The morning light in Veritus doesn't warm anything. It just scrapes across windows and leaves the city looking tired. Like it's been awake too long, and no one's asked how it's really doing.
I wake to the sound of the radiator coughing.
My flat is still standing. That's something.
I check the lock — still jammed the way I left it. The window — still cracked. My name — still missing from the mailbox downstairs. I've learned to do this every day, like a ritual. A reminder that I haven't vanished completely. Not yet.
I reach for the journal on my nightstand — today's is marked with a small "X" in the corner. I don't know why I started doing that. Maybe I thought it'd mean something someday.
June 2
Name: [Redacted]
Status: 2nd Stage Wraithbind (unstable)
Location: Veritus – Sector 7
Memory anchor: Girl at the station. Glimpse. Possible recognition.
Feeling: Detached. Fading. Hungry. (For memory or food? Unknown.)
I write like it's the only proof I exist. The journal pages are thin, worn at the edges, but they hold more of me than I do lately.
But after that, I pause, pen hovering.
I don't remember what my voice sounds like anymore. I haven't used it in days. What if I'm forgetting that too?
The room's quiet, but not empty. Echoes crawl along the edges of my sight — faint trails of emotion left behind by someone who lived here before me. I've stopped trying to clean them away. They always come back.
One of them lingers near the bookshelf. A curled-up sadness in the shape of a girl who sat there often, legs crossed, head bowed. She read old paperbacks and cried quietly. I don't know her name, but I know how she felt.
They say when you bind a Wraithtrace, it binds you back. That's true even for strangers.
When I stand, my limbs creak with the same old ache the city wears. The cold seeps through the floorboards no matter the season, like something in Veritus is always trying to settle inside your bones.
I'm going to the kitchen, to make tea. Because routine matters. Even fake ones.
Halfway through boiling water, I feel it — a pull in my chest, like a thread being tugged. Not painful, just… familiar.
It's happening more often now. Random surges. Emotional static in the air. A trace is waking somewhere nearby.
I get dressed. Layer by layer, like armor. I grab my coat. The same one I always wear. Pockets heavy with chalk, tape, and thread — the tools I've learned to carry, even if I don't remember who taught me. Then the scarf. Not because of weather — because it helps me feel there.
Fingers brush the edge of my Wraithmark through the fabric. Still warm. Still pulsing. Still mine.
The door groans as I step into the stairwell.
Three floors down, past the repair shop that doesn't know I live here, and out into the fog-draped street.
Outside, the streets blur into gray. Sector 7's always looked like it forgot what color was.
Veritus doesn't sleep. It forgets. People move like ghosts in reverse — busy, loud, unaware they're surrounded by echoes of themselves. And I… I move like I'm trespassing in a world that used to know me.
And sometimes, if you walk quiet enough… it lets you find what's been erased.
At the corner, I pass the café again. The one with the starless foam. The girl working inside doesn't glance up. I don't go in. I don't want to see her eyes look through me again.
Instead, I follow the pull — that faint tension behind my ribs that tells me something's waiting.
It leads me down a narrow side street that doesn't show up on any map. Veritus is full of them — alleys that bend in on themselves, doors that only open when no one's looking.
Halfway down, I feel it. A Trace.
It clings to the wall beside a boarded-up flower shop. A child's echo, from the look of it — light, jittery, like leftover laughter sealed in concrete.
I crouch beside it and place my hand to the wall.
The contact is like a chord striking a broken piano.
Suddenly A flash —
A small boy with missing front teeth. A woman holding his hand. A birthday balloon tied to his wrist. A memory that smells like cake and car fumes.
Then it's gone.
I pull back, chest tightening.
The more I touch them, the more I lose. But I need to remember something, even if it's not mine.
A sharp sound slices the air— metal scraping concrete.
I turn.
At the far end of the alley, a figure stands — just still enough to be wrong. Face half-shaded by a rusted overpass. Watching.
I freeze.
A cold shift in the air tells me this isn't a Trace. This is real.
But something in the figure vibrates wrong — like it's been near the echoes for too long.
Before I can call out, the figure tilts its head. Then walks away, vanishing into the mist between blinking signs and stacked debris.
Gone.
I don't chase. I've learned not to chase shadows that stare back.
Still, I mark the wall behind me with chalk — a simple glyph I've used before. Half a circle with a cross through it.
It means: echo active. unstable. avoid.
As I walk back into the street's noise, I feel the Trace still buzzing in my fingers. The boy's birthday. The warmth of the woman's hand. The absence that followed.
I wonder who they were.
And I wonder who I am without these fragments.
That night, I return home. I cross out the "X" on the journal and draw a line underneath.
"Saw something. Not a Trace. Not a person either. Watching me. Felt… aware."
I don't write anymore.
Some truths don't belong in ink.
Outside, Veritus sighs under the weight of its own forgetting.
Inside, I press my hand to the wall, feeling the heartbeat of a city that no longer knows my name.
But I remember theirs.
And that's enough— for now.