The silence no longer rests.
It stirs beneath me like a sleeper haunted by dreams.
When I walk now, the ground shifts—not as stone or sand, but as possibility. The void has become porous, unstable, veined with faint threads of light. They hum with quiet insistence, like memories calling out to be named.
I try to ignore them. I remind myself of my duty. I am the Keeper of Unmaking, the one entrusted to tend the peace that comes after. Yet the stillness I loved no longer knows how to be still.
And I begin to suspect that the disturbance does not come from without.
It comes from me.
The ledger at my side grows heavier each hour. Its pages bleed faint color, a slow infection spreading through the parchment. I feel warmth against my ribs where it rests, as though a heart has begun to beat within it. Each pulse releases a faint scent of smoke and paper—the scent of stories burning.
Only now, when I breathe it in, it reminds me not of completion, but of loss.
Loss… a word I have not thought in centuries. It is a word that presumes affection, attachment, something worth missing. I had long believed I had edited that feeling from myself.
But I was mistaken.
The tremor of memory is contagious.
I move forward through the dark, guided by faint glimmers. They gather, forming outlines: a street, a gate, the trace of a river. Velara is trying to return, not as it was, but as an idea of itself. The city remembers only that it once existed, not how. Every structure flickers between shapes—stone, then dust, then light.
The wind that should not be carries the taste of something ancient: rain.
I kneel and press my hand to the shifting ground. Beneath the textureless surface, I feel vibrations—like words written too faintly to read. I listen closely.
They are names. Thousands of them, tumbling through one another, unanchored. The citizens of Velara. The ones I erased.
Their syllables brush against me like moths against glass. They do not accuse. They do not plead. They merely are.
I realize, with sudden clarity, that this—this murmuring—is what silence was built to contain. Oblivion is not emptiness, but restraint. I have not been destroying stories; I have been storing them.
The void is not absence. It is the Library's hidden basement.
How strange, that I have been its archivist all along.
I rise. Above me, the sky begins to fracture. The blackness thins to reveal a faint, liquid shimmer—the texture of memory bleeding through the seal. Shapes swim across it: fragments of forgotten lives. A woman braiding her daughter's hair beside a window. A merchant polishing a coin engraved with an unfamiliar emblem. Lovers crossing a bridge at dusk, their faces blurred but radiant.
I cannot tell if these visions are real or merely the residue of what once was.
Still, I watch.
There is tenderness in the way they move. A softness I had not noticed when I erased them. In my devotion to the silence, I had only seen the agony, the grief, the noise of being. But now I see that pain and beauty were never separate things—they were the same material, woven together too tightly to unpick.
I close my eyes. The realization is both revelation and punishment.
To erase sorrow, I had to erase joy. To quiet the cries, I had to silence laughter. Every act of mercy was also mutilation.
And yet, I cannot undo what I have done.
The void does not forgive. It only forgets.
A faint vibration hums through the air, like distant bells beneath the earth. I follow the sound. It leads me down a slope of shifting color into a hollow where the darkness grows thicker, viscous. The glimmers fade until only one remains—a pale, hovering page caught in the air like a wounded bird.
It trembles as I approach. The writing upon it pulses with a dim light, rearranging itself in the rhythm of breath.
> "We are not gone."
I reach for it. The moment my fingers brush the edge, the world convulses. The page disintegrates into dust, and the dust becomes words—millions of them—spilling outward in a luminous storm. They coil around me, each one a memory clawing toward form.
For an instant, I see Velara whole: towers gleaming in twilight, music in the streets, a thousand windows lit with human warmth.
Then it collapses, folding back into shadow.
I fall to my knees, gasping. The silence that follows is not pure; it is broken, stitched with echoes.
I feel something wet against my face. I touch my cheek. My fingers come away damp.
A tear.
The last time I cried, I was still human.
That memory should not exist. It should have been erased with all the others. But here it is, rising like smoke from a sealed room. I remember sitting before a dying fire, a quill trembling in my hand, writing a name I swore I would never forget.
Her name.
No—their name.
I cannot recall the details, only the sensation of loss so profound it demanded silence to survive it. That was when I first turned to the Library, seeking not to remember, but to end remembrance.
I thought oblivion would heal me.
Now I see it only hid the wound.
The void shifts. I feel it moving, not as space but as awareness. It knows I have remembered. The fabric around me contracts, heavy with unspoken judgment. I hear the whisper again—my own voice, echoed back by the dark.
> "Why?"
I answer aloud, though my throat feels raw from disuse.
"To protect what remains."
The whisper laughs. It is a sound like breaking glass.
> "Nothing remains."
The ground gives way. I plunge into depthless dark. For a moment, I think I am falling back into true silence, but then I realize—the darkness is filled with pages. They flutter around me like snow, each one carrying fragments of things I have undone: laughter, weeping, songs half-remembered, promises broken and kept.
I reach out. The pages cling to my hands, to my face, to my breath. Each one hums with life.
> "Do you see now?" they whisper. "The void is made of us."
The truth opens before me like a wound: I have not been erasing the universe. I have been writing the void with its remains. Every absence is built from what it devoured. I am not its master—I am its continuation.
The thought fills me with both awe and despair.
I fall for what feels like an eternity until I land softly upon a plain of lightless glass. Beneath it, I see shadows moving: the silhouettes of countless cities, lives, and worlds—everything I have ever undone.
They shift as I walk, mirroring my steps like memories refusing to rest.
At the horizon, I see a shape forming—tall, indistinct, but unmistakable. A figure robed in white flame, her hand pressed to her heart.
Serephine.
She is not truly there, not yet. But her memory has entered the void, anchoring itself to me. The breach she opened is widening, and through it, the unmade world begins to dream of itself again.
I could seal it. One stroke of my pen, one erasure, and the tremor would fade.
But I cannot bring myself to do it.
Because I want to see what happens next.
The stillness I once adored has become unbearable. The silence feels like suffocation. And so I stand upon the threshold of my own unmaking, watching as the first fragments of Velara take shape again from the darkness.
Perhaps this is how creation begins—not with sound, but with a silence that finally dares to listen.
The ledger in my hand stirs once more. Its pages glow faintly. New words appear without my consent, written in the same luminous script as before:
> "Every void is born of memory.
Every silence remembers its song."
I close the book.
And for the first time since the first word was unspoken,
I begin to hum.