The city feels different now. I wake up just before dawn. Not from a dream, but from the silence between them. The kind that presses against the ribs. The kind that listens back.
Outside, the fog clings low to the streets like it's reculctant to leave. I wrap my coat tight and walk without purpose, but my feet carry me deeper into oldroot.
Oldroot is the part of narrowridge no one bothers to map anymore. The stones are uneven. The walls lean at tired angles. It's older than quarter I live in, maybe older than the city itself. I've only been here once before, as a child, holding my brother's hand during hallowname day.
The memory rises suddenly.
That day, the street were lined with glass jars. Each one held a small piece of paper inside a name written in red ink and folded three times. Names of the forgotten.
names of the missing. Names of those who crossed the ashroads and never came back.
Now, there are no jars. But the air feels the same.
I stop in a narrow courtyard where three alleyways meet. There's a statue in the center worn and Weather stained. A women kneeling, face lifted skyward, holding something in her palm.
It's been defaced.
Not destroyed, just… changed. The thing in her hand is no longer a torch. It's a stone, smooth and oval. Someone chipped away the original shape and sculpted this instead. I step closer.
It pulses.
Once.
Softly.
Like my fragment.
I step back, heart hammering. There's no one around. Only the mist. And yet the hairs on my neck rise like I'm being watched.
By midmorning, I reach the scribe arch one of the oldest structures In oldroot. It's covered in names etched in a hundred styles of writing, some fading, others fresh. A living archive of the dead.
I trace one of the names: Sia Tennin. Veilbound witness. Memory cut.
Someone added that part recently. The words are scratched in shaky line below the name, as if done in haste. I glance around. No one. But the air again feels… off. Thinner, somehow.
I press my hand to the stone.
And suddenly, I see it.
Not a vision more like an softer image, burned behind my eyes. A moment.
A woman young, wounded kneeling before a cracked red stone. Her mouth moves, forming a rod I can't hear. Then darkness.
My knees buckle.
When I pull back, the stone is cold. Dead.
I keep walking, slower now. The world hums low beneath everything.
At a crossroads, I see something strange: A tree growing in the center of the street. Tall and crooked, its bark blackened like it was once burned, but now it blossoms pale violet leaves.
Tied to its branch are dozens of hollow name charms, wooden token,carved with symbols instead of names. No writing. No memory. Just placeholders. Waiting.
I look closer and realize:
One of the charms is humming faintly, vibrating in rhythms with the figurine in my pocket.
I don't touch it.
Not yet.
The bells ring for midday.
I realize I've been walking for hours, but it feels like minutes. Or years. I sit on the steps of a broken fountain, watching a boy toss a pebbles into the water that's to still to be real.
He looks at me suddenly.
"You've seen the split," he says.
I blink.
He smiles sad. Tired and walks away. How footsteps make no sound.
I reach for the figurine again. It's still warm pulsing.
But now… slower. More deliberate.
Like it's waiting.