Ash fell in Nerathis the way rain fell in kinder places, thin at first, then steady, then so common no one bothered to look up.
Caelum Virek did not look up either. He kept his eyes on the street, on the gaps between bodies, on the small routines that held the district together like stitches. People stepped around puddles without seeing them. People greeted neighbors without listening for an answer. People lived as if living were a list of tasks that could be completed and checked off before night.
He preferred it that way.
A crowd meant warmth. Warmth meant noise. Noise meant attention. Attention meant questions.
He did not like questions.
The bakery line spilled out into the street, a narrow snake of shoulders and elbows and tired faces. Caelum stood near the back, a coin pressed flat between his thumb and forefinger until the metal warmed to his skin. The bakery was called something that sounded like a cough. A harsh name carved into the wooden sign above the door, the letters darkened with soot and age.
He knew the smell better than the name.
Yeast. Flour. Smoke. The faint sweetness of fruit that had been stewed too long because sugar was expensive, and pride was not. It was the sort of smell that told you the world still had rules.
A stone mill inside ground wheat with a slow, stubborn rhythm. The baker, a heavy man with scarred hands, worked without speaking. He measured flour in practiced scoops, slapped dough against the counter, and kept one eye on the oven as if it might decide to betray him.
Caelum watched him the way he watched everything. Not with curiosity. With caution.
He shifted his weight, felt the grit of ash beneath his boots. The air was cold enough that his breath showed only when he exhaled hard. He tried not to. He tried not to do anything that marked him as present.
The line moved.
A woman in front of him complained about the price of barley. A man behind him muttered about the Keepers and their taxes and their bone tablets and their endless rules. The words slid over Caelum without catching. He did not argue. He did not agree. He kept his face blank.
The mill turned.
The oven breathed.
Then the warmth thinned.
It did not fade the way heat fades when a door opens. It did not drift away. It was pulled.
Caelum felt it first along the back of his neck, a sensation like a hand held close, not touching, but close enough to raise the fine hairs under his collar. The ash in the air seemed to pause, suspended, as if unsure which way to fall.
The stone mill stopped.
The silence was wrong because no one noticed it.
No one flinched. No one turned.
The woman in front of Caelum continued talking as if the sound of grinding stone had never existed. Her mouth kept moving, her voice unbroken, a thread pulled through empty space.
Caelum blinked.
The line in front of him was shorter.
Not by one step, not by the slow, ordinary shuffle of hungry people. Shorter in a way that made his stomach tighten. A space had opened where a body should have been. A clean gap. A missing shape.
He looked toward the bakery door.
The counter was there. The oven was there. The brick walls were the same. The wooden shelves still held loaves, browned and cracked at the crust.
But there was no baker.
The heavy man with scarred hands was simply gone.
A customer stepped forward, placed two coins on the counter, and waited. She did not look for a person. She did not call out. She stared at the empty space with mild impatience, like someone waiting for a late train.
Then, without hesitation, she reached across the counter and picked up a loaf.
She tucked it under her arm and left.
The next person did the same.
Caelum swallowed. His throat felt dry, as if the air had stolen the last bit of moisture from him.
He stepped out of line.
No one objected. No one watched him. No one cared.
That should have reassured him.
It did not.
He moved closer to the bakery entrance, careful and quiet. The ash fell in small flakes around his shoulders, collecting in the seams of his coat. The oven's mouth was open, but inside there was only grey ash, no glow, no ember, no heat. The iron tools hung neatly on the wall, blackened with use.
The smell of bread was still there, faint now, like a memory trying to survive.
He looked up at the sign.
The name was gone.
Not burned away. Not scraped off. Gone as if it had never been carved. The wood was smooth, unmarked, old grain running clean where letters should have cut.
A cold breath slid along his cheek.
Caelum froze.
He did not see anyone behind him, but he felt presence, the way you can feel a door opening in the next room. He turned slowly, expecting a thief, a Keeper, a drunk, anything that would make the cold make sense.
There was only the street. Only ash. Only people walking past the bakery without slowing.
He forced his hands to unclench. The coin was still between his fingers. He had not spent it. He stared at it as if it might explain what he had seen.
It was a cheap coin, not silver. A dull alloy stamped with the crescent mark of the district and a number that meant less each week. Warm from his skin.
He put it in his pocket and backed away from the bakery.
As he moved, his eyes caught on details the way they always did. He saw the dust along the windowsill. He saw the cracks in the brickwork. He saw the flour scattered near the threshold.
But there was something else.
A patch of clean floor behind the counter.
As if someone had been standing there.
As if their weight had pressed the dust down.
As if the world had erased the person but forgotten to erase the evidence of them.
Caelum left before his thoughts could grow teeth.
He walked home by the narrow lanes, keeping to the edges, avoiding the places where patrols liked to pass. The district had no real walls, only tired buildings leaning close like conspirators. There were shrines carved into corners, small offerings of bone beads and black candles to ward off bad luck. Some candles burned. Some were cold stubs, long dead.
He tried not to look too closely at anything.
At his door, he hesitated.
Home was a small room above a closed shop, cheap because the roof leaked and the floorboards complained. It had one window, one table, one chair, and one narrow bed that never seemed to fully warm.
It also had his notebook.
He locked the door behind him, not because he feared a thief, but because he feared the kind of silence that could slip in without knocking.
On the table lay a plain book, its cover scratched and the corners bent. He opened it to the last page he had written.
Not poetry. Not dreams.
Facts.
He wrote facts because facts had weight. Facts could anchor you.
He dipped his pen and wrote:
Today. Dusk. The bakery on Hollow Street. The mill stopped. The baker vanished. The sign lost its name. No one reacted. The oven went cold.
His hand paused.
He stared at the line he had just written, then at the page above it. There were older entries, small observations that at the time had seemed too strange to speak aloud.
A man on the bridge who did not cast a shadow.A woman crying for a child no one else remembered.A stone tablet at the shrine that was blank where words should be.
He had told himself these were errors. Exhaustion. Hunger. The mind making stories out of ash and cold air.
But the bakery had been real. He had smelled the bread. He had held his coin. He had watched people take loaves from an empty counter as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
He turned the page and began a new list.
Things that changed without changing:
Names disappearing.
Sounds stopping.
Cold air arriving first.
People continuing as if nothing was missing.
He stopped again.
Cold air arriving first.
He lifted his head.
The room was quiet. It always was. But now the quiet felt shaped, like a cup turned upside down over a flame.
His breath fogged faintly in front of his mouth.
He had not opened the window.
He stood, slow, careful, and crossed the room to the door. He placed his palm against the wood. It was colder than it should be.
He listened.
At first, he heard nothing.
Then, faint as a thought, he heard the scrape of something against the stairwell outside. A soft step. A pause. Another step.
Someone was standing on the landing.
Caelum backed away from the door without turning his back on it. His mind ran through possibilities with the grim speed of practice.
A patrol. A neighbor. A drunk looking for the wrong room.
Or something else.
He reached for the knife he kept under the table, not sharp enough for a real fight, but sharp enough to make him feel less bare. His hand closed around the handle.
The steps outside stopped.
A shadow moved under the crack of the door, thin and precise, as if whoever stood there knew exactly how much of themselves to reveal.
Then came a sound.
Not a knock.
A fingernail dragged lightly across wood, once, as if testing its grain.
Caelum held his breath.
The air grew colder.
And from the other side of the door, a voice spoke, quiet and controlled, like someone reading from a record.
"Caelum Virek," it said, using his full name as if it had been carved into bone. "Open."