I remember silence first.
Not the calm kind, but the suffocating stillness that hums behind your ribs after something breaks too loudly to hear.
They call it the Fracture, though nobody remembers what exactly snapped. Some say the sky; others say the gods' patience. I think it was belief itself the moment people started arguing about which truth mattered more, and the world chose to believe all of them at once.
I was there, though I didn't understand it.
Back then I was just a student in the city of Kareth, memorizing doctrines I didn't feel. The walls were carved with creeds faith is fuel, conviction creates reality. Teachers called them axioms, personal truths so absolute that the world bent to them.
I didn't have one.
That was my first weakness. Everyone around me glowed with their small certainties little miracles flickering on their fingertips while I stared at my hands and saw nothing. I wasn't empty of belief; I just had too many. I wanted to understand everyone's truths. I thought understanding was the same as believing.
It wasn't.
When the Fracture hit, it was like watching the air tear. Entire streets folded, buildings shimmered into other shapes, rivers decided they'd rather flow upward. People screamed not from pain but from realization each convinced reality was proving them right. It did, for a while.
And me?
The world didn't know what to do with someone who couldn't decide. I slipped between other people's truths like a ghost, untouched and powerless. My indecision made me invisible to the laws they created.
Now, years later, I walk through what's left.
The sand under my boots isn't sand anymore it's ground glass from dissolved certainties. I hear echoes whispering out of it, fragments of long dead axioms still arguing.
"Only the brave deserve breath…"
"Pain is purpose…"
"All endings are beginnings…"
They swirl and fade. Echoes: that's what survivors call them. Leftovers of conviction. When two axioms collide, they leave behind these murmuring ghosts half thoughts searching for someone new to believe them. They can hurt you, twist your mind, or worse infect you with belief that isn't yours.
I learned that the hard way.
The first time an Echo touched me, I blacked out. When I woke, I saw the world in fractures of light like mirrors jammed behind my eyes. For a moment I could borrow the strength of the voice that touched me. It called itself a "Seeker's gift." The Pale Archivists those gray cloaked record keepers who collect dead axioms say people like me are anomalies: we have no true belief, so every belief tries to fill us.
Maybe that's why I'm still alive.
Or maybe I'm just too uncertain to die.
The Archivists told me to pick an Axiom and carve it into my mind before the Fracture devoured me. I tried. I whispered a thousand versions truth should belong to everyone, I must understand every truth, I must not lie to myself but none settled. Every time I thought I found it, doubt gnawed through, and the phrase unraveled like ash.
So I keep walking, chasing whispers, pretending that someday I'll find the one truth solid enough to stand on.
Today the horizon looks different. The sky folds inward, like a curtain pulled by invisible hands. The heat turns liquid. I know what that means: somewhere ahead, a domain is active. Someone's Axiom is rewriting the rules again.
I slow my breathing. The first rule of surviving a Fracture Zone is to listen. Every belief sings differently. Some hum with pride, others with fear. This one… this one sounds tired. A lullaby played backward.
Dust drifts in spirals as I step closer. The light bends, and I see it: a patch of still water stretching where desert should be, perfectly circular, reflecting a moon that isn't there. In the center stands a man. Or something shaped like one.
Bare feet on the surface, body half draped in a loose black gi, pale hair brushing his shoulders. His eyes are closed, yet the water moves when he breathes. The Archivists would call this Sleep Form a martial art that channels conviction through calm, not rage. The Dreamflow, they whisper, mastered by one man alone.
I know his name before I remember hearing it: Amnesia.
The Neutral Enemy. The man who never chooses sides, because he fights for balance itself. People say he appears wherever belief tips too far one way, and when he leaves, everything is equal again because everything is gone.
I should run. No one survives meeting him. But the strangest part of being powerless is learning to mistake curiosity for courage. My feet keep moving.
The closer I get, the heavier the air becomes. Belief pressure, the Archivists call it: the weight of someone else's certainty pressing against your thoughts. It feels like drowning in another person's heartbeat. My chest tightens until I can't remember what air tastes like. Still, I keep walking, because if I turn back now, I'll never know what makes him certain.
He speaks, but not in words his thoughts ripple through the water and slide into mine. "All is not lost," they whisper, "so I cannot lose."
That's his Axiom. I do not lose until all is lost. The sound of it burns. The moment I understand it, the ground itself refuses to let me fall. His conviction is so absolute that even gravity obeys.
For a heartbeat, I glimpse his world. In it, defeat is impossible, because he defines the ending himself. His Axiom holds entire battles in suspension, forcing every outcome to wait until he decides that all has truly been lost. The cost is written in his eyes when they open: endless fatigue. To never lose is to never rest.
He looks at me as if we've met before. Maybe we have in one of the truths I borrowed and forgot to return.
The water trembles, reflecting both of us, and I see something I wish I hadn't: my reflection flickers between shapes me, then him, then the same cracked face we both hide behind.
Maybe that's why he's here.
Maybe the world sent its most tired guardian to meet its most indecisive survivor.
His lips move. The words don't reach my ears; they echo straight inside my skull: "Find your truth before it finds you."
The surface beneath him fractures outward, light bending like glass shattering underwater. The ripples crawl toward me, humming with the promise of erasure.
I should be afraid. Instead, I feel the same silence that started all this the moment between thought and belief. The stillness before a choice.
And somewhere inside that silence, a whisper answers, not his but mine:
"I must understand every truth."
The world stirs. The reflection smiles.
Then everything dissolves into white.When the light fades, sound comes back first. Not words just the crackling hiss of air being reminded it exists.
I'm lying on my back. The sky is wrong again. It folds in slow motion, like paper being creased by unseen fingers, and where it bends, pieces of other skies bleed through. One storming. One starless. One filled with static light.
