There are sounds that should not exist in silence.
They do not arrive as noise but as disobedience—as if the stillness itself flinches. That is how I first knew something had changed.
For endless ages, the void has obeyed me. Every erasure falls into perfect hush, every memory dissolves into the calm of nonbeing. But now, when I walk through the fields of nothingness, I hear… hesitation.
The silence holds its breath.
It began after Velara was undone. The tremor spread outward, faint but insistent, like the first ripple on an undisturbed lake. The void remembers that something once moved across its surface, though it should not. I feel it beneath my feet when I walk—the pulse of something living in the marrow of nothing.
At first I thought it grief. Perhaps the echo of the city, lingering longer than it should. But grief is a form of memory, and I have spent too long excising both to mistake them.
This is not grief. It is remembrance.
Something remembers me.
I wander through the unlit plains, where color has no foothold and distance folds upon itself. Each step leaves no trace, yet somehow I feel watched. The emptiness bends subtly, a suggestion of gaze. Sometimes, when I turn, I think I see another figure in the distance—thin, pale, indistinct, as if carved from the margin of a thought. But when I blink, it collapses into dustless air.
It is a peculiar sensation to be imagined by one's own creation.
I should erase this disturbance. That would be the simplest way. I could open my ledger, find the line where the tremor began, and pull. But something in me resists the act. A curiosity I thought long extinguished stirs beneath the surface. I tell myself it is duty—the void must be studied, understood—but that is a lie.
I am simply lonely.
Silence is perfection, yes. But perfection is also solitude. I have forgotten how long it has been since I last heard another voice not born of my own reflection.
Now, faintly, I hear one.
A whisper threading through the quiet: Velara.
The word reaches me like a scent remembered from a dream—impossible, but undeniable. It drifts from nowhere, from everywhere, like a prayer uttered by a vanished world.
I stop walking. The void listens with me.
There, again. The same voice, trembling, fragile, but alive.
Velara.
Each repetition strengthens it, as if the word gathers itself from its own echo. With every breath it grows more coherent, more insistent. I can almost feel the shape of the lips that form it—a voice that does not know it is impossible.
And beneath it, the faintest rhythm of a heartbeat.
Mine, or another's.
I open my ledger. Its pages flicker like candlelight caught in a draft. The ink shifts of its own accord, forming lines I did not write. There, between the margins of the undone, a new passage blooms in a hand not mine:
> "The memory breathes."
The words glimmer, then sink into the parchment, leaving a faint warmth behind. The ledger shudders, as though reluctant to accept what has been written.
"The memory breathes."
I trace the phrase with one finger. The letters pulse faintly, like veins beneath skin.
I know that hand. Or at least, I think I do.
The Guardians. They were the first to oppose me, long before the Library granted me full curatorship of silence. I unmade their citadels, their archives, their names—but some part of them must have endured. Perhaps they hid within the margins, burrowed into the seams of unwritten things, waiting for the moment when remembrance might rise again.
Yet this feels different. More intimate.
The voice that speaks Velara does not speak in defiance. It speaks in longing.
I close the ledger and press it to my chest. The whisper continues, a thread of sound weaving through the nothing. It calls not outward, but toward me, as if seeking the source of its own vanishing.
Perhaps I should let it find me.
I walk in the direction of the word, though direction has no meaning here. The void reshapes itself in response to intent—distance becomes will, and space becomes belief. I follow the vibration through the silence until the air begins to change.
There is no light here, not truly, but a suggestion of glow, as if something remembered the idea of dawn. Around me, the emptiness thickens. Shapes begin to flicker in and out—archways, fragments of walls, the curve of a hand resting on a stone. They appear, then dissolve, as though an unseen artist were attempting to redraw a forgotten world from memory alone.
Velara.
The whisper is stronger now. The syllables tremble with meaning, though I no longer recall what they once meant. I step closer, and the world wavers like glass about to shatter.
I find myself standing before what might once have been a gate. Two pillars of light, uneven and cracked, hum softly with the strain of remembrance. Between them, a veil of faint mist shimmers, its surface rippling with images that refuse coherence. Faces, buildings, stars. Each one appears for the span of a breath, then vanishes into translucence.
At the center of that veil, a single word burns faintly: Velara.
I reach toward it. The mist recoils, then leans closer, as though recognizing me. The heat from the word brushes my skin, neither pain nor comfort but presence.
A flicker of sound—footsteps, approaching.
I turn, but there is nothing behind me. Only the vast, trembling hush.
Still, the footsteps continue. Not echoing—nothing here echoes—but overlapping my own heartbeat, aligning perfectly with it.
Then I understand. The sound is coming from me.
Every time I breathe, another pair of steps follows. Every exhalation carries another rhythm, a second self walking beside me, unseen.
For the first time in eternity, I feel afraid.
I look again into the mist. It shifts, showing the faint outline of a figure—a woman, robed in the light of memory, her face blurred by distance but her posture unmistakable. She holds something to her chest: a single page, glowing with defiance.
She is speaking. I cannot hear the words, but I feel them vibrate through the void, tugging at the edges of the nothing I have so carefully tended.
Her mouth forms the name again.
Velara.
The veil shatters like glass under water.
Light floods outward, not blinding but impossibly soft—the light of something remembering itself. The void reels, staggering under the intrusion. Pages in my ledger flutter violently, trying to hold their silence, but the ink begins to rise from them like smoke, drifting toward the rupture.
I stumble back. For a heartbeat, the void breathes.
And I hear it—the sound of the world inhaling for the first time in eons.
It is beautiful. It is terrible.
The silence tries to close, to swallow the light, but the memory resists. The two forces press against one another, neither yielding. I stand between them, feeling the pull of both: the comfort of oblivion and the ache of existence.
This is what I have spent all eternity escaping—the pulse of life, the unbearable persistence of what refuses to end.
And yet, I cannot turn away.
The woman's figure flickers within the breach, her gaze meeting mine. For an instant, I see myself reflected there—same eyes, same sorrow. Recognition blooms like fire in the cold.
Then she speaks—not aloud, but within the fabric of the void itself, her words carving through the silence like a blade:
> "You are not alone."
The light collapses inward. The breach seals, leaving only faint warmth in the air.
I fall to my knees, the ledger clutched against my heart. The silence returns, but it is no longer perfect. It trembles, alive with the ghost of sound.
For the first time, I cannot tell if I am comforted or undone.
I open the ledger once more. The pages are blank, save for a single new line written in the same unfamiliar hand as before:
> "The memory breathes, because you remember."
I close the book slowly.
Perhaps the Guardians were right. Perhaps to preserve even one memory is to defy the void.
But if that is true—if remembrance can survive even here—then perhaps erasure was never as complete as I believed.
Perhaps I am not the Archivist of Oblivion at all.
Perhaps I am merely its witness.
And somewhere, in the hollow between silence and speech, a forgotten city is breathing once again.