention.
Not a Warden.
Not a human.
A god.
And for the first time since I clawed my way out of the grave, I understood the full scope of my mistake.
By returning
By persisting
I hadn't just disturbed history.
I had reminded the gods that memory could be wrong.
And that terrified them.
We did not walk far before the city began to forget us.
Not immediately. Forgetting, I was learning, was a process—one that moved in stages, like rot setting into wood.
At first, it was subtle.
A dockworker glanced our way, frowned faintly as if trying to recall why we had caught his attention, then turned back to his work. A pair of sailors stepped aside to let us pass, then hesitated, looking around in confusion when they realized they had moved for no one they could now recall seeing.
By the time we reached the end of the pier, the world had gone… thin.
Sound dulled. Color flattened slightly, as though reality itself had reduced its effort budget in our vicinity. The lanterns behind us flickered, their light refusing to follow too closely.
Corin noticed.
"Good," he muttered. "They're losing interest."
"Who?" I asked.
"Everyone," he replied. "And everything."
We descended a narrow staircase carved into the stone beneath the pier, the smell of salt giving way to damp earth and mold. At the bottom lay a tunnel—old, brick-lined, reinforced with metal braces stamped with sigils I didn't recognize.
"This was built before the Doctrine," Corin said, noticing my glance. "Before memory enforcement got… enthusiastic."
The tunnel sloped downward, opening eventually into a chamber lit by softly glowing crystals embedded in the walls. The light they gave off was uneven, pulsing faintly like a tired heartbeat.
I felt it immediately.
A pressure—not hostile, but wrong. The air here was heavy with unspoken things, crowded with absence.
"What is this place?" I asked.
Corin slowed, expression guarded. "A sink."
"For what?"
"For what falls through the cracks."
He stopped beside a rusted iron gate and rapped on it twice in a specific rhythm.
The gate creaked open.
Beyond it lay a space that defied easy description.
It was vast—far larger than the tunnels that should have led to it—its boundaries dissolving into shadow. Structures jutted out at odd angles: fragments of buildings, pieces of streets, staircases that led nowhere. Objects floated in the air as though gravity had grown bored of them.
And scattered throughout it all were things.
Not people.
Not entirely.
I swallowed.
Some resembled twisted animals, their forms unstable, edges blurring and reforming as if undecided. Others looked almost human—too human—faces stretched into expressions of frozen confusion or rage.
"What… are they?" I asked quietly.
Corin didn't answer right away.
"Forgotten truths," he said at last. "Or what's left of them."
I stared.
"When a memory is suppressed but not fully erased," he continued, "it doesn't just disappear. It decays. Warps. Turns inward."
One of the creatures shifted, its body rippling like disturbed water. I felt a tug at my mind as it did—an intrusive sensation, like a thought that almost made sense.
A scream echoed faintly through the chamber, then dissolved into static.
"They're not supposed to exist," Corin said. "But neither are you."
The words landed heavily.
I stepped forward despite myself, drawn to a shape near the center of the chamber. It was vaguely humanoid, hunched over, its form flickering between solidity and transparency.
As I approached, it lifted its head.
Our eyes met.
And suddenly, I remembered.
Not clearly. Not cleanly.
But enough.
A village at the edge of the western plains. Evacuated too late. The Oracle's warning misinterpreted. A choice made in seconds that condemned hundreds to die so tens of thousands could live.
The truth had been buried.
This was what remained.
"I didn't forget you," I whispered.
The creature convulsed.
Sound tore free from it—not a voice, but the shape of one. Words layered over one another, overlapping in discordant harmony.
"—not meant—
—wasn't evil—
—someone had to—"
My head throbbed.
I staggered back, gasping, clutching the coin as heat surged through my palm. The memory stabilized, anchoring itself, preventing the truth from fully dissolving into madness.
Corin grabbed my shoulder. "Careful," he warned. "If you remember them too clearly, you'll join them."
I laughed weakly. "That would be poetic."
"This place isn't poetry," he said flatly. "It's a warning."
I looked around again, really looked this time.
Every fragment here represented a compromise. A truth deemed inconvenient. A story smoothed over for the sake of peace.
"How many?" I asked.
Corin's jaw tightened. "Enough that the gods started noticing."
As if summoned by the words, the light in the chamber dimmed.
The crystals flickered erratically, their glow stuttering like a failing pulse. The air thickened, pressure building until it felt like standing at the bottom of the sea.
I felt the gaze again.
Closer now.
Something vast pressed against the edge of the chamber, not physically but conceptually, like a thought too large to fit into a mortal mind.
The forgotten creatures recoiled, hissing softly.
Corin swore. "Damn it. We stayed too long."
The shadows at the far end of the chamber deepened, coalescing into a shape that was more suggestion than form. Lines of faint light traced an outline that hurt to look at directly—wings, perhaps, or something that wanted to be wings.
A voice echoed, layered and resonant, vibrating through bone and memory alike.
"THIS PLACE SHOULD NOT EXIST."
I felt my knees weaken—not from fear, but from recognition.
"Neither should you," Corin muttered under his breath.
The presence shifted, its attention narrowing.
"ANOMALY CONFIRMED," the voice intoned.
"BLACK REMNANT."
The title struck like a hammer.
I stepped forward before I could stop myself.
"No," I said, voice steady despite the crushing weight pressing down on me. "That is not my name."
The presence paused.
Just for a fraction of a second.
In that hesitation, something dangerous flickered—uncertainty.
"YOU WERE REMEMBERED," it said slowly.
"THEREFORE YOU ARE DEFINED."
"Then your definition is wrong," I replied.
The chamber shook.
Forgotten truths stirred, their forms writhing as the air filled with static. Cracks spiderwebbed through the stone beneath my feet, light leaking through from somewhere that shouldn't exist.
For the first time, the god—because that was what it was, no matter how it tried to dress itself in authority—recoiled.
"TRUTH IS NOT PERMITTED," it said sharply.
"Then stop listening," I said. "Because I remember."
The coin burned.
A memory surged—not of the Final Hour, but of the moment before it. The choice. The consent. The reason it had to be me.
The presence screamed.
Not aloud.
In memory.
The chamber exploded into motion. Forgotten creatures surged toward the godlike shape, drawn by resonance, by recognition. The air tore, reality stretching thin as conflicting narratives collided violently.
Corin dragged me backward. "That's enough!" he shouted. "You'll tear the sink apart!"
The god's outline fractured, lines of light breaking and reforming in jagged patterns.
"YOU WILL BE CORRECTED," it roared.
Then it vanished.
The pressure lifted abruptly, leaving the chamber eerily still. Crystals dimmed to a low, steady glow. The forgotten truths settled, their agitation easing.
I collapsed to one knee, breath ragged.
Corin stared at me, eyes wide with something that bordered on awe.
"You just made a god hesitate," he said quietly.
I wiped blood from my nose and laughed, shaky and exhausted.
"Good," I said. "That means they can bleed."
Silence stretched.
Then Corin spoke again, voice low.
"You understand what this means, right?"
I looked up at him.
"They know you're not just an anomaly anymore," he continued. "You're a threat. To the Doctrine. To the gods. To the story holding this world together."
I rose slowly to my feet.
"Then they shouldn't have buried me alive," I said.
Somewhere far above us, bells began to ring again—not in remembrance, but in alarm.
And for the first time since history had been rewritten, the lie had started to crack loudly enough that even the gods could hear it.