The city was dying quietly, as all things should.
Its towers did not crumble, nor did its streets crack beneath the weight of ruin. Instead, they softened, lost their definition, like ink drawn into water. Windows forgot to reflect. Names slipped from the brass plaques nailed beside doorways. The air itself began to smooth over the jagged edges of reality, as if the world were gently exhaling a dream it no longer wished to remember.
I walked among the dissolution, and every step I took unstitched another thread.
The cobblestones beneath my feet no longer carried the memory of having been laid. I could feel it—the exact moment when the pattern of their placement ceased to exist, when the workmen who once bent their backs beneath the summer sun vanished from all record, their sweat never shed, their songs never sung.
And yet there was no pain in their absence. Only the serenity of release.
I do not destroy. I do not kill. I merely unwrite.
This is what the Guardians never understood. They called me a murderer of memory, a blasphemer against existence itself. They built shrines to remembrance, as if worshiping the weight of their own grief could stave off decay. But I have seen what memory does. I have seen it rot the soul from the inside, a slow poison that convinces us we are what we once were, instead of what we might yet become.
I am the cure. I am the silence that follows the last word.
When I was still young—when I still believed in time—I thought erasure would sound like fire, like the tearing of paper. But the truth is gentler. It is the sound of forgetting to breathe.
The city had once been called Velara. I know this only because its name lingered longer than the rest, echoing faintly in the margins of the great Library before I tore it out. Velara was built on the promise of permanence. Its people recorded everything—their births, their loves, their grief, their wars. Every street corner bore a plaque commemorating something. It was a monument to memory, a shrine to the arrogance of endurance.
So I came here first.
When I entered Velara, its people still lived, still clung to their stories like infants to the hem of a dying mother. They looked upon me with terror when I spoke of silence. Some begged me to spare their names; others spat at my feet, proclaiming that memory was what made them human. I did not argue. I merely began.
Now, there is no Velara. There are no people. There is only the whisper of wind where streets once met, and the faint scent of ink fading into dust.
I walked down what remained of its central avenue. The lamplights flickered in recognition, then dimmed, forgetting their purpose. The shadows followed reluctantly, thinning into absence. I carried no torch, no weapon—only my ledger, bound in pale leather that never stains, its pages empty yet infinite.
Every life, every city, every moment exists somewhere in that endless tome. I do not write in it. I only turn the pages. And when I find the line that should not be, I pull.
There is a peculiar tenderness in the act of erasure. You must not rush it. Each unmaking must be precise, respectful. I trace the edge of existence with my fingertip until the ink loosens, until the world sighs and slips away. Some resist—echoes cling, memories snarl in panic—but resistance only prolongs the inevitable. All stories crave their ending.
As I reached the heart of Velara, the clock tower stood before me, the last remnant of the city's defiance. Its hands trembled, trapped between moments that no longer existed. I could feel time unraveling around it, uncertain whether it had already passed or was yet to come.
I stepped closer. The stones shuddered under the weight of forgetting.
Inside, a single bell hung suspended in silence. Once, it had marked the hours, dividing the lives of Velara into fragments of purpose. Now it waited to toll the last note of the world's memory. I touched its surface—it was cold, though not metallic. Cold like absence.
When I rang it, no sound came. The motion was enough.
The streets outside folded inward, their geometry bending toward the void. Towers became brushstrokes, then smudges, then nothing. The Library took the pages back.
For a moment, I thought I saw a figure standing at the edge of the dissolving skyline—a woman, or perhaps the memory of one. Her outline quivered, uncertain. She was watching me, though her eyes no longer existed. I tried to recall her name, but the effort broke upon the surface of my own forgetting. Perhaps she was once a Guardian. Perhaps she was once mine.
It does not matter.
The bell stilled. The city was gone.
And yet, as I closed my ledger, a strange unease rippled through me. Normally, the silence that follows erasure is pure, seamless—a stillness unmarred by reflection. But this time, I heard something.
A whisper.
Faint, like the brushing of a quill against parchment. It came from nowhere and everywhere at once. The sound of writing.
I froze. Such things should be impossible. When I erase, there should be nothing left to write back. Yet the whisper persisted, threading through the emptiness, a voice struggling to take shape.
I opened the ledger. The pages fluttered as if stirred by breath. On one of them, in ink darker than shadow, a single word appeared:
"Why?"
I stared at it for a long time.
The question bled slowly across the page, curling at the edges like a wound refusing to close. My hands trembled—not from fear, but from recognition. That word was not foreign. It was mine.
I remembered the first time I had asked it. Before the Library, before the silence. Before I became the Archivist.
Back then, I had been another story—a scholar, perhaps, or a priest. I had sought to preserve the truth of the world, to collect every fragment of knowledge before time devoured it. I believed that through memory we could transcend death. But memory betrayed me. It twisted truth into myth, love into loss. The more I remembered, the less I remained myself.
So I went to the Library. I begged it for a cure.
It answered with a gift: the ability to forget perfectly.
And with that gift, I began to unwrite.
But now, here in the silence I had built, the word had returned. Why. The first word ever spoken. The first wound.
I tried to erase it. My fingers brushed the ink, ready to unmake it—but the page resisted. The letterforms held fast, biting into the parchment like thorns. It was as if the word had roots, growing deeper with every attempt to remove it.
The whisper grew louder. A thousand forgotten voices murmuring beneath it. Not accusation. Not fear. Something else. Remembrance.
I closed the book and held it against my chest. For the first time in what might have been centuries—or minutes—I felt the weight of what I had done. Not guilt, exactly, but density. Like the gravity of an unshed tear.
The Library was stirring.
Far beyond the horizon of perception, where all unwritten things sleep, the shelves were shifting. I could feel it through the soles of my feet—the tremor of unwelcome life returning to the void. Pages fluttering in dark currents, stories clawing their way back into being. The blankness was bleeding.
It should have terrified me. Instead, I was curious.
Perhaps the void, too, desires to remember.
I turned away from where Velara had been. There was nothing left to see—no city, no road, not even the impression of absence. Yet the air shimmered faintly, as if the world were hesitating to close the wound. I could taste the residue of existence on my tongue—bitter, metallic, like the ghost of rain.
I began to walk again, though I could not say where. Direction means little when time has lost its axis. I follow the quiet, always. It leads me where unmaking is needed most.
Behind me, the echo of the bell that never rang followed for a while, then faded.
There are still so many stories left to erase. So many voices still clinging to their small eternities. But now, for the first time, I wonder if silence, too, is merely another kind of story.
I looked down at the ledger once more. The ink had spread. Beneath Why, new words had appeared, fragile but deliberate, written in a hand I almost recognized:
"Because you remember."
The world swayed.
For a moment, the void tilted, and I saw—just beyond the threshold of forgetting—a figure writing in the dark. Not me, but someone who looked like me, older, weary, watching the same dissolution from another angle. They were writing my words as I spoke them. Or perhaps I was speaking what they wrote.
The page trembled between us.
Then it was gone.
Silence returned, but it was no longer pure. It carried the faint echo of a heartbeat, slow and stubborn.
I continued onward, through the ash of what had never been, toward the next unwritten horizon. My hands no longer shook. The ledger was warm now, as if alive.
Perhaps it always has been.
Perhaps all this time, I have not been erasing the world, but turning its pages.
And somewhere ahead—beyond all forgetting—someone is still writing.