The morning after Adelia left, the village felt thinner than before. People moved the same, spoke the same, but Adam noticed small voids. Faces he passed held new expressions. Eyes measured him differently. The priests' warning had not been shouted; it had been recorded in posture and distance.
He tried to hold to ordinary things. He split his day between chores and quiet study. He helped Ernand mend nets. He answered traders with short, clearer sentences. Sometimes, mid-sentence, a word would slip away. He would stop, blink, and search his own mouth for what he meant to say.
That afternoon, while he sat under the tree turning a wooden cup between his palms, a thin panic rose up—not the raw, sharp panic from the first days here, but a slow, cold erosion. He tried to picture the front of his house in Jakarta: the narrow balcony, the rusted lamp, the neighbor who smoked late. He could see the lamp, could feel the balcony rail under his fingers—but the neighbor's face kept blurring at the edges until it vanished.
Adam set the cup down carefully. The wood clicked against his palm and grounded him. He wrote the neighbor's name on a scrap of paper, though he had to force himself to remember how the letters in his own alphabet formed.
The forgetting became more than small blanks. It arrived in moments—an entire lunch, a voice, a shape—fading between beats of his pulse.
That night he woke with the taste of metal in his mouth. He reached for his notebook by the bedside, the one he had started after the hospital dream. His handwriting was uneven. He wrote the time, the weather, the small facts he feared losing: names, a prayer verse, the sound of his mother's laugh, the name of the street in Jakarta. He typed none of it. He wrote by hand because ink felt more permanent than thought.
Word spread faster than ink.
Adelia returned two days later, not by accident. She arrived before dawn, when the world still held a thin blue. Her eyes searched Adam as if measuring him in degrees. She carried small instruments: a glass vial, a strip of cloth, and a small carved box that hummed faintly when she set it on the table.
"You are writing," she said without asking. Her voice had the same calm as before.
He held up the notebook. "Yes. Keep… memory."
She sat opposite him. She looked at his notes. His script contained half-sentences, names, dates, prayers. Pages filled with short commands: Don't forget, Write, Remember, Mama, Jakarta—then a blank space where meaning had been.
Adelia touched the blank and did not flinch. "The Veil does not only shape vessels," she said. "It seals memory."
Adam's throat tightened. "Seals?"
"It anchors your presence here to a different order," she explained. "Mana reorganizes reality around what it understands. It accepts your pattern. But in doing so, it compresses the other pattern—your old one—until it slips away."
He tried to say the word that burned his chest. "Return."
She shook her head slowly. "Some return. Many do not. Many cannot. The longer you remain, the thinner the thread back."
He swallowed, fingers tightening on the notebook. "How fast?"
She did not give a number; she gave a demonstration.
Adelia reached into her cloak and brought out a small crystal and a strip of cloth soaked in a pale liquid. She held the strip between her fingers and touched the crystal with it. The crystal glowed, and in the air above it a faint image shimmered—an impression rather than a full scene: a street with neon signs, a blurred silhouette, one last line of text.
Adam's breath hitched. He recognized the shape—Jakarta's skyline slanting in a way only he remembered—but when he tried to lock on, the image thinned and contracted.
"You see?" Adelia asked. "Mana can build a mirror, but the mirror shows only what it can hold. Memory is heavy. The Veil makes choices."
He pressed his forehead to the page he had just filled and felt the weight of loss like cold water pouring through him.
"Is there a cure?" he asked. His voice was lower than usual. It held, for the first time, a real fear of losing not just faces but himself.
Adelia did not soften. "No cure, not in the way you mean. There are methods to slow the sealing."
"Methods?" His heart jumped.
"Yes. Anchors." She opened the little carved box. Inside lay a thin strip of metal etched with runes, small as a fingernail. It hummed faintly. "These are anchoring sigils. They do not restore lost memory, but they can slow the bleed. They hold a pattern like stitches."
"How long?" he asked.
She folded her hands. "Days, weeks. Not forever. You can buy time."
He thought of his mother in the hospital-vision night after night. He thought of all the small things he had already lost. He thought of the life he had built: the mosque mornings, the friends who joked, the taste of soto on a crowded street at midnight. He imagined the names dissolving until only the word 'home' remained with no reference.
"I will take it," he said.
Adelia nodded and produced two strips. She pressed one to his wrist. The rune burned like cold iron and then cooled almost at once. The effect was subtle: a feeling of steadiness in his head, as if a small knot tied the torn edge of a rope.
He felt relief small and real. Not the kind of miracle that made villagers kneel, but a narrow, practical handhold.
"You must also write," Adelia said. "Not only names. Your voice. Your memories in long form. Use details no one else would think important. Descriptions, smells, sounds, your blunders. Ink helps because it resists the Veil differently than memory."
Adam nodded. He opened his notebook and began to write again, this time in longer sentences. He wrote the way his mother used to fold clothes. He described the fan in his Jakarta kitchen and how it squealed when his father turned it on. He wrote the names of friends with nicknames and insults attached, the way only someone who had lived the life could know.
Adelia watched him write and then spoke quietly. "You will lose some things. That is likely. Choose what you cannot lose by heart and put everything else on paper."
"Will saying the prayer keep me?" he whispered, as if testing his faith against a cold instrument.
She did not answer with certainty. "Prayer keeps you whole in spirit," she said. "Anchors keep the shell anchored. Both matter. The Veil cares about both."
He read that line twice and let it sink.
Night arrived. He wrote until his hand cramped. He fell asleep with ink smudges on his fingers and the rune warm against his wrist.
The next morning, he read what he had written and found a sentence he could not, for a moment, place: a joke he and a friend had shared once at an office party. The punchline blurred as he tried to catch it. He felt the fear again—sharp and personal—then calm returned. The anchor held, and the memories he had put on paper stayed readable. They did not gleam like fresh jewels, but they were there.
Outside, the village continued its tasks. Children ran. Lorna called him to eat. Ernand watched the north road a little more often. Rumors flowed. The Church had watchers now. Man from other towns would come to see, to gawk, to question. Adam understood that his days of quiet, even with the seal, were numbered.
He closed the notebook and placed it under his pillow. He prayed, not with panic this time, but with intention. He did not ask only for return. He asked for steadiness, for wisdom to choose what to keep, for the humility to accept that not all answers would come.
Adelia rose to leave. She tapped the rune against her palm, checking its glow. "I will return," she said. "Bring new pages. Anchor what matters. Keep your prayers."
He watched her go. She walked with purpose northward, a thin figure against the sun.
In the quiet that followed, Adam opened his notebook and read the passage he had written by the hearth the first night he arrived—small, clumsy sentences about the stars in this land. He smiled faintly at his own old fear.
He wrote a new page. He dated it carefully.
If memory could be a ledger, he would balance it. He would not let his past drift without a fight.