Aren woke with a start, the taste of rain still lingering in his mouth. The ceiling above his bed was blank, ordinary. Yet a hollow ache had settled behind his eyes, as if a shadow had pressed its hand against his mind overnight.
He sat up, rubbing his temples. The notebook lay on his desk, closed, inert. But it no longer felt like an object. It felt alive.
Hungry. Waiting.
He could not remember the man's face the one he had erased yesterday. He tried to summon it. Shape it with words. But the memory slipped, a ghost refusing to materialize. Only the echo of his voice calling the name remained.
Aren shivered.
What had he done?
Breakfast was quiet. His mother hummed a tune from the kitchen, unaware. His father left for work without a word. Life went on. Everyone went on. And yet, somewhere, a thread had been pulled.
He touched the notebook. The leather felt warmer than yesterday, as if it had absorbed the tension in his hands. He flipped it open, staring at the blank page. One small thought lodged in his mind, persistent and insistent:
It works. It really works.
And that realization was heavier than any fear.
The First Consequences
School was worse than usual. Faces blurred. Conversations became difficult to follow. Names that had once been solid seemed slippery. One classmate, a boy he recognized yesterday, now floated at the edge of his mind. He knew he should remember his name. He should. But he couldn't.
Aren's pen twitched on the edge of his notebook. He did not write it down. He knew better. He had rules. Observe. Do not interfere.
Still, the unease gnawed at him. He felt hollow, as if the act of erasure had carved out a space inside him. A space he could not fill.
In history class, he noticed a subtle anomaly. His notes from yesterday handwritten meticulously had small gaps. Words missing. Facts blurred. He frowned. The notebook had never done that before. Had he imagined it?
No. He remembered the man's name the one he had written but not the man himself. And now, pieces of his own memory were eroding.
A Stranger Notices
After school, Aren lingered in the library. He preferred the quiet, the smell of paper and ink, the faint dust in the air. It was safer. He could think here.
He did not notice the man watching from the corner, a figure tall and deliberate, with a notebook of his own tucked beneath his arm. Aren felt it, though he did not look up an instinctive tension, like being observed through a mirror.
The man's eyes were sharp, calculating. Not predatory. Curious. Professional.
Aren turned a page in a textbook, pretending to study. But his heart thumped.
He knows something.
The man walked away, but his gaze lingered. A subtle pressure, as if reality itself had noticed him.
Doubt and Obsession
Back home, Aren could not shake the feeling of absence. He opened the notebook, tracing the edges of the last page. The name he had written yesterday had disappeared completely. No trace. No evidence. Nothing.
He stared at the blank page, and the world seemed to shift. He touched his temple. Faint flashes of memorybfaces, voices, moments appeared and then dissolved instantly. One was the man from yesterday, the one whose existence had been wiped.
And he realized: every time he erased a name, it cost him something of himself.
Aren felt a tremor of panic.
This is not safe.
And yet… he could not stop thinking of what else could be done. Crimes, mistakes, cruelty gone. Lives ruined erased before damage could spread. The temptation pressed against him.
He shivered, torn between horror and desire.
First Hints of Rowan
That night, a news alert flickered on the television in the living room:
"Authorities are investigating an unusual series of disappearances. Witnesses are scarce. No evidence has been found. Experts say… anomalies in memory reports may indicate a previously unrecorded phenomenon."
Aren's pulse quickened. He froze at the word phenomenon.
Across the city, Professor Ilyas Rowan leaned back in his chair, reviewing hundreds of memory anomaly reports. Rows of data lined his screens. Cases where people could not recall friends, colleagues, even strangers, who had clearly existed. The patterns were subtle but unmistakable.
Rowan's eyes narrowed. He did not yet know the source. But he knew: someone or somethingwas bending memory itself.
And somewhere, in his subconscious, he sensed that the boy responsible was not far.
Aren's First Moral Dilemma
Aren returned to his room, notebook in hand. The temptation to write surged. One wrongdoer from school flashed in his mind a bully whose cruelty went unchecked. He could erase him. No one would suffer. No evidence. Perfect.
And yet… he hesitated. His pen hovered. Already, the first cost was visible. Memory had begun bleeding from him. He remembered less of his own life. The act yesterday had left a void.
Could he endure this? Could he continue erasing, knowing that with each name, he gave up a piece of himself?
Aren set the pen down. He closed the notebook.
For now.
The Lure of Power
Lying in bed that night, he stared at the ceiling. He could not forget the feeling of control, the thrill of absolute consequence. The Null Register was not just a tool it was a test. A mirror. A temptation.
Somewhere, deep in his mind, he whispered a question he dared not answer aloud:
If I can erase pain, should I?
The answer was silent. Yet it echoed louder than any voice.