Host: Mira Kestrel (Archivist, District 6 Registry)City: Aerlane — names are currency; the city taxes them.SAFEHOUSE (portable mark): Attic bindery above the shuttered Kestrel & Daughters PressPerks: Anchor Memory I | Thread-Sight I | Lucid Override I | Safehouse Mark (portable) | Backstep (10s, clean)Status In: Global 83d | Level 7 (753/800) | Streak 0d (+0%)Echo (local):The Forgetter — the "practical voice" that urges redaction, compliance, and mercy-kill erasures "for civic stability."
0) Arrival: Ink, Dust, Silence
He lands in a woman's body that smells faintly of linseed and old oak. His—her—hands know how to square a stack of documents with one slap of the palm. The Registry vault breathes cold.
A brass placard on the wall reads: "Order is Mercy." The Echo likes that sentence too much.
NEW HOST ONLINE: Mira Kestrel — Archivist II LOCAL TIMER (Act III): 21 days PRIMARY HAZARD: Systemic erasure (legal/social/sorcerous) SAFEHOUSE: Attic bindery (mark set) ECHO STRENGTH: 18% (rises in silence)
He flips the placard face-down.
+5 XP: Symbolic defiance of Echo Total: 758/800
The first file on the morning cart is blank. Not empty—blank: edges grayed by fingers that turned pages that are no longer there.
Stamped diagonally across the cover in red: INCONVENIENT.
There's a child's photo paperclipped to the inside: a blur where a face should be, like fog on glass.
Handwritten at the bottom: Junia. The "J" looks stubborn.
The room's lights hum. The Echo unspools: Seal it. Close the ledger. Mercy is a clean absence.
He looks at the blur until his own eyes water.
"No triage without names.""No warrant without ledger."No registry without witness.
He writes: JUNIA LARK in block letters on an index card and tucks it into his sleeve where the skin is warm.
ANCHOR NOTE (ad-hoc): +10 XP — Named the threatened subject; declared witness duty under risk. Total: 768/800 1) The Attic Press & the Woman With Ink on Her Hands
Night folds the city into smaller pieces. The attic bindery holds heat under the rafters. He unlocks the old press by feel.
Someone coughs in the shadowed stairwell, then pretends they didn't. He waits. The cough returns.
"Door's open," he says, low.
A woman steps into the lamplight. Tall. Left-handed. Ink on her knuckles like a constellation. She carries a roll of wheat-paste posters under one arm.
"Elara Roe," she says. "Typographer. I make the city read what it's trying to avoid."
"That's dangerous work," he answers.
"So is telling the truth in a ledger," she says, and smiles like she's testing whether it will be allowed.
They exchange trades: he has a legal shelf number; she has walls and eyes. He feeds the press with Memory Slips—tiny unassuming cards carrying three facts: JUNIA LARK — age 7 — District 6 — last seen: Market Bridge — witness: M. Kestrel.
Elara's fingers brush his wrist as she takes the first set. A harmless contact. It rings like a struck glass.
+10 XP: Secured ally with unique distribution network. Level Up → L8 (778/900) Perk Point +1
He doesn't spend the point yet. He wants Anchor Memory II if he earns it clean at Act Clear. He keeps Elara talking because voices anchor better than silence.
"Why do names go?" he asks.
"They're taxed," she says. "The city bleeds names to fund 'stability.' You've seen the White Fountain?"
He hasn't, but his host has. The White Fountain sits in the civic heart, drinking the ink out of certain lines. Citizens call it the Mnemos when they're tired of pretending it's just a sculpture.
"Then you know," Elara finishes. "Someone feeds it."
He knows exactly which kind of someone.
2) Day 2 — The Registrar & the Empty Chair
The Registrar's office is warm and full of plants that thrive on rhymes—ivy wound around rules. Regan Vale, Registrar, waters them with a ceramic cup that used to be a teacup and is now a weapon.
"There's a backlog," Vale says pleasantly. "You will resolve it."
"Including the Inconvenient files?" Mira asks.
"Especially those," Vale says. "They are accidents. Send them to City Cleanliness."
City Cleanliness is a euphemism like a fresh coat of paint over mold.
Mira nods, and does not.
