Rain fell backward for a moment.
Not in some poetic sense. Not as a metaphor.
It truly reversed—sliding up from cobblestone gutters into the clouds like the sky had forgotten its role. Charles paused under the awning of the old records tower, watching the world hesitate, as if it had remembered something it was never supposed to recall.
Then it resumed. Gravity returned. The drizzle became ordinary once more, thin and miserable and laced with the stink of memory ink from the court above.
Veltharion was broken—but it wore the mask of order like a noble at a masquerade: silk on one cheek, rot on the other. Behind Charles, the Arcanum Court had just passed its newest ruling—Mnemonic Branding, now considered a sacred art, would become property of the state. Unauthorized edits to memory, even accidental ones, would be treated as high treason.
Charles tugged at the thread on his left coat cuff. It was the only piece of fabric on him that had never been enchanted. A human detail, a fray. Something the Arcanum Lords wouldn't notice. Something he could control.
On his desk this morning, he'd found a child's drawing.
Crayons. Thick paper. Smudged corners. A little version of himself—too tall, too pale, with a hint of melancholy in the jaw. It looked childish, innocent.
Except for the eye.
The left one. A gear.
Not drawn. Burned.
Charles had no memory of this illustration. No context. And no child had visited his office in weeks.
He tucked it into his coat pocket now, not because it scared him, but because it didn't.
"You ever think your hands used to look… different?" Rahul muttered, breaking the silence beside him.
Charles glanced sideways. The boy's eyes were locked on his own palms, as if they were pages in a book he'd never read before.
"The lines," Rahul continued. "The scars. I swear this one used to run straight. Now it… curves."
Charles said nothing. Let the moment sit.
Behind them, the Court bell tolled once. Low and slow. A warning to the Ashborn below: curfew was near.
Zara stood nearby, arms crossed, pink eyes fixed on the descending ashtrains that slithered down into the lower districts. She hadn't spoken since they left the courthouse. She didn't need to. Her knuckles were white.
A child had appeared in her dreams.
Named Mia. Said she had a brother. Said she remembered the sound of him, even though no one else had.
The drawing. The scar. The girl.
Something had shifted in the weave.
And it was always Charles they called when reality began to misbehave.
He stepped out from the awning, letting the ash-laced rain kiss his face. Below them, the Ash Rings waited—where the streets twisted like intestines, and every alley remembered things the world had forgotten.
Mia's home was waiting.
And beneath her bed, something that had no right to still exist... still did.
The stairs down to the Ash Rings were not carved—they were forgotten into the stone.
Charles led the way with no torch. The city's pulse guided him. He had walked these paths in his dreams long before his feet ever touched them. The trick wasn't remembering where the turns were. It was forgetting what shouldn't be there.
Rahul followed reluctantly, casting looks over his shoulder like the stairwell itself might swallow him. "Why does it feel like... like we're not moving, but the world is?"
"We are," Charles said. "But time here moves like spilled ink. It spreads, then vanishes."
Zara said nothing. Her blades, hidden in folds of cloth and illusion, sang quietly against her hips.
Below, in the lowest ring, the air changed.
The scent of copper, wet dust, and rotting candles. An invisible pressure, like they'd descended into a thought someone had locked away. Graffiti carved itself into the walls—spells of trauma, symbols of denial—painted in substances Charles did not name.
This was where memories that didn't belong ended up.
The entrance to Mia's home was a crooked plank nailed across a hollow arch. It looked like it should collapse under its own despair, but somehow, it stood.
A woman opened the door before they knocked. Hollow eyes, threadbare shawl. Her mind had been edited many times. Charles could always tell—there was a crackling behind their pupils, like a memory struggling to escape the frame it was stuffed into.
"She's upstairs," the woman said, voice flat. "But... she's not talking no more."
Charles entered without waiting.
The room was small, impossibly so. There were no windows. Light came from a lantern hung in a jar of milk. Mia sat on the bed, legs pulled up, staring at a wall covered in children's drawings. None were hers. She had no crayons. But they were signed, all of them, Mia.
Charles studied the drawings.
One showed a tall boy with black lines across his chest. One showed him holding her hand, faceless. And one—
Zara stepped closer, squinting.
"He's bleeding ink," she whispered.
From the eyes. The mouth. The chest.
Charles approached slowly. Mia did not blink.
"What's your name?" he asked.
She answered without looking at him.
"Do you still have yours?"
The air left the room.
Something unseen—some vast ripple in the corner of their perception—pressed against the walls like a second heartbeat.
Mia turned her head. Slowly. Her eyes had no fear. Just certainty.
"He lives under the bed," she said.
Charles didn't move. Neither did Mia.
The silence that followed her words wasn't empty—it was loaded. Like the room itself was waiting for someone to laugh, to scoff, to explain it all away.
