Hope is a voice you hold on to when silence wants you gone… a fragile thread in the dark, where I am not alone.
I felt lost.
The kind of lost when all the roads disappear and you're left with no direction, only silence and uncertainty stretching out before you.
Thayer.
The name feels frayed now, like a thread worn thin.
When I picture it, the letters don't even sit still—they blur and fade like ink left out in the rain, pieces slipping away before I can gather them back.
I say it sometimes, just to remember I was real.
"T…Thay…Thayer…" It came out weak and quieter than usual.
It always sounded better when she'd say it.
She'd draw out the 'Th' just slightly, softening the edge until it felt less like a name and more like a promise, only she could make.
Some days, I forget my own voice, and the silence fills in the blanks for me.
Half mine, half hers.
Sometimes, I can't tell where her voice ends and mine begins—like two songs playing over each other, out of tune but inseparable
Even now, I wonder if I'm just someone made up in her imagination.
A whisper of her inner warrior, exhausted. Unraveling beneath the weight of her demons.
Failing at my mission, whatever that may be. The silence cracks, and for a moment, the fragments of who I was scatter into a memory. Unsure if it's hers or mine.
"Thayer!" she yelled this time. It was a memory that could easily be from either one of us.
I looked over at her sitting at the table in her apartment, eating, "Are you going to eat with me, or do you have somewhere to be?" she asked. Her voice is so beautiful and innocent. The smell of the food she was cooking made me feel alive again. I remember she said she found an old recipe in the museum, and she just had to try it. Something to do with chicken, which we only get twice a week. Atropa has the food on a schedule. The rest of the time, it's fish; they were proud to announce that they had filtered mercury using some new technology. And went on about how it will be healthier for us all in the long run. They had their people so blinded, but how could they not be when they would sprinkle in a few good deeds to distract them from the bad ones, and no one to question that they could possibly be evil in any way.
I was standing there, in the distant background, watching that version of me respond. Hoping he'd remember how important this meal was to her, like I just had. But I had already lived it and knew better.
"I have somewhere to be," I had said, rushing to get ready. Not noticing the disappointment on her face that I am noticing now.
How I wish I had just eaten with her at that moment. She wiped the hurt clean off her face before Memory Thayer turned her way.
He sees her laughing in the sunlit kitchen, the reflections of light bouncing off her hair and the threadband around her wrist, how only she could make an Atropa monitoring system look beautiful.
She always asked about my empty wrist. Not in this memory but in many others.
It would always start with, "Why do I never wear one? Because everyone wears one."
And I never told her the truth. I brushed her off. Every part of me kept her away at arm's length.
She looked up and called my name again, though I'm not there—never really there—and it breaks something in me. How I couldn't even give her a proper goodbye. She deserved better than me. Better than someone who just ran out the door that day. All I had in my head was the job. I had to take down Atropa. And that day, I was meeting the very person who could help me.
Until my timely death. And it dawned on me that this was my last goodbye before she found me. What a shitty person I was to her.
I tried walking toward her in the opposite direction from what memory showed. I wanted to fix it.
But the moment I got close, trying to comfort her and pretend I had never left, the memory vanished, never allowing me to change the ending.
I guess that had been her version of the memory, since I stayed behind rather than following myself to see who killed me, part of me wished it had been mine. I didn't know who killed me.
It's cruel, the way these places shut me out, like doors slamming in a storm, leaving me on the outside with nothing but the echo and a shock to the heart as if I've been electrocuted, feeling just an ounce of her pain.
Something unseen had tugged me backward, snapping me out of the past and shoving me back behind her eyes. Had the unseen been worried? Maybe I could have followed myself? If I learned how to move in here, and that's what scares them.
I'd felt something here before—a shadow brushing past my thoughts—but now it lingered, heavy and near, as if Valley's every movement stirred it from its hiding place.
I looked out from Valley's view as I contemplated my next move.
Valley reached for something covered in Atropa secrecy. The cloth lay loose under her fingers, as if someone had placed it there in a hurry.
The Atropa seal wasn't just a symbol—it was a warning.
People in Noctira whispered about it the way sailors spoke of storms, in hushed tones, afraid the very air might carry their words back to the wrong ears.
I was trained to take them down, but somehow, I ended up dead instead. And now I'm here watching Valley get mixed into all of it, what I thought I could protect her from. I kept going back and forth on this other presence that was stuck with me. Maybe they dragged me here out of the memory not to control where I'd go, but for me to see this. I still don't know if they are an enemy or a foe.
The cloth began to glow from where I stood, a golden flower morphing into a snake, its petals folding inward until scales shimmered where silk had been. I panicked, moving in circles with nowhere to go and no way to help her.
Valley! I yelled, hoping it would work this time, but she couldn't hear me.
When I looked again, there was no snake, no glow; I had imagined it all. Only I could see beneath the lies.
She wouldn't see the snake because Atropa is a savior to them, a god they worship, as it brought them blissful love and the distraction of finding the perfect soulmate. Who wouldn't want to spend their lives in a fantasy like that?
I lost my grip again, pulled back into the quiet, the static, the place where thoughts get muddled.
I hate being trapped here, nothing but scattered pieces of myself drifting through someone else's mind.
Once, I ran through the streets with choices of my own. Now, every memory feels borrowed—fractured—and it leaves me hollow.
She doesn't know what she did. She thinks it was love. She thought she'd saved me.
Keeping a part of me close was a mercy.
But this? This is a prison. A maze of memories that I could never escape. Always questioning my identity.
Like wandering a city whose alleys changed overnight, doors leading to the wrong rooms, dead ends filled with echoes of moments I wish I could forget.
And I need to get through to her.
Warm air rolled in, heavy and wet, like the humidity in Noctira—thick enough to cling to your skin and make each breath feel slow.
If I can't, hopefully the other soul residing here can.
It carried the faint scent of copper and ash, like the air after a fire has burned. A smell that didn't belong here and made my skin crawl.
But I didn't belong here either.
Maybe I had smelled the same.
I'd felt the other soul here many times, but now it pressed closer, as if Valley's every movement tugged it toward me. If it's not on my side, this prison just became a whole lot more hostile.
I could still feel them watching, waiting. But before I could hunt the presence down, I heard her.
Valley.
Not aloud, but in her mind—reading something soft and careful, like she thought no one could hear. But I could.
A single name rose above the noise. Hasley.
Suddenly, I wasn't lost. I was listening.
I knew these words. I had lived with them. I'd turned them over in my mind until every sentence felt carved into me. To hear her discover them now felt like a lifeline—for both of us. If she understands the truth hidden in these pages, maybe she won't just save herself. Maybe she'll finally see me.
For the first time in a long time, I felt hope.
Like drowning in the ocean, wave after wave until someone finally throws something to float on. Just enough to breathe, and land in the distance, waiting to be reached.
But even in that moment, I felt the other presence stir—drawn to her hope like a predator sensing blood in the water.
The tide beneath me shifted, ominous and deep. Each time I surfaced, it pulled harder, colder, like it remembered me and wanted me gone.
Hope is fragile. It floats… until it doesn't.
And something beneath the surface is waiting to drag me under.
I just don't know if it's the tide… or them.