Kai woke to a world without color.
The sky above was a uniform, slate-grey ceiling, devoid of sun, moon, or clouds. The ground beneath him was a fine, grey dust that might have been sand or pulverized rock. Twisted, skeletal trees clawed at the air, their branches the color of old bone, bearing no leaves. There was no wind. There was no sound.
This was the Blight of Forgetting. A place where a god had not just died, but had been so utterly erased that reality itself had frayed at the seams.
He sat up, his body a single, unified chorus of pain. The emotional storm had passed, leaving behind a desolate calm. The Echo of the Forge God was quiet for now, dormant like the embers of a banked fire, exhausted by his earlier efforts. He was just himself again, and he had never felt so small or so alone.
He got to his feet, his worn slippers sinking into the grey dust. He checked his robes. The pouch of coins was still there. Elian's flint and steel. That was the sum total of his worldly possessions.
He needed a direction. South, he had decided. Away from the Lyceum. But in this featureless, twilight landscape, his sense of direction was useless. There were no landmarks, no rising sun to guide him. Every direction looked exactly the same.
He picked a path at random and began to walk.
The silence was the worst part. It wasn't just an absence of noise; it was a presence. A thick, muffling blanket that seemed to press in on him, stealing the sound of his own footsteps. He felt like he was wading through deep water. After an hour, the silence began to play tricks on his mind. He heard phantom whispers at the edge of his hearing, the faint echo of a library page turning, the distant, imagined chime of the Lyceum's bell tower.
He tried to focus, to ground himself in the lessons he'd learned from books. He recited the names of the constellations, though he could not see them. He listed the succession of the Lyceum's Head Scribes. He tried to hold onto the structure of knowledge, a mental fortress against the encroaching emptiness.
But the Blight was insidious. It didn't just attack the senses; it attacked the mind.
He was thinking about Elian, picturing his kind, wrinkled face, when he realized with a jolt of cold panic that he couldn't quite remember the color of the old man's eyes. Were they blue? Brown? He squeezed his own eyes shut, trying to force the memory to surface, but it was like trying to catch smoke. A small, seemingly insignificant detail had been… plucked from his mind.
He stumbled, a wave of dizziness washing over him. The Blight was feeding. It was a slow, subtle form of the Chronovores' attack, a gentle erosion of memory.
He pushed on, his pace more frantic now. He had to get out. He had to find the edge of this grey wasteland before he was whittled down to nothing, a walking husk with no past.
Hours bled into one another. The landscape never changed. Grey dust, bone-white trees, oppressive silence. Thirst became a fire in his throat. Hunger, a hollow ache in his belly. He was a Scribe, a creature of routine and regular meals. His body was not made for this.
He saw a flicker of movement ahead. Hope, fierce and desperate, surged through him. It was a figure, hunched over, digging in the dust. Another person. A survivor.
"Hello!" he called out, his voice a raw croak. The sound was shocking, an act of violence against the crushing silence.
The figure did not look up.
Kai limped closer, his heart pounding with a mixture of hope and trepidation. "Hello? Can you help me?"
He was twenty feet away now. The figure was gaunt, dressed in rags that might have once been fine clothes. It was digging methodically with its bare, raw-fingered hands. As Kai drew nearer, a stench hit him—the smell of decay and stagnant water.
He reached out a hand to touch the figure's shoulder. "Excuse me…"
The figure stopped digging and slowly, stiffly, turned its head.
Kai recoiled, a cry of horror catching in his throat. It was a man, but his eyes were vacant, milky-white pools of nothing. His mouth hung open, a thin line of drool tracing a path through the grime on his chin. There was no recognition, no thought, no one home.
It was a Husk. A victim of a Chronovore, or perhaps the Blight itself. A body whose story had been completely devoured.
The Husk looked at Kai, its head cocked at an unnatural angle. It let out a low, guttural moan and began to crawl towards him, its movements jerky and insect-like. It wasn't hostile. It was just… drawn to him. Drawn to the bright, delicious feast of memories that still resided in his mind.
Kai scrambled backwards, his skin crawling with a primal revulsion. He turned and fled, not looking back, the image of those empty eyes burned into his mind. That was the fate that awaited him here. To be unwritten.
The encounter shattered his remaining composure. He ran blindly, his only thought to put distance between himself and that horrifying glimpse of his own potential future. He tripped and fell, picked himself up, and ran again.
He didn't know how long he ran. Time had lost its meaning. He finally collapsed at the base of a skeletal tree, his body spent, his mind frayed to the breaking point. The silence rushed back in, more profound than ever.
He was going to die here. All his knowledge, all his cleverness, all the stories he had memorized and the god he had swallowed… it would all amount to nothing. He would become another silent, forgotten footnote in a dying world.
He closed his eyes, the grey dust clinging to his sweat-and-tear-streaked face. He was too tired to move, too lost to hope.
And then he felt it.
It started as a faint tremor in the ground. Then, a pressure in the air. The oppressive silence was broken by a low, humming vibration that seemed to come from everywhere at once. It was a sound, but it was also a feeling, a deep, resonant thrum that vibrated in the bones of his skull.
He forced his eyes open. The air in front of him was shimmering, like heat haze off a summer road. The grey dust on the ground began to shift, stirred by an unseen force.
Something was coming. Something ancient and powerful.
He tried to push himself up, to run, but his body wouldn't obey. He could only watch as the shimmering intensified, the humming growing louder, more menacing. It wasn't the mindless hunger of the Husk. This was something else. Something with purpose.
The air itself seemed to thin, and a creature of pure nightmare began to resolve out of the shimmering haze. It was a moth, but a moth the size of a man, its wings not of feather or chitin, but of swirling, static-laced shadow. Its body was a vague, writhing mass of darkness, and from its head unfurled two long, spectral antennae that seemed to taste the air, questing, searching.
A Chronovore. But it was larger, more defined, than the one he had glimpsed in the Library. It was drawn to him, the brightest beacon of memory for miles in this desolate waste.
The creature let out a psychic shriek that bypassed his ears and lanced directly into his brain—a sound of ravenous, insatiable hunger.
This was it. The end of his story. The final page was turning.