The anniversary arrived like a wound reopening: quiet at first, then all at once. The void remembered its own absence and filled the space between stars with a cold that tasted like old promises.
JE woke to a sky that had never been sky — an expanse of braided ash and bruised constellations, each thread humming with names that weren't his. He lay on a floor made of something like obsidian and breath, and the air around him whispered in languages that curved like broken glass.
He should have known better than to call it calm.
Somewhere beyond the visible fissures, the System stuttered — not with the sterile efficiency of command, but with a tremor that was almost regret.
— System: [Observation: Vessel heartbeat irregular. Metadata diverges from baseline.]
JE pushed himself upright. Hunger rose in his ribs like a tide. Not the petty gnawing of a starving body; the appetite that came from being chosen, the one threaded into bone and oath. It pulled at him now, tugging toward a shadowed seam in the void where light had thinned to thread.
There, where the ash-threads braided into a seam, a circle had been carved across nothingness. The circle held a flicker of a day that had never existed: paper pages turning in reverse, footprints vanishing into sky, a clock whose hands moved like teeth.
JE did not approach because curiosity called. He approached because the System had chosen the point, and chosen things had weight. Besides, the voice that had been following him since the fissure first opened — the low, patient whisper he had learned to call "the Measure" — had spoken in a voice that was not quite cruel but not kind either.
— "Tonight, it remembers."
He reached the seam. The air tasted like iron and star-dust. Shapes coalesced in the periphery: fragments of memories that were not entirely his. A child's laugh that belonged to another world's sunrise. A battlefield's distant bell. A hand—someone else's hand—closing over a book whose title burned like frost.
Beneath the seam, something moved — not crawling, but unwinding. A spool of threads pulled into being, each thread a name. JE watched names unspool: vessels who had held the System before, patrons who had once been devourers and were now quiet, their letters dissolving as if being unpainted from the world.
JE felt a sting of kinship and a colder bite of dread. He had seen the echo of failed devourers before. He had watched their names curl like smoked parchment in the fissure. The memory of that chorus had been a map of peril. Tonight, the map rearranged itself.
A shadow detached from the seam and folded into his palm — not heavy, but stubbornly present, like a coin carved from midnight. It hummed with someone else's recollection: a taste of rain from a planet that had been swallowed, the lull of a child's breath, the smell of smoke and copper.
The System blinked in the back of JE's skull.
— System: [Hidden Quest Reissued: "A Memory for a Memory." Reward: Fragmentary Knowledge + Unknown Cost. Accept?]
He thought of Kael, briefly — an echoful name that had been tied to other hands and other decisions — and felt the old promise tighten: no revealing. No shortcuts. The Devourer's path was both ladder and net, and each rung borrowed a little of the climber's soul.
JE said yes because he had less patience for waiting than for wondering. He cupped the shadow-coin to his lips. The world around him folded like a page being read too quickly.
Memory came in a rush that was not memory: it arrived as images and feelings and the pungent certainty of things once loved. He tasted salt and soot and the metallic tang of a city collapsing under its own gravity. He tasted laughter that dissolved into a list of names. He saw a man with a crown of glass, singing to stars that could not be reached. He felt, for one breath, the weight of another life's regret.
And then the System took its tithe.
It was not violent. It never was. The cost was smaller than a scream and larger than a whisper. JE felt one sliver cleave from the hollow of his left wrist — a tiny notch of himself, a name he had once kept secret even from sleep. The name left like a moth. With it went the memory of a river they'd called "The Beginning" and the exact way moonlight had settled on a broken hull in the first dream that had birthed him.
He staggered and tasted nothing now but the coin's residue. The knowledge had lent him clarity where the path forked: directions to a place the fissure had once been tethered to, and an inkling of the thing that waited beyond the seam — not an enemy, not exactly, but an arbiter who catalogued failures like a librarian stacks cursed tomes.
JE clenched the empty notch on his wrist as if to hold the absence together. The hunger behind his teeth quieted a fraction; knowledge had fed it. But the price anchored itself in him like frost.
— System: [Trade Complete. New Entry: "Tithe — Personal Ephemera removed."]
The seam pulsed. In that heartbeat the Measure spoke again, softer now.
— "You will not be the first to listen."
JE looked up and saw that the ash-sky had gained fissures like spiderwebs, lines that were not random but a ledger. Each line slotted into the cosmic lattice like stitches. Somewhere along those stitches a presence watched them — patient, amused, ancient.
He did not know its name. He could feel, rather than know, the topography of its attention: patient as a spider, precise as a surgeon. It did not hunt with teeth. It hunted with scale and ledger and the quiet arithmetic of contracts.
JE's new knowledge gave him orientation. The seams were doors and bindings; the names were keys and weights. If he followed the threads, he could find the place where the System had first been unmade and reshaped, and perhaps peel back the ledger to see who had been writing the rules.
He also knew, now with a clarity that felt like a brand, that to pry at that place would bring more than answers. It would bring witnesses. And some witnesses kept terrible ledgers.
The seam closed behind him with the sound of a page flipped. The shadow-coin turned to ash in his hand and sifted through his fingers like the last of a long dream.
— System: [Quest Update: "A Memory for a Memory" — Partial Success. New Objective: "Find the Archivist of Broken Names." Hint: It favors anniversaries.]
JE walked away without the river's name, with a small hollow in his wrist, and with a direction. The void watched him go, not unkindly. Hunger hummed. So did curiosity. So did dread.
There are bargains that teach you how to beg. There are bargains that teach you whom to fear.
He had chosen. The ledger had taken. The witness had noted it.
Tonight, the anniversary would remember him.
And that, JE thought as the ash-sky stitched itself closed above, was only the beginning.
---
— System: [LOG SAVED — Vessel Action Recorded. Monitoring continues.]