Hiro99

In the city of Altaran, memories are currency—and power. The ruling elite hoard knowledge like gold, while the desperate sell fragments of their past to survive. With the right tools, you can buy blissful ignorance, erase a crime, or rewrite your loyalties. But every stolen memory leaves a scar… and some scars never fade.

Ilyas Varin, known on the streets as Rook, is an illegal Memory Forger—erasing, rewriting, and stealing thoughts for the city’s most dangerous players. His tools can sever trauma, fabricate alibis, or bury the darkest sins. His own past? Locked behind mental fortresses even he can’t breach.

But when a high-profile client’s mind reveals a memory of Rook himself, imprisoned and begging for a freedom he doesn’t remember losing, the lines between hunter and hunted collapse.

Now, with the city’s most feared factions—the Blackwell Consortium, rogue mind-brokers, and the secretive Mnemonic Order—circling like vultures, Rook must unravel a conspiracy buried deep within Altaran’s neural underground. His gift made him powerful. His forgotten past might get him killed.

In a world where the mind is no longer sacred… what happens when your own memories become your greatest weapon—or your final betrayal?

The Memory Forger

I didn't return to the loft immediately.

Two shards pressed against my ribs, humming faint and constant — not loud enough to draw attention, but enough to drown out every quiet thought deep in my mind. Each fragment was a pulse of unfinished history, an anchor to a version of me I no longer remembered.

The masked attacker's blade still burned phantom heat across my throat.

I doubled back through the lower sectors, trading the choking smog of the Chime District for the labyrinthine crawl of Lathrin's Vein — Altaran's oldest arterial corridor, a stretch of layered catwalks, forgotten archives, and network uplinks buried beneath half the city.

It wasn't the kind of place you wandered without purpose. The Vein had a way of swallowing people whole — minds included.

But I needed a place to work. Quiet. Off-grid.

I found a sealed service node beneath a defunct transit bridge — rusted keypad, broken surveillance, just enough shelter to hold me for an hour.

Inside, the air reeked of old circuitry and oxidized steel. Perfect.

I knelt, sliding the first shard from my coat, followed by the new one — both crystalline fragments faintly cracked, pulsing in time with each other like twin hearts grown from glass.

I unpacked the stabilizer, neural interface cables snaking out like veins. Fingers steady, I linked both shards to the uplink module, spliced into the data stream, and activated the relay.

The world narrowed — then fractured.

It hit like a surge of vertigo. Memory, raw and jagged, bleeding across my synapses — flashes of the past spliced with sensory ghosts I couldn't fully contain.

First — the same image I saw in the stolen glass shard from the stranger:

A cell. Metal bars slick with condensation. Blood on my shirt. Younger. Shackled. My own voice, hoarse, pleading to no one.

The door swung open. A silhouette stood beyond — broad-shouldered, coat trailing like liquid smoke. His face obscured, but the Solis sigil gleamed at his collar.

He stepped forward — grabbed my chin — forced my gaze upward.

"You'll forget this," the man's voice rasped — cool, surgical.

A syringe. The bite of needles along my spine.

I ripped the uplink free, breath sharp in my throat, pulse rattling.

Whoever orchestrated my erasure hadn't just stolen memories — they buried the pieces inside these shards, encoded into crystalline carriers only I could access.

But the man with the Solis insignia? He wasn't the only ghost clawing out of the past.

A second vision flickered beneath the fractured memory stream:

Dark corridors. Sirens wailing. And someone else — smaller frame, moving fast beside me. Their face obscured — but familiar. A voice cutting through the chaos.

I sank back against the corroded wall, heartbeat still spiking.

That second voice. Not the Solis operative. Someone else. And buried somewhere deeper in the fragments.

I shoved the shards back into my coat, snapped the stabilizer closed.

Two shards recovered, ten to go. But now… a new threat. Someone was hunting the fragments too — masked, trained, fast.

And someone else — the voice beside me in the vision — an ally? A ghost? Another fragment of a life I wasn't meant to reclaim?

I slipped back into the Vein's deeper channels, pulse steadying as the city coiled around me.

The past was bleeding into the present. And the hunt for what was lost had just become a battle for what remained.

The Memory That Bleeds