(Volume I: The Silence Beneath Ruins)
Alden Raith awoke into a world that did not remember itself.
He became aware slowly, the way a drowned man might drift toward the surface-
And not rising, but rather pulled upward by something which could no longer tell the difference between motion and memory.
There was no heartbeat.
No lungs.
No body.
It was just a point of consciousness suspended in a weightless void, flickering like a candle whose flame was in another room.
The first sensation he recognized was the hollowing—
a quality of soundlessness so complete that it felt predatory.
Silence implies life awaiting noise;
This was the opposite.
A void that had consumed its own echo.
He floated above a street fractured into immaculate petals.
Cracks formed spirals, veins, sigils.
Each one glowed faintly with a cold luminescence, as if the ground remembered moonlight long after the moon had fled.
Buildings hung around him, tilted at impossible angles, as if someone had plucked the city from its foundations and set it back down imperfectly aligned. Some structures hovered a few inches above the earth, refusing to land. Others were frozen mid-collapse, stones suspended mid-fall, caught in the moment just before destruction claimed them.
It took him a while to realize that the city wasn't just destroyed.
It was paused.
As though the last second of its existence had been stretched into an eternity.
A shard of memory drifted across Alden's mind—
the faint impression of his own voice, a promise whispered to someone.
"I'll be back before the sky breaks."
But the face attached to that memory had dissolved before he could grasp it.
Another loss.
Another subtraction.
He tried to take a breath, as if breath would steady him.
Nothing happened.
He remembered the idea of lungs, but not the feeling of air.
A faint itch of dread traced the periphery of his consciousness.
It had nothing to cling to—no nerves, no skin—
Yet it gnawed at him just the same.
You are dead,
a voice in him whispered,
and yet… not gone.
He sank lower.
The broken stones of the street blurred into shadows as Echo-Sight flickered for the first time.
Alden froze.
The world rewound.
Colors surged back into the city—vibrant, alive, unbearably warm.
The street was filled with people.
Carriages.
Shouts.
Vendors.
Children chasing each other through streams of neon dusk-light.
A radio murmuring a song from a world that still knew what music was.
Life.
Messy, loud, imperfect life.
Alden watched his past self cross the street.
The living Alden was dressed in a long dark coat and carried a notebook heavy with sketches, runes, and diagrams. He looked exhausted ,Haunted and Determined.
A woman seized his arm, panting.
Her face blurred by the distortion of fading memory.
"They're hastening the ritual," she said urgently, her voice trembling across the echo.
"If the Lorn Mirror-Father is sealed first, then identity itself will unravel. Alden-people will forget who they are."
The vision quailed, shaking under some unseen pressure.
Alden Ghost-and-witness reached out, trying to hold onto the moment, the tone of her voice, anything that might anchor who she was.
But the memory disintegrated like sand blown from an open palm.
Heat.
Light.
Screams bending into reverse
Buildings that liquefied into white fog.
The sky breaking along faultlines of impossible geometry.
The vision imploded.
Alden was back in the present—
hovering above a corpse-city stuck between collapse and surrender.
His awareness pulsed unevenly.
The afterimage of sound still clung to him, like a bruise.
He drifted down the avenue.
And for a time, the only thing that moved was the pale shimmer of Palefog swirling through the ruins like smoke from some invisible fire.
It clung to the ground in sheets.
It clung to the air in threads.
Everything felt a little off, the way a dream feels when it's someone else doing the dreaming.
Then the Obelisk called to him.
It wasn't a sound, and it wasn't a thought.
It was gravity-
A pull with intention.
In the city's very center stood the Obelisk of the Lorn Mirror-Father, jutting from the earth like a tooth of polished white stone.
Its surface shimmered with blurred reflections, the shadows of people who once stood before them, memories of identities no longer belonging to anybody.
Alden was helplessly drifting towards it.
The Obelisk hummed.
A pitch too low to hear, too deep to ignore.
It pulsed through his consciousness, stirring the fringes of his mind like a magnet rustling iron dust.
Something within the stone pulsates.
Echoes.
Responses.
Alden stopped, his dread spiraling up through him like cold smoke.
The Obelisk spoke.
Not through sound—
through memory.
Through him.
> "You are late."
Alden's awareness constricted.
The voice that emerged from the Obelisk was—impossibly—
his own.
Not quite.
Older.
Worn thin by centuries of strain.
"The world forgets itself faster than you move."
Alden tried to speak, but the attempt fractured.
Words slipped from his grasp like eels.
His very ability to form sentences felt rusted.
The glow of the Obelisk sharpened, narrowing into a vertical slit, like an opening eye.
Identity decays while the seal holds. You must move. The others sleep in prisons of silence.
Something inside of Alden unraveled.
A thread.
A tether.
He backed away, though "back" was meaningless without a body.
Memories stirred.
Fragments.
A ritual.
Nine obelisks.
A collapsing sky.
The price paid in blood.
A name whispered by something vast and unseen.
And then-pain.
So, so much pain.
The Obelisk vibrated again.
"If you don't unseal the next, this world will forget its own shape. Even death requires structure."
The streets surrounding the Obelisk began to change.
Stones rotated.
Buildings cracked along new seams.
The whole district had readjusted itself into a spiral arrangement centered on one path running outward from the Pale Heart.
It glowed faintly, the light in it seeming almost to pulse like a heartbeat.
Alden could feel its pull.
It was not an invitation.
It was a necessity. He demurred. For one instant, the Palefog broke apart to show distorted silhouettes moving behind the sky— colossal beings sliding across the underside of reality like shadows cast by something the world refused to describe. A cold realization flooded him: They were watching. Not him— absence from where he ought to have been. Whatever Alden had become, the Supremacies could not properly perceive it. He was a blind spot. A misremembered thought. A ghost not of death, but of error.
Fear—raw, animal, wordless—washed through him.
And the Obelisk whispered, almost gently:
> "You survived the sealing because you were meant to return. A fragment of the Dirge-Wright clings to you still."
The name stirred something in him. A symbol. A circle of runes. A choir of bone singing memories wrong. Before he could comprehend what was being said, the Obelisk spoke once more:
> "Go west." TO THE SHATTERED MARGIN.
Before the next hour remembers what it has lost. The spiral path pulsed once more. Alden drifted forward, tugged by a gravity not of this world. The Obelisk behind him had dimmed. The sky flickered, as if annoyed by his movement. A distant rumble shivered across the Pale Heart. And somewhere, far above, a great shape pressed closer to the membrane of the sky— curious, hungry, patient Alden crossed the boundary of the ruined plaza. The air changed. The fog coiled. And the city exhaled- a long, shuddering release, as if relieved that something had finally begun again. Alden did not know whether he was saving the world, or return it to a nightmare it had tried to forget.
He knew only one thing:
He was no longer alone.
Something must have awakened with him. And it wanted to be remembered.