I try to move. My limbs feel heavier than stone, but lighter than meaning. It's strange like gravity hasn't made up its mind yet.
My fingers brush against glass dust. Warm. Then cold. Then warm again. I realize I'm lying at the center of a new Fracture Zone a crater of liquefied truth, still pulsing from the encounter.
And then I hear it.
"…understand every truth…"
My own voice an Echo of the words I spoke before the white out. The air repeats them like it's testing how they taste. The sound vibrates inside my chest, pulling on my heartbeat.
Echoes aren't supposed to mimic the living. They're remnants of dead Axioms, floating scripts searching for believers. But this one is mine, and it's alive.
"Stop copying me," I whisper.
It laughs. Not yet.
The voice doesn't sound like me anymore. It's sharper. It moves when I breathe, almost like it's inhaling through my lungs. The air shivers; motes of color scatter, flickering with half formed sigils. They hover just long enough for me to see the pattern language born from conviction.
"When a truth is spoken with intent, the world listens," I remember one Archivist saying. "When the world answers back, that's when you're no longer a bystander."
The thought tightens in my skull. Is that what this is? The world answering me? Or did Amnesia leave something behind?
I push myself up. The landscape has changed. The still water is gone; in its place stands a ring of floating shards thin as glass, wide as banners each reflecting moments that don't belong to me.
In one shard, a woman screams her Axiom and turns her blood to fire.
In another, a monk collapses mountains with a whisper.
A child rewrites gravity to chase a falling kite.
And in the center, I see him again Amnesia, fading into the distance, walking across horizons that dissolve beneath each step.
When his reflection turns, I swear he's looking at me.
"Why did you show me this?" I ask.
No answer. Only the Echo's whisper: Because you asked to understand.
Then the shards collapse inward. Light spears through my chest. My body convulses not from pain, but recognition. Every fragment slams into me, carrying someone's forgotten truth. The noise inside my head becomes unbearable: dozens of Axioms screaming to be believed.
"I am fear."
"I am the law."
"I am never alone."
"I am the first light."
Each phrase tries to overwrite me. My pulse fractures into rhythms that don't match. My breath staggers between other people's patterns. I'm being rewritten, sentence by sentence.
I dig my nails into the ground. "I'm not your vessel!"
The air cracks. One voice pushes louder than the rest the same calm tone from before, the one that called itself me.
You wanted to understand. This is understanding.
For a heartbeat, I see the structure of the world.
Every Axiom isn't just belief it's code. Lines of metaphysical logic twisting through reality, written in conviction instead of ink. When two Axioms contradict, they tear, leaving fractures. That's what caused everything: humanity's collective argument turned physical.
I realize now that my indecision doesn't make me powerless. It makes me porous. I can absorb fragments of those contradictions because I don't belong to any single truth.
I'm not immune to belief.
I'm adaptable to it.
The insight is blinding. My veins glow briefly, outlining my nerves like constellations. The fragments within me settle still foreign, but no longer hostile. They orbit something deeper, something that might be my own forming core.
A pulse trembles through the earth. The crater responds to my thoughts crystals rising and falling in rhythm with my breathing.
"Is this… power?" I whisper.
The Echo laughs again, this time quieter. A beginning.
The glow fades. My strength drains with it. The world tilts sideways. Before I can fall, I feel hands grab my shoulders rough, gloved, smelling of old parchment and ink.
"Easy, drifter."
The voice belongs to a man in gray robes, face hidden by a hood embroidered with geometric lines the insignia of the Pale Archivists. Three more stand behind him, scanning the crater with mirrored tablets.
"You're lucky to be alive," the man says. "A neutral domain just imploded here. You were at its center."
Neutral domain. Amnesia's doing.
"I saw him," I murmur. "The one they call the Neutral Enemy."
The Archivist freezes. "Impossible. He doesn't appear twice in the same region."
"Then maybe he didn't leave," I say, glancing toward the horizon where Amnesia once stood. Nothing remains just sand, unbroken and painfully normal.
The Archivist studies me. "You're trembling. What did you feel before the collapse?"
I hesitate. If I tell them about the voices, the Axioms inside me, they'll mark me as a Fractured Host a walking contradiction. Archivists dissect those.
"I just… heard echoes," I lie. "Too many of them."
He nods slowly. "That explains the resonance." He holds up his tablet its mirrored surface flickers with faint patterns, the same symbols that burned in my veins. "You've absorbed residual belief signatures. They'll fade if you don't feed them."
"Feed them?"
"Through conviction," he says simply. "Unfed belief decays. When it does, it takes the host's mind with it."
He starts to turn away, then pauses. "If you value your sanity, find an Axiom before the next Fracture dawn."
They leave me with that warning, walking toward their caravan a collection of floating runic cubes humming softly against the wind.
I sit there, staring at my hands. The glow beneath my skin is gone, but I can still feel the static whisper of a hundred borrowed truths.
One of them murmurs again: Never lose until all is lost.
Amnesia's voice. But lighter this time, almost human. It lingers like a heartbeat that isn't mine.
The thought chills me. Did I take something from him… or did he plant something in me?
I look up at the fractured sky. The seams are closing, threads of light stitching the world back together, but crookedly as if reality can't remember how it used to fit.
For the first time, I realize that the Fracture didn't just shatter the world. It's still breaking, constantly, endlessly, every moment we argue about what's true.
And somewhere inside that unraveling, a man named Amnesia is still walking, erasing, balancing.
I tighten my grip on the glass dust. It cuts my palm, and the pain feels honest simpler than belief.
Maybe that's where I'll start.
Not with conviction, but curiosity.
Not with strength, but survival.
Because if belief makes gods and unbelief makes ghosts, then I'll be the space between them the fracture itself.
And in that space, maybe I'll finally understand what it means to be whole.