But no one did.
Because they all felt it.
That hum. Barely audible. A frequency just at the edge of thought, like a whisper you couldn't hear with your ears, only with your spine.
Zara tensed, hand slowly reaching behind her cloak.
Rahul stared at the bed, eyes wide. "Under the bed, like… what, like a monster?"
Mia didn't answer. She reached out and placed something in Charles's hand.
It was a small brass cog. Worn at the edges, dented in one tooth. It had no markings, no engravings. But as soon as it touched his skin, Charles remembered something he hadn't lived.
A child's laughter.
A toy falling.
Ink spilled.
Then… screaming.
He closed his fist.
"What is this?" he asked softly.
"He gave it to me," Mia whispered. "So I wouldn't forget."
Charles looked down at the gear again.
"Your brother?"
She nodded.
"But no one else remembers he existed. Not even your mother."
Mia pulled her knees closer. "Mama says I made him up. But I didn't. He lives under the bed now. He says the bed is just the last thing that remembers him. That's why he stays there."
Zara's expression changed. It wasn't fear—Zara never feared anything with skin. It was caution. A rare thing from her.
Charles knelt beside the bed.
He didn't lift the sheet. He didn't crawl under. He simply looked at it.
And the bed looked back.
The legs were uneven, but not from poor construction. The wood had warped—not broken, but reshaped, like it was adapting to something that slept beneath it.
The floor under the bed was wrong.
Not dusty. Not cluttered. Just wrong.
It breathed.
"What do you see?" Rahul whispered, crouching low.
Charles didn't answer. His mind was racing. His thoughts were slicing the scene apart.
A child who remembers someone no one else does.
A drawing of Charles with a gear in his eye.
A bed that behaves like a memory—half real, half echo.
And a world where memory was currency.
He exhaled and stood.
"Zara," he said quietly. "Clear the room."
"What?" she blinked. "Why?"
"Because the moment I acknowledge what I think this is," Charles said, "it might become real enough to touch us."
Mia's voice came again, barely audible.
"He's waiting. But not for me."
Charles turned slowly.
Mia was staring at him. Not blinking. Her fingers were trembling.
"He said you're the one who forgot him first."
The gear in Charles's pocket began to vibrate.
The gear in Charles's pocket hummed like a caged secret.
Low. Mechanical. Alive.
He slowly reached inside and retrieved it, holding it in his palm again. But this time, the vibrations weren't random—they formed a pattern.
A heartbeat.
Charles frowned. No. Not a heartbeat.
Two.
One slow and deliberate. One frantic and childlike.
"Charles," Zara said, her voice low. "We should leave. This… this isn't a crime scene. It's a snare."
But Charles didn't move. He was staring into the floor beneath the bed.
For a brief second, he saw it. Not with his eyes, but with something deeper.
A crack in reality. Not light. Not shadow. But unbeing.
A pocket of the world where time went to die.
A place too forgotten to forget.
He knelt again. And this time, he whispered.
"I know you're listening."
The bed creaked. Just once. Not under pressure. More like acknowledgment.
Rahul muttered a string of prayers from a dozen contradicting religions. None of them helped.
Mia's mother called from the other room, asking if they needed tea. The world above moved on. The world below… did not.
Charles laid the gear on the floor and gently rolled it beneath the bed.
And then the impossible happened.
The gear fell.
As if the space under the bed was deeper than the floor. A hollow echo, like metal falling into a dry well.
Zara drew her weapon. A thin dagger shaped like a tuning fork, humming with frequency.
Charles stood. "It's not a trap. Not yet."
"You're sure?"
"No." He looked at Mia. "But I think it's a message. From something that can't speak in words anymore."
Rahul shivered. "Or something that forgot how."
Charles turned to Mia. "If I ask you a question, will you answer it honestly?"
She nodded.
"Has he ever come out from under the bed?"
Mia didn't answer at first. Her mouth opened, then closed. A hesitation not of fear—but of confusion.
"I think…" she whispered. "I think he did. Once."
Charles leaned closer. "When?"
Her brow furrowed. "When I was sick. Really sick. I thought I died. And then I woke up… and he was beside me. Holding my hand."
Zara's grip on the blade tightened.
"And what did he say?"
Mia blinked slowly. Her pupils dilated. For a heartbeat, her voice sounded older.
"He said… 'You'll forget me again. But I won't stop trying.'"
The bed creaked once more.
But this time, it breathed in.
The boy with Charles's face looked as if he had been weeping for centuries. His cheeks were stained with lines of dried ink instead of tears, and his eyes were pale—not blind, but unreadable, like they remembered too much.
Charles froze.
Not because of the resemblance.
But because he recognized the fear in the boy's eyes. A fear he had buried. A fear he thought he had outgrown.
The boy spoke first.
"You took my name."
