Tirian had walked for what felt like lifetimes.
The ash clung to him now—not as filth, but as intention. Each step stirred not just powder, but memory. Ghosts did not haunt this place. The land itself remembered everything, and it wanted him to remember, too.
But his mind was still a cage.
And the key, he feared, was shaped like pain.
He passed beneath arches carved from bone, their inscriptions unreadable. They pulsed faintly in the dark, echoing in a tongue older than time. Around him, the world was still crumbling—but slower now, as if something had begun to observe again.
Observation changed things.
He knew this too well.
In the distance, a city flickered in and out of existence. Not a mirage—something worse. A refusal to decide whether it wanted to be real. One moment, it was a cathedral of light; the next, a prison of flesh. Tirian felt drawn to it.
But first, he saw her.
A woman stood at the edge of a dried riverbed filled with glass. Her body was draped in chains that writhed like serpents. Her eyes were missing, but she still saw. When she turned to him, the wind stopped. Even the ash bowed slightly.
"Do you remember me?" she asked.
Her voice cracked mountains.
Tirian said nothing.
She smiled, or something like it. "Of course you don't. You chose silence. You chose forgetting. But even that is a kind of worship."
The chains around her clinked, whispering names in languages he had never spoken.
"You are being hunted," she said. "Not by beasts. Not by men. But by concepts that want your shape."
Tirian's hand moved to the blade of silence again.
The woman chuckled.
"You cannot cut what you have already become."
He stepped back.
The lantern at his hip hissed, brighter than before. It began to flicker with images instead of flame—shadows of cities he'd never seen. A tower of screaming bells. A lake that wept blood upward. A door that led only to itself.
"You are too late to stop what is waking," the woman whispered, her chains unraveling into wings. "But you may still decide what it calls you."
And then she was gone.
Just ash. No trace.
Only a new sentence etched into the dirt where she'd stood:
"There are truths that choose their witnesses."
Tirian turned toward the flickering city.
The ground groaned beneath his feet.
He walked.
Hours passed—or seconds. The sky cracked. The moon melted. The stars rearranged themselves into letters. He began to read them.
The city, when it stopped flickering, was worse than he'd feared.
Not because of what it contained, but because of what it remembered him as.
He walked its broken streets. Statues turned to follow his steps. Doors sighed when he passed. And above them all, a name echoed from the cathedral-tower at the center:
"Tirian the Unwritten."
He had never told anyone that name.
Not even himself.
It came from the before.
Inside the cathedral, things twisted. Pews knelt like broken soldiers. Candles bled wax that hissed like snakes. A single figure stood at the altar, cloaked in parchment, eyes sewn shut with red thread.
"I have read your silence," it said. "It speaks louder than sermons."
Tirian raised the blade.
The figure did not move.
"You seek Elías," it said. "But he does not belong to you anymore. He belongs to the story. And the story is hungry."
Tirian stepped forward. "I don't seek him."
"Then what do you seek, child of ash?"
Tirian's voice cracked, but he forced the words out.
"My own page."
The figure laughed. Pages burst from its robe, flying like broken birds, screaming ink.
"You will bleed for every word."
Tirian knew.
He already had.
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Question for the reader: If your soul were a book and the world demanded to read it… would you let them open it—or burn the pages before they could?