(Except it does. In the dreams that wake you bleeding. In the lullabies your mother never sang.)
The road to Ilyor was a memory wrapped in fog.
Kai and Elio didn't speak as the tram crawled toward the city's edge. Azrael blurred behind them like it was being forgotten in real time. Buildings folded into smoke. Time signals blinked erratic. The air thinned the farther they traveled—like even oxygen refused to remember.
"It doesn't show on the map," Elio said, watching the horizon crack into ruin.
"Because it isn't supposed to exist," Kai replied.
They passed a forest of television antennas, each one rusted and humming with static. Then came the red fields. Then the salt river. And finally, the edge.
Beyond it: nothing.
Except Ilyor.
The moment they stepped off the tram, the landscape shifted. Grass turned to ash. Trees whispered in reverse. Even the birds flew backward.
Elio stumbled, clutching his head. "My name... I forgot it for a second."
Kai didn't answer. His hand burned where the mirror mark pulsed.
Ilyor rose ahead like a city remembering how to breathe. It shimmered at the edges, half-built, half-decayed—a paradox of time.
They entered through an archway made of bones and silver. A sign swung overhead:
"Welcome back, Founders."
The town was wrong.
It had no people, only echoes. Voices murmured from empty windows. Footsteps with no bodies. And the houses... they moved. Slightly. Like they were breathing.
Kai paused in front of a cracked mirror nailed to a tree. His reflection blinked a moment too late.
"We lived here," he said.
"We built it," Elio replied.
Then the first memory struck.
Kai was a boy again. Running through Ilyor barefoot, laughing. Elio behind him, shouting something in a language they no longer knew.
Then a storm. Fire. Screams.
Then... nothing.
They both gasped awake, lying in the center of a spiral burned into the dirt.
A voice echoed from nowhere:
"You left something here"
The center of town held a chapel with no door.
Kai reached for the handle that didn't exist, and the wall opened like flesh. Inside: pews made of bones, and a single stained glass window showing *the mirror.*
It pulsed.
"We buried it here," Kai whispered. "Before the gods fell. Before the loops began."
Elio moved closer. "What happens if we touch it again?"
"I think... it remembers us."
Then something growled from beneath the chapel.
The ground cracked.
A hand burst through the floor—not human. Burned. Bone showing. Holding a second mirror.
It hissed: "Begin again."
The mirror in the hand flashed like lightning trapped in glass. Elio stepped forward, but Kai pulled him back.
"Don't," Kai said. "It's not offering—it's warning."
The chapel groaned, walls twitching. A scream echoed from beneath the floorboards—their scream, from a life neither remembered but both feared.
A heartbeat later, the ground split wider, and something climbed out.
It was Kai.
But older. Or younger. Or corrupted.
Skin peeling in places. A spiral of eyes across his chest. Mouth stitched shut with golden thread.
Kai staggered. "Is that—?"
"You," Elio finished.
The copy moved with jerks and glitches, flickering like a faulty reel of film. It held the mirror high. The reflection didn't show Ilyor, but something deeper:
A mountain made of bones. A river of ink. A star falling in reverse.
And a door.
"It's a vision," Kai whispered. "A place we haven't ruined yet."
The copy lunged.
Kai shouted a word of unbinding. The chapel exploded in light. Bones scattered. The mirror cracked. The stitched Kai collapsed—but didn't vanish.
It laughed without a mouth.
Elio knelt. "This isn't just memory—it's infection. Time's folding into itself."
"And we're the rot," Kai whispered.
A bell rang outside, low and wet like it was tolling underwater.
"It's calling others," Elio said. "Other versions. Other loops."
They ran.
Outside, Ilyor had changed again. Now the sky was blood-orange. The buildings were upside-down. People with no faces walked backward. Children sang spells that turned to ash.
Kai led them into what used to be a bakery.
Inside, the air was clearer.
On the wall: a mural. It showed them.
Kai and Elio, hands clasped, standing at the edge of a cliff while the world shattered behind them.
"Prophecy or memory?" Elio asked.
"Yes," Kai replied.
They stayed there until night swallowed the streets whole.
At midnight, the mirror pulsed again—from beneath the chapel ruins, a new echo rising.
Not footsteps. Not screams.
Music.
A piano.
"Do you hear that?" Kai asked, rising slowly.
Elio nodded. "It's the song from the mural."
The melody drifted through the cracks in Ilyor like a curse. As they followed it, the streets rearranged, leading them back to the chapel that no longer existed.
In its place: a ballroom.
Mirrored. Broken. Empty.
And at the center, a boy played the piano. Not Kai. Not Elio. Someone else.
His eyes were pure silver.
The melody twisted.
The boy turned.
"I was waiting for you to remember," he said.
Kai reached for Elio's hand.
And the boy smiled.
"Welcome back to where you ended it all."
The silver-eyed boy stood from the piano, the melody still echoing on phantom keys. The ballroom windows shattered inward as if the sound had broken reality.
"What do you mean 'ended it'?" Elio asked, voice hoarse.
The boy's smile faded. "You wrote the first loop. Burned it into this place. This isn't a city—it's a scar."
Kai stepped forward slowly. "Who are you?"
The boy tilted his head. "Your consequence."
The chandelier above them began to spin, casting shadows that didn't match their movements. One showed Kai stabbing Elio. Another showed them kissing beneath a collapsing moon.
Elio's voice was hollow. "Why can't we remember everything at once?"
The boy stepped closer. "Because if you did, you'd die."
The lights exploded. For a heartbeat, everything went black.
When it returned—
They were alone.
The ballroom was gone.
Only dust remained.
And carved into the stone floor beneath their feet:
"Next time, don't forget the girl."
Kai touched the mark on his palm. It burned.
Elio's breath caught. "The one I said I forgot. The one with silver eyes."
Kai whispered, "She's real."
And the street preacher's voice echoed in memory:
"Time's bleeding. The loops are tearing."
They turned toward the horizon.
Ilyor shimmered again.
This time, it blinked.