In the afternoon's pale lull, a woman sits at a public inquiry desk and asks for her niece. "Junie," she says, and then frowns. "Junia? Um. She—she was here. My sister says—" The woman stops. The sentence dissolves. She blinks, embarrassed. "What was I saying?"
Mira slides a Memory Slip across the desk.
"Take this," he says gently. "Put it in your wallet. Read it hourly until the letters stop slipping."
The woman's eyes brim. "Thank you," she says. "Thank you for my—" She touches the card, breathes, swallows. "For my niece."
+15 XP: Protected bond (family link) under erasure pressure. Total: 793/900
The Echo pushes: You can't save everyone; delete strategically. He files the thought as hostile advice.
That night in the attic, he and Elara run the press until their shoulders burn. She tells him about her sister who changed her name to miss a tax bracket and then forgot who she'd been trying to be.
"Why keep doing this?" Elara asks, rolling paste.
"Because sometimes the city believes its own paperwork," he says. "And sometimes it believes a thousand small posters that refuse to go away."
Elara leans an elbow on the press. "And what do you believe?"
"That there's a child named Junia Lark," he says, not looking at Elara because the room got small. "And that forgetting her will eat me from the inside out."
She studies him, eyes thoughtful, mouth soft.
"Okay," she says. "Then I believe that too."
+10 XP: Mutual commitment vow formed (ally bond strengthened) Total: 803/900 3) Day 4 — First Bite
On Market Bridge where Junia vanished, food vendors trade names for discount bowls: say your grandmother's maiden name and I'll knock off a coin. People laugh. The laugh feels wrong.
Thread-Sight tingles: a flash of a handbill peeling in the rain to reveal a sigil etched into the stone underlayer—three concentric squares and an unblinking dot. A mnemon glyph.
He waits for the crowd to swell, then kneels as if to tie his boot. Elara covers him with her body, chatting brightly about linocut ink weights while he rubs a charcoal over paper and lifts a rubbing of the glyph.
A city guard clears his throat. "No unauthorized tracings."
Mira stands, smiles. "Official registry audit." He flashes an actual badge. The guard squints, thinks about paperwork, and decides he loves his free time.
+10 XP: Truth Found (glyph channel), social survival vs. authority Total: 813/900
The rubbing smells like rain and steel. Later, in the attic, he overlays it with a map of district drainage. The glyph network travels under water and rumor. It ends at the civic heart: the White Fountain.
"As expected," Elara says.
"Expected and provable are different," he answers.
The Echo taps a finger in his head: You don't need to prove; just remove. He doesn't listen. Proving makes rooms, and rooms let witnesses in.
4) Day 6 — The First Forgetting
Names are a muscle; when you stop using them, they atrophy. He's careful—written notes, whispered repetitions, anchored slips—but sometime between tea and dusk, he looks at the index card and Junia blurs.
He grips the table until wood bites palm.
"Derek?" Elara's voice. Gentle. He's used to being called Mira here; hearing himself startled open is like cold water. "Read with me," she says, and lays her ink-smudged hand over his.
They do it like a litany:
"Junia Lark," he says."Age seven," she says."District Six.""Market Bridge.""Witness: Mira Kestrel," Elara finishes, and squeezes his fingers.
The letters come back into shape like a face surfacing from water.
He realizes he's shaking. He hates showing it. He hates that he hates it.
Elara doesn't comment. She just reaches past him to the press, runs her fingertip over the E-stop ridge on the flywheel, and then sets a fresh line of type.
"Let me carry it for an hour," she says. "You rest."
He lets her.
+15 XP: Resisted Echo (active forgetting) with ally aid (bond deepened) Total: 828/900 5) Day 7 — The Door & the Ten Seconds
Registrar Vale "invites" Mira to an evening cultural event: a private fountain viewing. It's not a request.
The White Fountain is beautiful the way a blade is beautiful. Its limestone ribs flex when no wind blows. The pool is white because the water has forgotten it was water.
A young clerk refills Vale's cup. The clerk's name tag reads ANA. Mira blinks, and it reads A—. He blinks again, and it reads nothing at all.
He Backsteps.
Time clicks back ten seconds. The clerk's tag reads ANA again.
"Your name is Ana," he says quickly, quietly. "Repeat it to yourself until your shift ends. Then write it twenty times on paper and tuck it inside your sock."
She laughs, then sees his face, and stops laughing. "Okay," she whispers.
Across the pool, Vale watches like a python watches heat.
