Chapter 13 – The Memoryless One
For the first time in his life, Shayan felt something foreign.
Uncertainty.
It slithered beneath his perfect logic like a parasite. The girl—Velka—had shown him something that defied every law he understood. The glowing Astrian relic had projected an echo of something that couldn't be remembered. A thing that erased all trace of itself, even from the minds of those who could not forget.
A creature like that shouldn't exist.
And yet... it had been there, in the projections—blank space, no context, just screams and silence.
Velka stepped away from the relic, her face pale but steady.
"I call it the Memoryless One," she said quietly.
Shayan scoffed. "Poetic. And unscientific."
"I didn't name it to explain it," she replied, "only to remind myself that I'm not going insane."
He circled the relic, his eyes scanning its surface, absorbing the intricacies of Astrian glyphs with his photographic memory. He'd studied these runes before—in a banned library beneath the ruins of Saphirion—but even those texts had only theories.
"I thought Astrians died in the Collapse," he said, voice low.
"They did. But this relic survived. And it's been whispering to me for years."
Velka's words lingered like mist in the air.
> "Not all knowledge is meant to be remembered."
Shayan turned toward her sharply. "That's an Astrian principle."
Velka nodded. "I told you, I came first."
He hated that sentence more than he expected.
She wasn't just like him—she was ahead of him.
But then, a realization.
"If this Memoryless One erases everything… how do you know about it?"
Velka looked at him with something between fear and resignation.
> "Because I died."
The silence that followed wasn't normal silence—it was dead silence.
"What do you mean?" he asked, not moving a muscle.
"Three years ago. The Kyoto Vault," she said. "I triggered a mnemonic backlash. I saw too much. I remembered too hard. And for a moment—I slipped out of time."
Shayan stared at her, expression blank. But inside, his mind was tearing through probabilities.
"I came back," she whispered, "but not alone. Something... came with me."
Before he could respond, the relic pulsed again—this time red. Blood red.
Eira's voice crackled through the communicator in his coat. "Emergency alert: breach detected. Multiple unknowns. Coordinates… your location."
Velka's head snapped toward the windows. Shapes moved in the rain—too fast to be human, too quiet to be soldiers.
"They followed me," she whispered. "I think... I think it's begun."
Shayan didn't hesitate. His mind was already twenty moves ahead. He activated the black key in his pocket—instantly alerting two of his closest secret organizations: Obsidian Net and Crown Division.
> "You fight?" he asked her.
Velka gave a small, bitter smile.
> "I remember how."
And as the dome shattered above them and silence bled into screams, the two most dangerous memory-wielders in the world stood back to back.
The war no one could remember was about to begin.
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