The thief's memories

**Kelly Thompson's POV**

The skyline isn’t a horizon—it’s a *collision*. Buildings from a hundred eras jut crookedly from the wastes, their bones twisted by the Veil’s tantrums—Gothic spires snarled in neon veins, adobe huts split open by steel roots, skyscrapers hollowed and sprouting orchids with teeth. The air thrums with the aftershocks of dead timelines, their ghosts gnawing at my temples. Eden walks beside me, his silver-fractured scars humming in dissonant harmony with the ruins. He’s fading at the edges, fraying like thread pulled loose from the world’s fabric.

The heart nested in my ribs purrs, its voice honeyed and maternal. *“You bled here once. Or was it her? Memory’s such a fragile thing.”*

Fragments claw at me—a battlefield slick with gold-tinged rain, a child with Eden’s eyes burying a locket in soil that screamed, hands that were mine and not mine clawing at a door that bled. I crush the visions. “None of this is real.”