What the world forgets first is not cruelty.
Cruelty is memorable. It leaves marks. It demands stories.
What the world forgets first is care that did not have to exist.
Aldir learned this while watching a council argue over a bridge.
It was an old bridge, arched stone laid over a river that had carried bodies during the early purges—before necromancy had rules, before restraint had vocabulary. The bridge needed repairs. The council had already consulted the dead engineers who designed it.
They had consulted the victims who had drowned beneath it. They had even consulted the soldiers who had thrown those bodies into the water.
The dead agreed: the bridge should be reinforced.
The council approved unanimously.
And that was the problem.
No one asked whether rebuilding the bridge would reopen the river to traffic that had once turned it into a grave.
No one asked whether some places should remain inconvenient.
Aldir stood at the back of the hall, unnoticed. He had not been invited. He had come because he remembered the river differently.
He raised his hand.
The motion startled them—not because of authority, but because interruption had become rare.
"Have you asked," Aldir said calmly, "whether the living want to cross it again?"
A murmur rippled.
"That's not relevant," a councilor replied after a moment. "Infrastructure must serve progress."
Aldir nodded slowly.
"Progress," he repeated. "Then you should know: the dead you consulted did not drown because the bridge failed. They drowned because people stopped seeing the river as a boundary."
Silence.
Uncomfortable silence.
Finally, a younger woman spoke. "What are you suggesting?"
"I'm suggesting," Aldir said, "that sometimes the right question isn't can we rebuild, but should this remain difficult?"
They postponed the vote.
That was his victory.
Not prevention.
Delay.
Isabella watched him afterward as they walked along the riverbank. The water was calm now, almost beautiful.
"You're exhausting them," she said gently.
"Good," Aldir replied.
She smiled faintly, then frowned.
"You're exhausting yourself too."
That was also true.
The longer Aldir lived in this era of refinement, the more he felt the weight of contradiction pressing inward. His necromancy had succeeded beyond anything he imagined—and success had hollowed it out.
When something becomes normal, it becomes invisible.
People no longer recoiled when he passed.
They no longer feared him.
They barely recognized him.
Children sometimes asked if he was one of the "first-generation practitioners," as if he were a historical footnote who had wandered out of the wrong century.
Isabella, by contrast, drew attention—because she changed.
She aged.
Slowly, unevenly, but undeniably.
Fine lines at the corners of her eyes. A stiffness in her hands on cold mornings. The quiet recalibration of a woman relearning limitation after years of altered magic.
People noticed.
They treated her with a reverence Aldir no longer received.
"Your work preserved balance," scholars told her. "Your restraint saved us from gods."
They rarely mentioned Aldir in the same breath.
She corrected them when she could.
It did not matter.
The world had already decided which narratives were comfortable.
That night, Isabella woke from a dream she could not fully describe.
"There was a room," she said, sitting upright, breath shallow. "Full of voices. Not screaming. Arguing. But none of them knew why they were arguing anymore."
Aldir sat beside her.
"That's happening already," he said.
She looked at him sharply. "No. This was worse. They were using words perfectly. Ethically. But the meaning had drained out."
She hesitated, then added, "You weren't there."
The absence hurt more than any accusation.
The devils moved again.
Not openly.
They infiltrated memory curricula.
They began teaching closure.
That was the word they used.
Closure protocols. Finalization rites. Emotional efficiency metrics.
Grief, they argued, should not linger.
Aldir read one of their proposals and felt something cold settle in him.
Grief that does not linger does not transform.
It calcifies.
He attended a symposium under a false name and listened as a devil—disguised as a soft-spoken ethicist—explained a new model.
"We are not erasing the dead," it said. "We are preventing dependency. The living must move forward."
Aldir raised his hand.
"And when the living move forward too quickly," he asked, "who cleans up what they trample?"
The ethicist smiled kindly.
"That is why we optimize."
Isabella stood before Aldir could stop her.
"You cannot optimize mourning," she said. "You can only end it."
The room shifted.
Someone laughed nervously.
"This is sentimental resistance," another voice said. "We can't let feelings obstruct progress."
Isabella looked at Aldir then—not for permission, but for grounding.
He nodded once.
She spoke again, slower.
"Sentiment is memory that hasn't finished teaching yet."
The symposium ended early.
Afterward, they walked through streets lit by steady, regulated lamps. No shadows. No darkness deep enough to hide regret.
"Do you think we're losing?" Isabella asked quietly.
Aldir considered the question carefully.
"No," he said. "I think we're being absorbed."
She stopped walking.
"That's worse."
"Yes," Aldir agreed.
They changed tactics.
Not by confronting institutions, but by cultivating unrecorded spaces.
They began hosting gatherings without documentation. No transcripts. No memory extraction. No archival consent.
People came hesitantly at first.
Then eagerly.
They sat with the dead without speaking.
They told stories that contradicted official records.
They allowed grief to remain unresolved.
The devils despised these gatherings.
They could not infiltrate them without becoming visible.
Still, they adapted.
They began whispering that Aldir and Isabella were creating memory cults.
That these spaces were regressive.
Dangerous.
Anti-progress.
The accusation stung—not because it was true, but because it was effective.
Some people left.
Others stayed.
Aldir noticed something then—something deeply unsettling.
Those who stayed were not the powerful.
They were not leaders.
They were caretakers. Laborers. Parents. The quietly exhausted.
People for whom grief was not theoretical.
One evening, a woman approached Aldir after a gathering.
"My son died," she said simply. "The system says I'm done grieving. But I'm not."
Aldir did not offer necromancy.
He did not offer answers.
He just listened.
Later, Isabella said, "You didn't teach her anything."
Aldir shook his head.
"I reminded her she didn't need permission."
That was when Aldir understood what the world was forgetting first:
Not death.
Not pain.
But permission to feel unfinished.
The devils wanted endings.
Clean arcs.
Final judgments.
Because endings could be owned.
What Aldir and Isabella cultivated was continuity without resolution.
And that frightened the eternal.
That night, Aldir stood alone beneath the stars.
He could feel time pressing on Isabella now—slowly, insistently.
One day, she would weaken further.
One day, the imbalance would become unbearable.
The devils would offer solutions again.
They always did.
He clenched his hands, feeling the old necromantic hum stir reflexively—and forced it still.
Power would not save this.
Only patience would.
Somewhere, a bell rang to mark the hour.
Aldir realized he no longer knew which calendar it belonged to.
And that, too, was part of the forgetting.
But as long as he could still notice what was being forgotten—
As long as Isabella still chose to stand beside him, finite and defiant—
The erosion had not won.
Not yet.