Dawn brought a pale, almost sickly light.
The mist covered the city like a slow breath, and the bell of the old church—which had remained motionless for months—swung on its own, emitting a muffled sound, as if coming from underwater.
Miguel woke to the sound.
It took him a few seconds to realize where he was.
The ceiling of the room seemed lower than before, the walls covered in dark stains he didn't recognize.
On the table, the medallion rested, but now it pulsed with a discreet, lively light, like a heart at rest.
Elisa slept leaning against the wall, her clipboard still in her hands.
Pedro, in the chair next to him, stared into space, his pupils dilated and his skin cold.
When Miguel tried to call out to him, the boy reacted with a start, as if he'd come back from a distant dream.
"I... saw people," he wrote, his handwriting shaky. "But they weren't from here. They looked like... us."
Miguel frowned.
"What do you mean?"
Pedro hesitated before continuing to write:
"A city just like this one, only alive. The same bell, the same square. But there were voices. Songs. People wrote on the floor, on the walls, and... smiled. I was there too."
Elisa woke to the sound of charcoal scratching on paper.
Reading what Pedro had written, she paled.
She picked up her clipboard and wrote quickly:
"He's remembering. Like the woman from yesterday."
Miguel stared at her uneasily.
"Remembering what? A life that doesn't exist?"
Elisa shook her head.
"Maybe it does. But not here anymore."
In the central square, the movement was abnormal.
Residents gathered in groups, writing frantically on tablets and pages torn from notebooks.
Some wept, others laughed, and some simply gazed at the sky with a kind of calm that seemed wrong.
A middle-aged man, the local shoemaker, was kneeling before the dry fountain.
On the ground, he had written dozens of names.
Among them, Miguel recognized some—people who had died months before the curse.
Dr. Vasconcelos walked among the groups, observing and writing in his notebook.
When he saw Miguel, he approached urgently and wrote:
"They're remembering lives they didn't live.
They call themselves 'the Rememberers.'
Apparently, they believe they're direct descendants of the city's first builders."
Miguel looked around.
In each face, he noticed a strange gleam in their eyes—a lucidity that contrasted with their fear.
Some even seemed proud of the memories consuming them.
"Is this contagion?" he asked.
"Psychological? Or spiritual?"
The Doctor hesitated before writing:
"Perhaps both.
But there's something more.
Some Rememberers say they dream of the Guardian.
And that she calls them by name."
That night, the phenomenon intensified.
The moon was overcast, but the sky pulsed with greenish reflections, as if breathing alongside the city.
The sound of the wind turned into indistinct whispers, and each house seemed to hold an echo of forgotten voices.
Elisa spent hours watching from the window.
Every now and then, she saw figures walking the streets—but they weren't the residents.
They were human shadows, translucent, repeating familiar gestures: a woman sweeping, a child playing, a man writing in the air.
Everything repeated itself silently, like a film that time insisted on projecting.
Pedro began to write without stopping.
His eyes were glazed, and the charcoal scratched the paper violently, as if his hand didn't belong to him.
When Miguel tried to read, he realized they weren't words—they were symbols.
The same runes from the altar, perfectly reproduced.
"Pedro, stop!" Miguel wrote, trying to snatch the paper from him.
But Pedro looked at him, and for the first time since the curse began, he spoke.
A single word, scratched and hoarse:
"Silaren."
The sound echoed through the room.
Not loud, but enough to make the windowpane crack.
Elisa covered her mouth with her hands.
The silence that followed was denser than ever—as if the air had become solid.
Pedro fell from his chair, unconscious.
Miguel's medallion glowed brightly, and the same symbol he had seen in the forest appeared engraved in the wood of the table, burning like a live coal.
Miguel tried to erase it, but the mark refused to disappear.
It was as if it had been written on the surface.
The next morning, the city was different.
The streets seemed slightly shifted—corners that hadn't existed before, stairs leading to doors where windows had been.
The Rememberers paced back and forth, drawing symbols on the walls with charcoal or dried blood.
Dr. Vasconcelos, exhausted, met them in the square.
He had dark circles under his eyes and a feverish gaze.
"The structure of the city is changing," he wrote.
"Not just people's minds.
Memories are rewriting space."
Miguel stared at him in astonishment.
"As if we were being thrust into an ancient version of the city?"
"Or into it," the Doctor replied.
As they talked, one of the Rememberers—the shoemaker from the fountain—approached.
His eyes shone with fervor, and in his hands he held a fragment of stone, covered in runes identical to those on the altar.
He wrote in large, firm letters:
"The Guardian is not coming.
She is already here."
And before they could react, he opened his mouth.
From it came a white light—intense, alive, pulsating.
The body crumbled to dust, and the light rose, dissolving into the air.
The bell rang again.
Three times.
At night, the sound of the city seemed different.
The silence was no longer empty—it was full of echoes, as if the world were breathing back.
Miguel observed the square, now covered in luminous marks.
They were paths, lines that converged toward the forest.
Elisa wrote:
"She's building something.
With memories."
Dr. Vasconcelos slammed the notebook shut.
"Or she's rebuilding what we destroyed."
Miguel's medallion glowed again, and the crack in the center opened.
From within, something began to move—a particle of light that seemed to want to escape.
Miguel held it, feeling the heat grow until it almost burned his skin.
And then, a voice—the same one from before, deep and soft—whispered inside his head:
"Silaren is not my name.
It's the name of what you've forgotten."
The light went out.
And the city fell into a silence that seemed to wait.