He woke with the memory of a word on his tongue and a taste like old ash at the back of his throat. For a moment he lay perfectly still, as though motion would tear the dream from him and release whatever had been holding its shape. The room was a single breath of shadow and the old kettle on the shelf made a soft, patient tick. Beyond the thin wall, the city breathed in and out—clatter of carts, a dog barking twice, someone laughing too loud and too soon.
Aurel pushed himself up, hands pressed into the grainy plaster of the wall. The dream's edges were sharp enough to bruise: an ocean that did not belong to water, a woman who bent the world with a look, and a single syllable, intimate and wrong. He had learned to live beside that ache of memory the same way one lives with a loose tooth: it is there, you are aware of it, and everything you do is a small attempt to ignore the wobble.
He dressed in the dimness, the motion mechanical. Pottery's rhythm felt a lifetime away this morning—clay stamped into hand, the kiln's heat like a patient, trustworthy heart. He could picture his mother now, the crease at the corner of her eye when she smiled; she would be at the oven, folding dawn into bread. Those small certainties steadied him.
But when he stepped into the lane, the certainty of the world slackened, as if the city itself had forgotten to hold its breath. A scent followed him, thin and oddly sweet: cedar, iron, and something older, like the smoke his grandmother whispered about when she told stories beneath the cotton roofs. He stopped. The lane stretched out as always—stalls with striped awnings, a boy with a basket of figs, a woman sweeping the steps of her doorway—but the air had a weight to it, a sensation that something visible had just been elsewhere.
A boy across the street—one of the kiln-helpers—stared at him and then looked away, eyes too quick to read. Aurel felt a prickle along his scalp. He remembered the name from the dream again, quieter now, as if someone had moved farther away: Aurel.
"Morning." The baker's daughter, Mira, called. Her voice was warm and familiar. She handed him a crust still warm from the oven. For a handful of copper, she let him tuck the bread under his arm.
He nodded, but the crust tasted of the dream; he could not enjoy it. The name had been like a key turned in a lock somewhere deep beneath his ribs. He had not wanted more than that—just to keep meaning simple: apprentice, son, neighbor. Instead, he felt the net of questions settle around him.
At the market's edge, behind a stack of crates, Kinn waited, as if he had been there for hours, as if he were the place memory reached for when it needed proof. When Aurel saw him, his throat tightened in recognition and in irritation. Kinn had a way of appearing at corners the mind considered private. He was a salvager of things people forgot, a merchant of the city's discarded histories.
"You look like you slept in a kiln," Kinn said without preamble. "Or woken from one."
Aurel clutched his bread like a talisman. "I dreamed."
"The gods prefer the night for walking." Kinn's voice had the comfortable flatness of someone who had seen too many entrances and departures. "And your goddess prefers your dreams, it seems."
Aurel flinched. "Don't call her that."
"Call her what then? Old lady? Flame-lady?" Kinn shrugged, but there was no humour in it. He studied Aurel's face, then the palm that curled around the bread. "She chose an odd door."
Kinn's hands were deft and careful when he took Aurel's wrist, folding it back to look at the pale skin. "You're not marked," he observed, almost disappointed. "Not yet."
"Marked?" The word dropped like a stone into the quiet well of the market. Around them, people moved with the surface calm of a river over stones. Aurel's pulse clattered.
Kinn's mouth tightened. He placed something small into Aurel's hand—wrapped, warm. "This will hide you from eyes that search by sight," he said. "For a while. But marks are not always visible. The goddess works through forgetting as much as through burning."
"How do you know so much?" Aurel demanded.
Kinn's smile was patient, the same one that would charm merchants out of their last coin. "I remember what people forget. Part of the job." He hesitated, and for a sliver of breath his face looked like the face of a man who had once loved and then learned how to survive without the memory of it. "Go to the Brackens, Aurel. Leave before dusk. There's a woman in the Northhold—Sera Nalen—she trades in names. She'll tell you if what called you is a warning or a door."
Aurel thought of his mother kneading dough, of the steady tilt of the kiln's brick. To leave her now would be to fold everything safe into uncertainty. He felt the timbers of his life creak under question. "If I go, how will I know she'll take me?" he asked. "If I stay, what will happen?"
Kinn's answer was a thin coin tossed into a well that would not return it. "Both choices carry small deaths." He pushed a second object—a coin—into Aurel's palm. "Buy passage, buy trust, buy silence. Whatever you can afford." He looked up, scanning sidelong. "And Aurel—don't tell anyone the word. People are poor with secrets here; they trade them for comfort."
As the day slackened into heat, the city watch changed their rhythm. A cluster of men in the barred green of the city returned from patrol, their boots leaving wet prints on the road. The watchman's face found Aurel as if drawn by the same string that tugged at the dream. The taller of the men paused and regarded him with an attention that made Aurel turn his bread into something to hide his hands with.
"You there," the man called. The voice was all authority, no curiosity. "Seen anything strange tonight? Smells like burning around the old temple."
The words spun on Aurel's skin. "No," he said. "Nothing beyond the usual."
The watchman's gaze did not leave him. "You looked like you woke suddenly," he observed. "Keep to your business, potter's son. The city has little use for wanderers."
