"Some trains don't look for a station, but for a single passenger… one who never dared step off his past."The Forgotten Track Echo of the Unknown Iron
When the threads of time unraveled around Rain and his companions, they didn't fall into a place but into a void that knew their names.
The track beneath their feet wasn't built it was carved into the air, twisting like a serpent of steel.Every inch of it groaned not from weight, but from memory.
The surrounding walls weren't made of matter… but of feeling as if longing had solidified, and regret had become tangible.
The gray light leaking from the sky wasn't light… but the memory of an old dream, trying to return.
Then the train appeared it did not move, it did not whistle. It simply… waited.
No beginning, no end as if it were part of a recurring nightmare.
Its metallic frame was covered in scars that resembled faces.Some looked at you.Some turned away, ashamed to be seen.
When Rain tried to touch the door, he felt a strange recoil not of energy, but of emotion.As if the door told him:"You are late."
Then came the voice not from the train, but from within it, from something older than time:
"This train is not for you two… Not now. Not yet. Only for Niko…"
And in an instant… Rain vanished. Then Lima.
No explosion, no scream, no light.They were simply removed as a sentence is erased from a novel.
A Wordless Invitation – Entering the Memory
Niko stood alone.
But he wasn't truly alone.The walls watched.The air breathed with a depth that could not be heard only felt.
The door did not open for him.It broke as a siege breaks after a long confession.
Each compartment bore a sign:A distorted number.An old scratch.A symbol written in a language even time had forgotten.
But he did not head toward the numbered compartments…He walked toward the ones that breathed through their cracks.
A door split down the middle, leaking gray light as if the place itself bled silence.
He didn't enter…He was pulled in.
The White Room – The Child Who Knows Too Much
What surrounded him was not a "place" in the usual sense.No ground beneath him.No ceiling above.No walls to contain.
Only stark whiteness. Silent. Cold.A whiteness that pierced the senses like a psychic wall, invisible and unbreakable.
At the center of this void sat a child.
Five years old.He bore the features Niko once had before so much inside him had dimmed.
Before the boy lay a black stain, slowly spreading beneath his fingers.It wasn't clear what it was…Blood?Ink?Or perhaps just rotten silence leaking from the inside out?
The boy whispered not with his mouth, but from deep within:
"Should I have resisted?"
He waited for no answer.It wasn't a question it was a postponed condemnation.
Then, from the nothingness… a man appeared.
He had no features.No eyes.No mouth.Nothing memory could retain.
But his presence was overwhelming like a mirror that shows you your self, not your image.
He approached slowly, reached out to the child's head, and touched his forehead.
Suddenly… everything went dark.
As if a candle were extinguished one that no one knew why it had ever been lit.
When the light faded from the white room, Niko did not fall.He did not move.
He slid like a thought slipping from a tired mind into a dream that will never be remembered.
The whiteness did not vanish all at once.It cracked in silence as though silence itself could no longer endure.
And from those cracks, a shadowed path emerged…
A misty staircase leading not up, not down but in a direction that could not be named.
Niko walked it not with his eyes, but with his memory.Each step extinguished a light within him… and ignited a question.
Then…
The second door appeared.
It seemed familiar to him… uncomfortably familiar.Not just from his childhood, but from those moments when he lied to himself and said, "Everything is fine."
The door was made of gray-tinged wood, bearing no number, no sign just a slanted scratch like a wound that had been silently bleeding for years.
As Niko approached it, he didn't feel fear… but exposure.
As if the door wasn't hiding anything, but whispering:
"You know what's behind me… but you've always chosen to look away."
Niko hesitated for a moment, then reached for the handle.
But the door didn't open… it withdrew, as if memory itself opened its mouth to swallow him.
He closed his eyes for a second, and when he opened them…He was there.
In a kitchen more familiar than it had any right to be.
He recognized the cracked tiles, the damp clinging to the walls, the scent of burnt bread, and the creaking of the ancient refrigerator.
But everything felt older… heavier with sorrow, as if the kitchen had not been rebuilt from childhood, but from shattered dream fragments.
The light was dim, filtering through a grimy window that would not open.
A man sat at the table.His face wrapped in bandages, hands trembling slightly as he sliced a rotting apple with a rusty knife too carefully, as if it were his only daily ritual.
"Do you blame me?"He said it softly, but firmly… like someone used to being condemned in silence.
Niko didn't answer.
"I was you… when you chose to stay silent. When you decided not to see."
Then, without warning, the man raised his hand and removed the bandages.
Beneath them… was Niko's face.But older, wearier, stripped of any resistance.His eyes carried nothing but repeated loss.
Niko couldn't scream.He couldn't run.
And suddenly, the ground was no longer ground.It cracked beneath his feet not like a pit, but like a heart split open to reveal its secrets.
And he fell… not downward, but toward the deepest point within himself.
Inward.
Niko didn't fall… he was reborninto a city that looked like a dream, but didn't respect it.
A violet sky torn open, breathing from a wound, and maple leaves falling slowly, as if the wind had been executed.
In the square, amid stones groaning with age, stood a man.
A samurai but not like those of legend.Rather, like a past that had never been buried.