Vale raises the teacup. "Archivist Kestrel. Do you know why the fountain is white?"
"Because limestone leaches," Mira says blandly.
"Because it purifies," Vale says, and drinks.
Mira thinks of Junia slipping out of a hand, of Elara's fingers on the E-stop ridge. He thinks of Emma's laugh in rain. He decides to be rude.
"Purity is a word people use when they want to wash blood off numbers," he says.
Conversation skids. Vale's smile thins. Somewhere, a plant dies.
+25 XP: Backstep used to save a name; high-risk defiance at seat of power. Total: 853/900 6) Day 9 — Names on the Wind
Elara scales a scaffold at dawn, pastes a triptych over a municipal mural: WHAT IS LEFT OF A CITY THAT EATS ITS YOUNG? Beneath, a neat grid of Memory Slips—each with a different "inconvenient" first name. People stop. They say the names out loud. The air changes shape.
A patrol rounds the corner, bored until they aren't. "Remove that," one says, reaching for his baton.
Mira steps between baton and paper. He is terrified in a slow, competent way.
"This is a sanctioned notice of inquiry," he lies, chin high. "Removal is contempt."
"By who's order?" the guard sneers.
Mira points at the bottom line of the poster. Elara has set it in 7pt type; only someone trained will see it. The line reads: Harbor Tribunal Notice 441-B—a code that, strictly speaking, does not exist yet.
The guard squints. His partner squints. No one likes asking a clerk to explain a number. They move on.
Elara hops down and lands close. Too close. Close enough to smell citrus oil in her hair.
"You make good numbers," she says.
"You make good trouble," he says.
They grin at each other like conspirators at a high window.
+15 XP: Public action escalated without violence; ally romance flag ↑ Total: 868/900 7) Day 12 — The Vault
He follows glyph-channels and ledger gaps to the sub-basement beneath Vale's office. The door is iron that remembers wrists. It opens when someone who has signed too many erasures touches it.
Inside: a vault lit like a library in a fever dream. Shelves of ledger-spines that say nothing and hold everything. The Mnemos hums behind the wall—you can hear water forgetting to be itself. A child-sized coat hangs on a peg. The tag reads —NIA.
Thread-Sight shows two futures:
A) He torches the shelves. The smoke dies white. The city panics. The child remains unfound.
B) He steals the Index of Indices—a thin, ugly book bound in something that is not leather—then files a public Request for Review in twelve jurisdictions at once, forcing the Mnemos into the light.
He chooses B. He is not here to purify. He is here to survive other people's purity.
He takes the Index. On his way out, he pockets the coat tag.
+30 XP: Truth Found (Core index), restraint vs. cathartic destruction Level Up → L9 (898/1000) Perk Point +1 (unspent: 2) 8) Day 15 — The Trial of Names
It's not really a trial. It's a bureaucracy with all the lights on. Harbor Tribunal, Temple Court, and District Board sit in joint session because Mira filed them into the same room and then didn't let anyone leave.
Registrar Vale arrives with counsel and a smile like a monogrammed knife. Elara sits in the gallery, shoulders tight, jaw soft.
Mira does not grandstand. He does not name names that are not his to name. He pushes the Index into evidence and calls the mnemon engineer who was bribed to etch glyphs into drainage stone. He calls the market vendor who offered discounts for grandmother names and then printed them on, not paper, but water-soluble slips routed to a city culvert. He calls Ana, who is still Ana, who testifies that she was trained to look past incomplete tags.
He reads from the coat tag.
"Junia," he says, and the room hushes like a chord resolved.
"Junia Lark," he says again, and the white pooled water up the hall flexes.
Vale does a beautiful thing badly: he tries to sound like he is on the side of poor families who need order. The crowd knows the price of order. You can tell from how they hold their mouths.
When it is over, the Tribunal does not jail Vale. It does something worse to someone like Vale: it remands him to maintenance oversight of the very glyphs he abused, under public camera, for a year. He will spend twelve months unwiring the city he wired. He will be remembered for it.
"The Fountain will be shuttered for audit," the Speaker says. "All 'Inconvenient' files will be recatalogued under witness."
Mira breathes once. Just once.