Aurel wanted to answer back, to insist that the world had shifted and that he felt its looseness. Instead he folded himself into the ordinary like a piece of cloth. The watchman moved on. Kinn's thumb caught his elbow and his fingers were warm and steady.
"Tonight," Kinn murmured. "Not tomorrow. At dusk. Come meet me by the well. Pack light. If you leave now, you can reach the Brackens before the road fills with traders. If you wait, you may find the road crowded with the wrong kind of eyes."
The hours that followed were a map of hurried decisions. Aurel told his mother he would fetch clay from the southern yard, then he fled to his room and packed the bitterly necessary: a change of clothes, coins, a small knife, the little whistle his mother had bought him years ago. When he slid the wrapped charm into his belt, the warmth of it was like the memory of a hand.
The market had already begun its slow evening chorus when the first trouble arrived. A scream—sharp, animal. It came from the direction of the old temple where the city's neglected gods sat with their backs turned. People spilled into the lanes, faces alight with fear and curiosity. Kinn pushed Aurel toward the crowd and held him there.
There, in the hush that followed the scream, time pulled thin. A child's face—a small boy, perhaps six—stood in the square with eyes as wide as the moon. The child's mother clutched his shoulder, lips moving in frantic reassurance. But the boy's expression was wrong; his mouth moved, but the sound that came was paper-thin, empty of memory. He smiled without knowing why, and his laughter had the shape of something stitched on. Aurel's throat closed. A woman two stalls down—her name he knew, because he had bought parsley from her—stared as her own face softened, then tilted in an expression that should have been surprise and became empty.
Kinn pressed a hand to his face. "They're forgetting," he said, voice no louder than a thread. "Names, faces, small things at first—tricks to find a seam. Where the seam opens, bigger things can fall through."
Panic fed like a fever. The city watch tried to take control, and men and women shoved and divided and pointed. From the edge of the square, something moved. It was not a woman or a shadow or a sound—the crowd parted as if a wind had passed through and someone had spoken. On the periphery of sight, a ribbon of smoke knotted and threw itself like a dark braid over the low roofs.
People began to forget in little steps—first a grocery, then a kin. A man muttered and could not remember the names of the children he had kissed to sleep. A baker could not recall the recipe for the bread he had made for twenty years. Aurel felt his stomach fold with a cold he could not explain. He gripped the edge of the bread until his knuckles whitened.
Kinn's fingers closed around his arm. "Now," he said. "We go."
They moved like a pair of thieves through the riot of confusion, slipping between handcarts and spilling grain, until a watchman's boot faltered next to them and a blade flashed. He had been one of the men who had stared earlier; he now glared with the certainty of duty. Kinn shoved Aurel forward and met the blade with a movement that was part parry, part bargaining.
Aurel did not know how Kinn had learned to move that way—he saw only a blur and then the blade clattered to the cobbles. Kinn's jacket was slit along the side and a thin line of blood glistened, sudden and private. He grunted but did not fall.
"Run!" he growled.
They fought their way narrower, a corridor of memory-loss and terror, until they were in the alley behind the well. Kinn leaned against the cool stone and breathed like someone who had carried an entire roof of rain. "You need the North road," he said. "I will distract them. Go."
Aurel hesitated, looking at Kinn—at the small, brave man who sold the city its past and had cut himself to buy Aurel a way out. "I can't leave you—"
"You must," Kinn said, almost tenderly. "You're a door. I can chain my own hands to a post. You must walk, Aurel. You must not be what she wants."
The alley smelled of wet clay. Above them, where the roofs met the sky, smoke coiled like a curious snake. Somewhere in its curl, a voice hummed—no words, only a melody that pried at places in Aurel's chest he did not know were loose.
He left because the world had offered him a choice that could not be refused: to stay and be the center of a slow, terrible forgetting, or to run toward the single answer Kinn had named. He ran with his satchel tight at his side, with the taste of ash in his mouth, and the sound of Kinn's breath behind him like a drum.
At the city gate, the sentries were confused, eyes glazed with small, betraying blanks. Aurel fumbled coins at the toll and the man at the booth could not remember what a coin was called. The road beyond the city unrolled dark and uncertain, fringed with low trees that whispered like old women. He began to run.
As the gates closed behind him, patched wood and iron grinding, he felt the warmth around his hip shift, as if the charm had moved. He stopped and, hands shaking, unwrapped the cloth.
Beneath it, instead of a coin or a trinket, was a small mirror, framed in iron and pitted with age. When he looked into it, his face was dead center—hair matted with sweat, eyes rimmed red—but in the glass, there was something else: a faint, pale sigil burned into the skin of his palm, a line of ash that seemed older than the world.
Aurel blinked. The mark was not there when he had last checked. The mirror grew warm in his hand until the iron hummed like a held note. Far off, across the dark field where the city's lights dwindled, a shape unfurled against the sky. It was not a woman. It was not fully visible. It was a silhouette, vast and terrible, like a memory straightened out into a body.
It lifted its head and the world forgot its breath.
Aurel pressed his palm to the mirror until the sigil flared black and the iron sang.
Somewhere beyond the gate, the city's last streetlamp sputtered and went out. The name he had heard in the dream moved through him again, not as a whisper but as an invitation. He did not know what answering would do. He did not know he was about to change the world.
He only knew one thing: the road ahead had the first of many doors. He had walked through the threshold, and behind him, the city exhaled and began to forget.