His voice was soft, childish… and entirely wrong. The syllables didn't echo—they lingered, like something trying to become permanent again.
Charles stepped forward, trying to control his breath.
"No," he said carefully. "I don't know you."
The boy tilted his head.
"Not knowing doesn't make it untrue."
Around them, the corridor began to ripple. Paintings that hadn't been there before bled through the walls—crude sketches of a family. A little girl. A woman with no eyes. A boy with gears for teeth.
And always, in the corner, the same figure. Charles.
Watching. Distant. Unaware.
"I dreamed about this place," Charles whispered.
"You forgot this place," the boy corrected.
He took a step forward. The floor didn't creak. It sighed.
"I kept waiting for you to come back. But you kept solving other people's puzzles. Wearing my name like a coat you stitched from silence."
Charles felt something tightening in his chest.
The Machine.
The erased children.
The ones no one remembered, not even themselves.
And now, here was a boy with his face, asking not to be found, but to be remembered.
"What are you?" Charles whispered.
The boy blinked. One eye rolled too far in the socket, revealing gears turning behind it.
"I'm the version of you that chose to feel."
Then the corridor cracked.
A seam opened in the wall, revealing Veltharion—but twisted. The skyline inverted, the spires of the Arcanum Lords dripping down from the heavens like melting chandeliers.
And in the middle, the Machine's Eye, turning slowly in the sky.
Charles stumbled back.
"You're not real," he muttered. "You're a reflection. An echo."
The boy didn't argue.
But his shadow reached out like a hand.
"Then why do you remember me now?"
Charles was trembling.
Not from fear.
From recognition.
He could hear Zara yelling from the other side of the bed, muffled, distant. Rahul's voice was warbling like it was underwater.
And in that moment, Charles made a choice.
He knelt in front of the boy and whispered, "Tell me what I forgot."
The boy smiled. Not kindly. Not cruelly. Just tired.
And said:
"You were the one who built the Machine."
Charles didn't move.
The corridor around him groaned, then cracked again—this time vertically, like the world itself was splitting along an old scar.
You were the one who built the Machine.
The words didn't feel like an accusation.
They felt like a curse returning to its caster.
"I don't remember," Charles whispered.
The boy—his Echo—nodded. "That's the point. The Machine runs on forgetting. It feeds on it."
"Then why am I remembering now?"
"Because it's breaking."
Suddenly, a low mechanical whir filled the corridor. Not from any visible machine, but from the walls themselves. It was the sound of a name trying to write itself again.
The boy's eyes flared. His form began to flicker—frames skipping like a damaged film reel.
"I'm running out," he said softly.
Charles reached forward. "Wait—what do I need to do?"
The boy smiled again. This time with sorrow. "Not solve. Choose."
"Choose what?"
The boy's body twisted, pixelated. His mouth opened wide, and from it spilled not a scream—but a surge of ink, like liquefied memories rushing back too fast.
Words bubbled up from the floor, from the boy, from the space between:
THE CARTOGRAPHERS OF THOUGHT HAVE MARKED YOU.
THE HOLLOW EYE REMEMBERS WHAT YOU ERASED.
IF THE MACHINE MADE YOU, WHO UNMADE YOU?
The gear in Charles's coat burst into radiant heat.
The corridor shook. Reality strained.
And then—
A hand grabbed his wrist. Zara's.
The moment she touched him, the corridor collapsed like brittle glass.
Charles fell—upward—through the floorboards of Mia's room, gasping, soaked in cold ink that vanished the moment it hit the real air.
He was back.
Under the bed.
No longer a passageway. Just wood and dust.
Zara pulled him out, eyes wide, blade still glowing.
"Charles—what happened in there?"
Charles sat up slowly. His breath steamed in the air, though the room wasn't cold.
"I saw someone," he said. "Someone I left behind."
Rahul was staring at Mia's notebook, which now had a new page written in the same unfamiliar hand:
Don't trust the sky. The stars have names, but the stars lie.
He's still watching. Under different masks.
Tell the Mysterious Lord: the Order of the Hollow Eye remembers him.
Rahul exhaled. "What the hell is the Hollow Eye?"
Charles didn't answer. His eyes had fixed on the far wall—where a drawing Mia hadn't made now hung, pinned by an ink-dipped nail.
It was of three figures: one with a crown of keys, one with no face, and one with gears embedded in their chest.
Below, in a child's handwriting:
They were never missing. Just misplaced.
Charles stood, brushing the dust from his coat.
His voice was low, thoughtful.
"I think we've just opened a door," he said, "that shouldn't exist."
Zara glanced at the drawing, then at him. "And what's on the other side?"
Charles gave a half-smile. "The truth. Or something trying very hard to pretend to be it."
The gear in his pocket clicked once.
Soft.
Almost like a laugh.