MILESTONE: Broke an erasure engine with sunlight, not fire. +80 XP (high-impact social survival + truth) Streak: 15 days (+35%) → applied to scene awards over Act Total: 978/1000 (approx., after streak calc) 9) Day 16 — The Child
They find her in the sub-basement dormitory, curled behind a crate of blank tags, thumb in mouth, hair in knots. The city had tried to turn her into a misprint.
"Junia?" Mira kneels, careful with his voice. "I'm Mira."
She studies him, solemn. "I don't like the white water," she says. "It eats songs."
"Me either," he says, and offers his hand.
She doesn't take it yet. She points at Elara, who stands a little distance back, as if reverence matters.
"Her," Junia says.
Elara moves like you do when holding an egg. "Hey, honey. You hungry?"
Junia nods, then thinks better of it, then nods again.
They walk out together—Mira carrying the Index in a bag that looks like it should hold bread; Elara carrying a child who is starting to weigh something more than a rumor.
Outside, the crowd doesn't cheer. They speak. Names. Quietly, like a spell done right.
+40 XP: Protected bond (child); secured living witness out of system Level Up → L10 (approx. 1018/1100) Perk Point +1 (unspent: 3) 10) Day 18 — Growth: What We Keep
The attic is warm. Junia sleeps in a nest of ink rags and blankets. Elara stands at the window, hands wrapped around a mug she forgot to drink.
"You said once that forgetting her would eat you from the inside," Elara says. "What about remembering me?"
He could dodge. He could deflect with policy or process.
He doesn't.
"I remember your left-handed s curves," he says. "I remember the way you touch the E-stop before you start the press like a superstition. I remember your sister's borrowed name. I remember wanting you to carry the weight for an hour and hating that I wanted that, and you carrying it anyway."
Elara's breath skips. She sets the mug down because her hands have work to do that isn't holding something.
"Then remember this," she says, and steps close.
It isn't dramatic. It isn't pure. It's two people who've survived a week of quiet war sharing the only luxury Aerlane doesn't tax: a soft mouth on a soft mouth, the press creaking in the corner like an old aunt who approves.
They laugh into each other when the press actually does creak.
+20 XP: Romance bond secured under hazard; emotional survival Total: ~1038/1100
Later, when he can think again, he spends a Perk point.
Anchor Memory II—he locks two more fragments: Elara at the window and Junia's voice saying "it eats songs."
PERK ACQUIRED: Anchor Memory II — lock two additional core memories GLOBAL ECHO RESIST: +30% (total) Perk Points remaining: 2
He keeps the other points banked; the final loop will want edges he hasn't named yet.
11) Day 21 — Act Close: A City That Chooses to Remember
The White Fountain is scaffolded, its ribs wrapped in honest canvas. Vale sweeps slurry in a yellow vest. People bring him sandwiches. No one spits. It's worse.
The Registry posts a new placard where the old one hung:
"Order is Mercy" → "Witness is Mercy" (7 votes to 2)
Mira leaves the placard face-up.
Elara walks with him to the District Gate. Junia holds his hand with the stubborn J he wrote on the first day.
"You could stay," Elara says.
"I could," he says. "But I won't win by stopping."
Elara swallows. "Then I'll make sure the printing plates don't rust." She presses a small tin into his palm—printer's black. "For luck."
He kisses her once more like a seal, not a goodbye.
Junia tucks a Memory Slip into his sleeve. He pretends he didn't already have a dozen.
The floor goes sideways. He holds on to the slip until the next room has walls.
ACT III CLEAR: "Witness is Mercy" REWARDS: +150 XP (Act Clear) Boons: ANCHOR MEMORY II (claimed) | Bonus: +1 Identity Fragment shield (temp refreshed) GLOBAL COUNTDOWN: 68 days LEVEL: 10 (approx. 1188/1200) PERK POINTS: 2 KARMIC DEBTS: 0 BONDS: Elara Roe (lover), Junia Lark (ward) Current META STATUS
LEVEL:10(1188/1200)PERKS:AnchorMemoryI–II|Thread-SightI|LucidOverrideI|SafehouseMark(portable)|Backstep(10s,clean)IDENTITY FRAGMENTS:5/5(+1tempshield)GLOBAL COUNTDOWN:68daysRULES:1)Nowarrantwithoutledger.2)Notriagewithoutnames.3)Noregistrywithoutwitness.4)Don'ttradetomorrow'smercyfortoday'sapplause.