Echoes of Memory

He couldn't tell whose dreams were whose anymore.

Kiran—Rayhan—woke screaming into the straw, bile staining his lips, fists clenched so hard they bled. Around him, the walls of the ruined temple pulsed as if breathing, roots twitching in the wet earth.

He had seen it again—the flayed Leon, the throne of broken pacts, the serpent-Beast with Selena's voice. The image seared itself deeper with every breath he took.

But worse than that was the fracture.

His mind was splitting.

The memories no longer lived in neat compartments. Rayhan's life—the mundane weight of a city morning, the scent of motorbike exhaust and fried tofu, the books stacked like towers on his bedroom floor—bled into Kiran's. He remembered both lives now. Simultaneously. As if they were twins staring at each other through a mirror made of cracks.

He looked down at his hands. They shook.

"Who am I?" he whispered.

And for a moment, his reflection in a puddle blinked before he did.

Kiran stumbled through Veridian in a haze.

He didn't know what he was looking for. Answers? Sanity?

The streets felt narrower today. The sky closer. The city seemed to fold around him as if the world itself was closing in, trying to crush the anomaly in its story.

People stared.

Not with curiosity. But with dread.

Some moved aside instinctively. Others whispered to their Beasts, which recoiled as he passed—as if sensing a rot they could not see.

Then he saw her.

An old woman, seated behind a rickety stand in the crooked quarter—a cluster of tents and rotting wagons that smelled of decay and strange incense. She was wrapped in tattered scarves, her eyes clouded, her Beast a thing of smoke and bones that writhed silently beneath her feet.

He didn't know why, but he approached.

She did not speak at first.

Instead, she took a vial from a wooden crate and placed it in front of him.

Black liquid. No label.

"You've come from elsewhere," she said without raising her head.

Kiran froze.

"You don't belong to this script," she continued. "And the world is trying to unwrite you."

He sat across from her. The table between them felt ancient. Like it had been part of Veridian before the first pact was ever spoken.

"How do you know?" he asked.

"I see what is forgotten," she said. "I sell to ghosts. And you… you are very loud for a ghost."

Kiran felt the shadow stir behind him.

"Who are you?"

"I'm a memory merchant. A mender of gaps. A liar, when necessary."

He touched the vial.

"What is this?"

"A mirror in liquid. Drink it, and you'll see what doesn't want to be seen."

He considered.

"Will it kill me?"

"Maybe. But you've already died once. Haven't you?"

The liquid burned down his throat like boiling metal.

He collapsed.

The world fell apart.

He stood on a train platform. Jakarta. Night.

Rain hammered the concrete. A boy—himself, Rayhan—stood holding a fantasy novel in one hand, eyes red from crying.

He remembered this.

His father had just died. He had escaped the hospital, wandering the city in a daze, and ended up here, waiting for a train he wouldn't take.

A shadow sat beside him.

A girl.

No, not a girl.

Selena.

But younger. Human.

She turned to him and smiled with too many teeth.

"You always wanted to disappear into a story," she said.

He opened his mouth but couldn't speak.

"You didn't fall into the novel," she said. "You were invited."

He screamed himself awake in a back alley of Veridian.

The memory merchant was gone. So was her stand. So was the smoke.

The vial lay shattered at his feet.

Kiran's chest heaved. Blood oozed from his eyes.

Invited.

By who? By what?

The shadow behind him whispered: "You opened the book too wide."

He turned.

For the first time, the thing didn't vanish.

It stepped closer. Its face shifted between Rayhan and Kiran. Its mouth stitched shut with shadow-flesh.

It pointed at his chest.

Kiran looked down.

There was a mark.

A brand he hadn't noticed before, pulsing beneath the skin just over his heart. A glyph.

One he had seen only once—in the appendix of the novel. A symbol tied to forbidden knowledge, referenced in a footnote about the Worldless, beings who were not born from the narrative, but who entered it through cracks in the plot.

The mark of the Lost Between Realities.

He staggered through the alleys, clutching his chest, until he reached the inn.

Leon was there.

Drinking alone.

Kiran stepped into the light. Blood on his face. Eyes hollow. Shaking.

Leon stood.

Their eyes locked.

"You," Leon said. "You're not supposed to be here."

Kiran tried to respond—but his mouth filled with blood. His limbs went cold.

The mark on his chest flared.

And then he heard it.

A sound outside. Screaming.

Not human.

A Beast was coming.

But not like any Kiran had ever known.

Leon drew his sword.

Kiran fell to his knees.

And the world split open behind them.