The first thing one noticed was the Silence.
It was not the silence of a countryside at night, nor the quiet peace of an untouched forest. This silence was different dense, suffocating, and alive. It pressed down from all sides, as though it were an ocean and anyone who breathed within it risked drowning.
The streets of the abandoned quarter stretched out like veins carved into a corpse. Once, they had been full of merchants and beggars, mothers with their children, taverns spilling out drunken song. Now only the skeleton of that life remained. Shutters hung broken from their hinges, doors leaned ajar as if expecting guests who would never come, and the cobblestones glistened with damp patches where moss had claimed the cracks.
What truly unsettled travelers who dared to wander here was not the absence of people, but the faint traces of what they had left behind. Shadows still lingered where bodies should have been. Murmurs drifted with the breeze, fragments of words spoken without tongue or lips. They were not ghosts in the traditional sense. They were echoes splinters of memory that clung stubbornly to stone and wood, unwilling to dissolve entirely.
Those who listened long enough swore they could hear the city pleading, as though the very walls begged for someone to remember them.
A figure moved through that hollow landscape.
His steps were deliberate, but strangely muted, as though the stones beneath him did not wish to acknowledge his presence. Cloaked in a long coat of faded black, he passed under the arch of a ruined chapel. Its once-vivid stained glass lay shattered, leaving jagged teeth in the stone frame. The moon filtered through, pale and indifferent, touching his face for an instant.
The face was young too young to carry the weight of such a place. Yet his eyes betrayed something unnatural. They were not simply tired, nor merely hardened by suffering. They were crowded. Each glance seemed to hold the weight of hundreds of lifetimes, colliding and shifting beneath the surface.
He paused at the altar, where black scorch marks still stretched across the stone. No flame had caused that. These marks were the residue of something else: memories burned out of existence, leaving only ash no hand could touch.
The whispers gathered around him, pulling at his coat, at his hair, at the corners of his mind. Fragments of prayers without context: "Deliver us" "…my son's laughter…" "not forget, please…" Words that belonged to lives erased.
He reached out, brushing his fingers over the scorched altar. The voices hushed instantly, as though recognizing something in his presence. For a long moment, he stood there, letting the silence weigh upon him. Then, with a slow exhale, he turned back into the street.
The city was not always this way.
Long ago, this place had thrived. Its towers had touched the sky, its markets overflowed with color, and its people traded not only in gold and grain but in something far more precious: memory. The practice had begun as ritual, a sacred act of sharing experiences to preserve them beyond death. A grieving widow might surrender her happiest recollection of her husband to a scribe, ensuring the world never forgot. An aging warrior might sell the memory of his first battle to a student, granting the boy not only knowledge but skill.
But what began as devotion soon became commerce. And commerce, unchecked, becomes hunger.
Soon, memories were bought and sold like grain in the marketplace. People traded their childhoods for wealth, their fears for courage, their grief for temporary peace. The poor stripped themselves bare to survive, forgetting who they were. The wealthy hoarded the sweetest recollections until their minds drowned in indulgence. And in time, the city itself became glutted, like a body devouring its own flesh.
The famine came quietly.
At first, it was only the beggars, wandering aimlessly without names or homes, unable to recall where they belonged. Then it was soldiers forgetting how to wield their blades, mothers forgetting the faces of their children. Entire families sat in silence, staring at one another as strangers. And when the last remnants of memory were spent, when no one could recall even how to draw breath, the city emptied.
All that remained were whispers.
The figure walking through the ruins knew this history intimately. Not because he had read it in books, nor heard it told in hushed tavern tales. He knew because he carried fragments of it within him. He remembered things that were not his own: the warmth of a baker's oven, the fear of a girl on her wedding night, the steady calluses of a blacksmith's hands.
Each belonged to someone else.
Each was his now.
He did not know if this was a gift or a curse. Perhaps both.
His name was Dereck.
The night deepened as Dereck walked further into the city's core. The sky above was heavy with clouds, though the moon sometimes forced its way through, casting pale silver over shattered rooftops. The air smelled faintly of rain mixed with iron a metallic tang that hinted not of blood, but of something older, more intimate: the scent of a memory being stripped away.
Dereck had grown accustomed to it. Memory had its own fragrance. Some were sweet, like ripe fruit, bursting with life. Others were acrid, rotting with regret or soaked in despair. And some were dangerously addictive, clinging to him even after he consumed them.
He felt one now, tugging at him from a nearby alley.
Curious, he stepped into the darkness. His boots brushed past scattered papers, brittle and flaking at the edges. Each page had once been inscribed with careful handwriting. Now the words shifted constantly, letters writhing like insects. Dereck bent, picked one up, and felt the echo pour into him.
A child's memory small, trembling, clutching a wooden toy. A laugh, high and unbroken. The sensation of running barefoot through a summer field. For a moment, Dereck's lips curved into a smile. The memory was intoxicating, innocent in a way that his own life had never been.
But then it slipped, unraveling into sorrow. The toy breaking. A scream. The child's world collapsing into darkness.
Dereck exhaled sharply and let the page disintegrate between his fingers. Dust scattered into the air, swirling in the moonlight.
Every memory came with its price. Every fragment taken left behind a hollow space where something essential had once been. And he feared though he never admitted it that one day he would be nothing more than a patchwork of borrowed moments, his true self erased beneath them.
The whispers grew louder.
This time they were not random fragments, but deliberate. They called his name. Not the name of the city, nor of the countless voices still drifting within it. His name.
"Dereck…"
It was not one voice, but many. Male and female, young and old, blended into a single trembling note. It seemed to crawl up the walls, down the gutters, through the very stones of the street.
Dereck stiffened. His eyes narrowed.
No one should remember his name here.
The sound grew, vibrating against the silence. He followed it, step after step, through the winding streets until he reached the heart of the market square. There, the old fountain still stood dry, cracked, its statue eroded beyond recognition. Around it clustered shapes, indistinct, like silhouettes carved from smoke.
The silhouettes turned as one. Empty sockets stared at him. Mouths opened, and the chorus whispered again:
"Dereck…"
For a long moment, he did not move. The weight of their gaze pressed against him like chains. He knew these were no ordinary echoes. These were the remnants of those who had given too much, who had bartered away every memory until nothing human remained. What lingered was hunger, endless and gnawing.
One of them stepped forward, dissolving and reforming as though unable to hold a stable shape. Its voice cracked like old parchment.
"You… remember… us…"
Dereck clenched his jaw. A memory stirred within him, unbidden. The taste of bread baked at dawn. The scrape of chalk on slate in a classroom. A woman's hand brushing hair from her child's forehead.
None of them his. All of them theirs.
"Yes," he whispered. His voice was hoarse, as though dragged from deep within. "I remember."
The figures shuddered. Some reached toward him, their smoky limbs stretching desperately. Others recoiled, fearful of the weight he carried.
Dereck stood still, torn between pity and revulsion. They had lost everything. He, in turn, risked losing too much. If he reached out, if he absorbed them, he would gain what little remained of their lives. But in doing so, he would carry their hollow hunger as well.
The silence deepened, as though the world itself held its breath.
And then, with deliberate slowness, Dereck raised his hand.
The shadows surged.
That night, beneath the pale eye of the moon, the ruins trembled with whispers that would not fade until dawn.
And Dereck the boy who carried the weight of countless stolen lives walked deeper into the ashes, knowing that each step drew him further from the truth of who he once had been.