The Echo of a Forgotten Name

Silence was a scream.

A scream too old to be heard by human ears, too vast to belong to a mouth.

When he opened his eyes — for the second time — it was not light he faced, but shadow. A shadow with torn, fleeing, shifting contours. It was no longer the ruined theater, but an unstable room, as if the laws of gravity, sound, and even space still hesitated to impose themselves.

He didn't understand where he was.

But he understood that he shouldn't have been there.

At the back of the room, a melted clock ticked slowly. Each tick seemed to etch a different name onto the walls — names he did not recognize, but which made his thoughts bleed.

Then, a voice. Grave as a mass grave. Deep as a betrayed oath.

> "You were the actor. You were the mask. It is time to be the author."

He tried to sit up, but his body was stiff — as if he had never learned to walk. Or as if he had forgotten.

> The author of what? he wanted to reply, but his mouth remained silent.

And yet, he understood.

He understood that this voice was not addressing his ears, but his truth.

What he had been — and could no longer name.

In his hand, he found an object. A black feather. Without a reservoir, without a point, without weight. It vibrated gently. The moment his fingers brushed against it, a current of memories coursed through him.

Fragments.

A starry sky that was not Earth's.

A sea of threads suspended, taut as violin strings, resonating with ancient echoes.

A blade. A pain in the back.

And a laugh — a laugh so familiar he thought he heard his own voice.

But the memory faded immediately.

Only one question remained.

> Why was I killed?

A mirror appeared before him. Or rather, something that believed it was a mirror. The reflection he saw was not his own. It was that of a man he could have been — or another come to replace him.

His hair was white as frost, his eyes empty as dead stars.

But it was neither their color nor their brightness that frightened him.

It was what they knew.

For in that gaze, he read a certainty:

> You were born to write the end.

Not out of vengeance.

Nor out of hatred.

Nor by divine will.

But because it was written.

Because it had been decided, somewhere, by someone — or something — older than the gods themselves.

And he, a mere puppet turned flesh again, had to find the threads that connected him to his past.

And perhaps... cut them.

---

He was awakened by cold. A real cold. Wind howled against the windows of a collapsed building. He lay in the ruins of the theater, the charred boards cracking beneath his elbows.

The theater was nothing more than a gutted carcass. Around him, silhouettes moved. Firefighters. Militiamen. Miserable residents dressed in electronic rags, their skin tattooed with cables, their eyes too empty to be human.

> "Hey! He's still breathing!" shouted a distant voice, muffled by alarms.

He didn't have time to respond. They lifted him roughly onto a steel stretcher. His hands instinctively closed around the black feather. No one noticed it.

As he was carried away, the world around him stretched slowly — like a curtain being drawn.

---

In the ambulance, a nurse — more human than the others — leaned over him.

> "What's your name?"

He opened his mouth. No words. Nothing.

> "You're lucky. That explosion… it should have killed you. Do you at least know why you were there?"

He searched. Dived into the depths of his memory. Nothing. Nothing, except…

> Threads.

A scene suspended in space.

A voice saying: Write.

---

The vehicle stopped. He was thrown into a dormitory for the unidentifiable. An old theater, ironically repurposed as a memory asylum. Hundreds of souls wandered there, all marked by the chaos of the world.

It was there he heard, for the first time, the whispers of the Codex.

A vibration in his pen. A phrase in his mind:

> "To regain your name, write what others have forgotten."

He understood that his power did not lie in his muscles.

He understood that his place was not among the heroes.

But among those who trace their story in the ink of oblivion.

And that night, in the darkness of the dormitory, he wrote… his first word.

A word in an unknown language.

But one whose truth he felt.

> Betrayal.