The rain was falling on the old fort — drops washing the dust of centuries.
A teenage boy named Arhan wandered through the ruins with his sketchbook. He loved to draw, to capture what others ignored.
As he touched a cracked wall, his fingers brushed over something — a faint carving.
It wasn't a name, not a date. Just a sentence:
> "We were here, too."
That night, he couldn't sleep. Every time lightning flashed outside, he saw faces — blurred, broken, desperate.
Women carrying stones for palaces, soldiers dying nameless in mud, poets whose words were burned for speaking truth.
They didn't scream.
They didn't beg.
They just watched him — eyes full of silence.
The next morning, he returned to the fort.
This time, he brought charcoal and began to draw — not kings or heroes, but the forgotten souls. A mother holding her dead child during famine. A farmer dying while empires celebrated victory. A young girl whose voice was cut off by power.
Every sketch he made — he could hear their breath behind him.
Every stroke of his pencil was a resurrection.
And when he finished the last drawing, he whispered,
> "You will not be forgotten anymore."
The air around him shifted. The walls gleamed with light — not sunlight, but something older, something holy.
The silence broke.
A single word echoed through time — soft, tearful, endless:
> "Thank you."
Arhan looked down.
His sketchbook was gone.
In its place lay a stone tablet — with the same words carved on it:
> "We were here, too."
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Epilogue:
Centuries later, when archaeologists uncovered the fort, they found that tablet buried under sand.
No one knew who carved it, or why.
But when the wind passed over it, it sounded almost like a human voice —
a voice that had waited for eternity to be heard.
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