The first thing Elias noticed was a dull, throbbing ache, a familiar metronome beating a rhythm in his skull. He brought a hand up to his forehead, his fingers brushing against the rough, congealed scab of a fresh but fading gash. The pain wasn't sharp but a deep, bruised agony that resonated with the hollow ache in his chest. A metallic, coppery scent clung to the air, a phantom trace of blood he could no longer find on his skin or clothes. He compulsively scanned the ground, searching for a spill, a single crimson drop, anything that might tell him to whom the blood belonged. But there was nothing. The floor of the archive, with its dusty, worn stone, was clean.
A different memory, a more recent ghost, surfaced instead. He was in this very room, hours ago, and Seraphina was standing before him. Her face was smudged with soot and her eyes were filled with a look of pure relief. He could almost feel the heat radiating from her, and he could remember the faint, acrid smell of burnt wiring on her clothes. "We did it," she had said, her voice a low, tired whisper. "We'll get through this, Elias. I promise." The memory was already fading, the edges blurring like a watercolor painting in the rain. The knowledge of her promise, however, was a pain more profound than any gash on his forehead, a visceral ache that settled deep in his gut. It was a promise he knew, in his heart, he would soon forget.
His gaze fell on a worn, leather-bound book on the table beside him—the Temporal Codex—and a familiar jolt of panic shot through him. The book felt cold to the touch, its leather cover cracked and smooth from countless years of handling. He reached for it, not to use its power, but to see if its frayed edges and familiar weight could ground him. The pages were blank, as always, their unblemished parchment mocking his struggle. Buried deep within its cover, he felt for the one thing he always kept hidden there: a faded, crumpled sketch of a woman's face.
The drawing was simple, a quick pencil sketch on yellowed paper. But to Elias, every line held a universe of emotion. He saw a girl whose name he couldn't remember, yet the visceral ache in his chest told him he knew her. He didn't know why, but he loved this woman in the sketch with a love so fierce it felt like a physical wound. Her eyes, drawn with a few deft strokes, seemed to hold a spark of defiant mischief, a ghost of a personality he could no longer access. For the first time, the rage he felt for the Chimeras was replaced by a cold, searing panic. He had saved so many people, but he could not save the most important one: the memory of his sister.
He snatched a nearby piece of parchment and a quill, his hand trembling so violently that the scratching of the nib on the page sounded deafening in the silence. He dipped the tip in ink and began to write, not a log of the day's events, but a frantic, desperate list. "Her hair was the color of autumn leaves," he scrawled, the words a lifeline to a drowning memory. "She laughed like bells." His breath caught in his throat as he wrote the next line: "Her last words to me were..." and then his mind went blank. The memory was gone. He stabbed the quill back into the inkwell, a small splatter of ink marring the list. He stared at the blank space, his mind a void where a name should have been, a face, a final moment.
A blaring siren cut through the silence of the archive, a primal wail that vibrated through the stone floor and rattled the books on the shelves. It was a sound Elias knew intimately, a screech that meant only one thing: the Wall was breached. The sound ripped him from his desperate struggle against his own mind, a cruel reminder that his personal tragedy had to be set aside for the city's survival. He slammed the Codex shut and stood up, the paper with his scribbled memories left behind on the table. He moved with practiced speed, grabbing his combat gear from the locker in the corner. As he donned his hardened leather armor, the familiar weight of it settling on his shoulders, his mind was already running through battle scenarios, predicting the movements of the Chimeras, calculating the best point of defense. He was a master of the loop, a warrior of a hundred battles he could no longer remember. But the only thing he could feel was the emptiness where his sister's name used to be, a hollow echo in his mind that fueled his rage but offered no comfort.
Seraphina burst through the heavy archive doors, her face a mix of fear and determination, the siren's shriek echoing behind her. Her eyes immediately fell on the parchment on the table, the frantic scrawl of his handwriting a dead giveaway. "Elias, what's wrong?" she asked, her voice laced with an urgency that wasn't just about the alarm. "What did you forget this time?"
Elias didn't look at her. He snatched the parchment from the table, crumpling it in his fist. "Nothing," he said, his voice clipped and professional, a performance he had perfected over a hundred loops. "It's nothing. Wall 17 is breached. We need to move." He tried to walk past her, to put on his soldier's face and focus on the mission.
But Seraphina didn't move. She stepped in front of him, blocking his path. She didn't say a word; she simply reached out and took his clenched hand in hers, gently unfurling his fingers. Her hand was warm, a sharp contrast to the cold leather of his gauntlet, and as she looked at the crumpled paper, a small, sad smile touched her lips. Then she looked up into his eyes. In that moment, he felt completely seen, completely understood. She didn't need him to tell her what he had forgotten because she had just watched him forget it.
Then, from outside the walls of the archive, a new sound cut through the shrill wail of the siren. It was a guttural, earth-shaking roar, followed by the terrible, splintering crack of reinforced concrete. The sound was not from the Wall's defensive turrets, but from something far older, something tearing at the very foundations of the city. A roar that meant the Chimeras had not only breached the wall but were now inside.