His mask was featureless.His sword, transparent.
"Father?"Niko said it as if he knew it would not be heard.
The man did not move.But the air changedAs if the place was preparing for a ritual of judgment.
Trial by Sword – The Wounds That Cannot Be Seen
It wasn't a battle.
It was a prayer made through violence.
Each strike unleashed a memory:
A mother crying in silence.A small child hiding behind a curtain.The sound of a door closing… and never opening again.
"Where were you?""Why did you choose silence?""How many times did you ignore the fire because you feared getting burned?"
Every question became a new sword.
And Niko did not fight.
He knelt.
"I wanted you to stay away... because I lived by blaming you."Niko said it as if he were collapsing into himself.
The man loosened his grip and said with a voice that carried no echo:"I am not your father.I am the guilt you magnified so you wouldn't see yourself.I am the curtain… that covered your true reflection."
Then he faded.Not with a scream, but like ink dissolving into an old page.
After the man disappeared, Niko remained alone in the square, now quieter than before, though the air never regained its warmth.
The stone city around him grew thick with mist, wrapping everything as if the very walls were breathing slowly, hiding what remained of the past.
Niko looked around but found no trace of the man or the sword, only the imprint of his own steps, soaked in the dust beginning to gather over him.
He started to feel a strange weight in his chest, as if a part of his soul had been torn with the shadow's vanishing.
Suddenly, a whisper reached his ears distant but clear Raen and Lima's voices:"We saw you… but the path you took was yours alone."
Step by step, Niko began to feel something new unfolding ahead of him, something unlike anything he'd known before.
And just as the mist started to fade
Right before clarity set in, Niko stood in a narrow chamber with no doors or windows, surrounded by a heavy silence, as if time itself had stopped turning.
At the center of this chamber stood a tall mirror.It reflected only his shadow no face, no features.
Within that shadow, a small child waited.Not to be punished or buried under guilt but to be heard, to be embraced.
Raen's voice echoed softly from afar, like a distant yet clear resonance:"We saw you, Niko… We were there, but we couldn't cross."
Lima's voice carried no less wisdom:"That path was not ours to walk… it was yours alone."
These words dissolved into the silence of the space, leaving Niko alone with one final, decisive choice.
It was the moment he realized that resistance was no longer possible, and that the gray wall surrounding him wasn't built of stone…
But of fear, pain, and denial.
As he approached it, his hands did not tremble.They were steady filled with the will for harsh truth.
There was no need to push.The wall wasn't made of bricks, but of inner barriers that melt before truth.
With a single touch, it began to crack not because someone forced it, but because admission dissolved it.
The light behind it was not salvation, nor sky, nor reward.
It was, simply: truth.
Niko didn't push the wall.He didn't knock.
He only approached.And at his touch… it melted.
When the wall dissolved beneath Niko's touch, there was no crashing sound, no blinding flash of light.There was only a breath as if the world finally exhaled after a long silence.
Behind the wall, at first, there was nothing.A gray void, shapeless, without texture as though the present had not yet been drawn.
But slowly, the emptiness began to form not as a city already built,but as a scene born from within Niko himself.
The light wasn't bright, nor comforting,but it was honest.
And through it, the features of an incomplete city began to appear:
Buildings without windows,as if waiting to be lived in for the first time.
Paths forming beneath his feet, not ahead of them.
A sky in flux neither blue nor blackbut the color of the feeling Niko carried in that very moment.
There were no road signs, no neighborhood names.Everything seemed to exist only because he walked toward it.
The city behind the wall wasn't a fixed place but a reflection of what Niko had become:
A man who had faced himself, and no longer needed a door to enter.
Because he had become the door.
The Encounter
Niko crossed the wall, and time behind him was no longer the same.
His feet did not tread familiar ground, but rather roads forming beneath each step as if the present was being written with every beat of his heart.
Then… in a corner of that shifting void, he spotted two shadows standing in a silence that wasn't quiet, but deep echoing with questions yet to be asked.
Raen and Lima.
But they weren't exactly as he remembered them.It was as if time had passed for them, too.
Lima stood near the edge of a light, her eyes gazing into something unseen.While Raen crouched, tracing incomprehensible lines on a ground that didn't truly exist.
When Niko approached, none of them spoke at first.
The silence between them was like a prayer.
Then Lima smiled not a smile of triumph, but of final relief.
"You were alone there, weren't you?"
Niko nodded, then said in a hoarse but clear voice:
"And I'm not anymore."
Raen looked up, his face marked by a weariness that belonged to more than just the body.
"We couldn't follow. The door wouldn't open for us."
"Because it wasn't a door," Niko replied."It was me."
Another silence followed, but this time, it wasn't heavy it was restful.As if, for the first time, the three of them didn't need words to know:they had survived… but not without cost.
Then, without agreement or signal, the three began to walk together toward a city with no names, no walls, and no suspended memory.
A city that, simply…was just beginning.
End of Chapter 20
In the next chapter:
In a distant city south of the continent…An ancient temple, and a ritual said to reveal the true face.
But some faces…were never meant to be seen.
Rituals of No Return