They walked in silence.
Dust fell like memory from the sky — not flakes, not ash, but the residue of days that had never been. Roads wound like questions no one dared ask. Buildings leaned, as if ashamed of standing. Doors opened into screams. And overhead, the sky rippled like water trying to remember how to be sky.
This city had a name once.
It had a history.
But both had been redacted.
"What is this place?" Tirian finally asked, his voice hushed.
Elías looked up. His eyes still bled faint trails of black, though his breathing had calmed. "A footnote," he said. "A forgotten draft of the world. Cities like this are where time sends what it no longer wants."
Tirian touched a wall — and it flinched.
"Elías," he said, "we shouldn't be here."
"No," Elías murmured. "But that's exactly why we are."
They turned a corner — and there it stood.
A fountain.
Still flowing.
But not with water.
With names.
Names that poured endlessly, glowing faintly, each one carved into the liquid like curses. Elías stepped closer. One name shimmered at the top of the current, resisting the pull of erasure.
His.
"Elías."
He reached out — but before he could touch the stream, a hand caught his wrist.
It wasn't Tirian.
It was a girl.
Young. Pale. Eyes sewn shut with silver thread. Her voice was not a whisper, but a contradiction.
"You touch that," she said, "and the story forgets you."
Elías paused.
"Who are you?"
"I am what remains when memory fails," she said. "I was once a prayer. Then a child. Now I am Denial."
Behind her, shadows gathered.
Not monsters.
Not demons.
But others.
Children with names carved into their skin. Soldiers with no flags. Elders who spoke in broken clocks.
Tirian stepped forward.
"What do you want?"
The girl tilted her head. "We want nothing," she said. "We are what is left when wanting ends. We are the Rejected."
Elías's voice was quiet.
"Why are you here?"
"To warn you."
The fountain shimmered brighter.
"Something else is coming," the girl said. "Something that doesn't want to be remembered. It eats revision. It lives between edits."
"What is it?" Tirian asked.
She smiled.
And for a moment, it was a terrible thing.
"It's the thing that watches when no one is writing. The thing that exists in narrative silence."
The wind stopped.
The sky went still.
And from the alley behind them, something crawled out of non-existence.
It had no shape. No face. Just a suggestion of hunger — a wrongness that rippled the fabric of place and self. Its voice was not sound. It was absence.
The Unreader.
The girl screamed. "Run!"
But the Unreader didn't chase.
It unwrote.
Tirian watched in horror as the building beside him blurred, then vanished — not destroyed, but reversed. Made into never. Names from the fountain leapt into the air, panicked, trying to escape — only to be devoured mid-flight by the thing's breath.
"We have to fight it!" Tirian yelled.
"No," Elías said.
He raised the feather — still clutched from the throne.
"We have to write it."
He stabbed the ground with the quill.
The city trembled.
Light bled from the cracks.
Reality rewrote itself, forming a wall of narrative around them — a bubble of pure authorship.
The Unreader recoiled.
For now.
The girl collapsed. "That won't hold it long."
Elías knelt beside her.
"What does it want?"
She laughed. "To be read. But not understood. To be seen… and forgotten. It is every plot hole. Every lost word. Every tale abandoned mid-chapter."
She looked at him.
"You'll face it again."
The girl turned to dust — her name stolen by the wind.
And the city shivered, slowly, quietly… rewriting itself.
---
Question for the reader: Is it better to be remembered for a broken truth… or forgotten for a beautiful lie?