The Last Truth Keeper

Rain hammered the cobblestones of the Lower Ward, each drop striking with the persistence of a creditor who would not be ignored. Sera pressed herself against the wall of a memory shop, her hood offering only a barely noticeable amount of protection against the downpour, and waited.

The job was simple. Protect a client's memories during the extraction. Ensure the merchant took only what was agreed upon and nothing more. Collect payment. Move on. Nothing that complicated when things went well.

She had performed this task countless times in her five years as a memory keeper. The work was steady, but not as lucrative as one might assume at first. In a city where memories could be stolen, extracted, or altered, there was always demand for someone who could shield a mind from unwanted intrusion. One of those people was Sera, but when it came to memory keepers, she was nothing special, at least in her own opinion.

The shop door opened, releasing a shaft of amber light into the rain-darkened street. Her client emerged looking dizzy. This time, the client was a middle-aged woman named Vasha who had sold the memory of her wedding day to cover her son's debts. Sera had stood in the corner of the extraction room, her consciousness wrapped around Vasha's mind like armor, ensuring the merchant took only that single, precious recollection and not the associated memories of the marriage that followed, the children born, the life built.

It was brutal and soul-crushing to witness, but it was necessary work. Sera had learned not to judge and to distance herself from it all. It was a job, nothing more.

"Thank you," Vasha said.

Her eyes had the unfocused quality that always followed extraction, as if part of her was still searching for something that should be there.

"I don't know how to repay you."

"The payment was agreed upon."

"I mean..."

Vasha trailed off, then pressed a small purse into Sera's hands.

"Take it. Please."

Sera weighed the purse without opening it. Heavy. More than the job warranted. "This isn't necessary."

"I would have loved to remember my own wedding and what that day felt like, the joy of it."

Vasha's voice cracked.

"Now I never will again. But because of you, at least I still remember why that day mattered."

The memory keeper had nothing to say to that. She just pocketed the purse and nodded once, then watched Vasha disappear into the rain.

This was life in the Lower Ward. The wealthy collected memories like treasures, hoarding the joy and wonder that others had lived. The poor sold pieces of themselves, one recollection at a time, until only hollow shells remained. And Sera stood between them, protecting what little remained.

It was all she could do. It had to be enough, but she knew it wasn't. Life was not supposed to be like this.

She made her way through the twisting streets toward her apartment, a single room above a defunct chandler's shop. The route she walked had become quite familiar over the years. She had to go past the memory merchants with their glowing vials, past the extraction parlors with their surgical chairs, past the hollowed-out shells who had sold too much and now wandered without purpose or self.

The Lower Ward was quiet tonight. Too quiet. Sera's instincts, honed by years of surviving in a city that preyed upon the weak, twitched with unease.

She noticed the Enforcers first.

They stood at the corner of Merchant's Row, their gray uniforms marking them as servants of the Upper Ward's ruling council. Enforcers rarely descended to the Lower Ward, and when they did, someone usually vanished. The memory of that person also seemed to evaporate, but not for the usual reason. Sera suspected that it was because nobody wanted to be the next to be taken, so they kept their mouths shut.

Tonight, Sera altered her path, moving into a side alley that would add ten minutes to her journey but would keep her out of sight. She had no particular reason to fear the Enforcers. Her work was legal, for now at least. But in the Lower Ward, invisibility was survival.

The alley led to a narrow courtyard where laundry hung between buildings like the flags of a defeated army. Sera paused, listening. The rain muffled the sound, but something felt wrong. The air had weight to it, a pressure that had nothing to do with the weather.

"You are difficult to find."

The voice came from behind her. Sera turned slowly, keeping her hands visible, her mind already cataloging escape routes.

The man standing in the courtyard entrance was old. Not the artificial youth that wealthy Upper Ward residents wore, purchased from those who had vitality to spare. This was genuine age: deep-carved lines and skin like crumpled parchment. His eyes were milky blue, the common mark of those who had traded too many memories for coins.

But something about those eyes was wrong. The milkiness seemed superficial, like clouds hiding something brighter beneath.

"You have me confused with someone else," Sera said.

"Sera. Memory keeper. Twenty-four years old, though you tell clients you're older. Orphaned young. Raised in the orphanage until you escaped at thirteen. Discovered your talent two years later when a merchant tried to extract from you without consent and found he could not."

Sera's hands curled into fists. "Who are you?"

"Someone who has been looking for you for a very long time."

The old man took a step forward, and despite his frailty, Sera found herself retreating.

"Someone who knew your mother."

The word hit like a blow. Sera had no memories of her mother, no knowledge of where she had come from or why she had been abandoned. The orphanage kept no records, and no one had ever come looking for her.

"I don't have a mother."

"Everyone has a mother. Yours simply ensured you would not remember her."

The old man coughed, a wet rattling sound that spoke of limited time.

"She did it to protect you. From them."

"From who?"

"Come with me. There is something you must see."

Every survival instinct screamed at Sera to run. But the old man knew things about her that no one should know. And his memories, she realized now, were not the faded remnants that milky eyes usually suggested. They pressed against her awareness with terrible weight, dense and layered and impossibly old.

She had never felt memories like these before.

"Why should I trust you?"

"You shouldn't."

The old man smiled, revealing teeth too white for his weathered face.

"But you will come anyway, because you have spent your entire life wondering why you are different. I have the answer."

He turned and walked into the rain. After a long moment, Sera followed.

The journey led through parts of the Lower Ward that Sera knew well and parts she had never seen. The old man moved with surprising speed despite his apparent frailty, navigating streets and alleys with the certainty of long familiarity.

They stopped before a door that looked wooden, warped, forgettable—just like every other door in the Ward. But when the old man pressed his palm against it, Sera felt reality shift. The air grew thick, charged with energy she did not recognize.

The door swung open.

The room beyond looked completely impossible. The building's exterior could not have contained the space that stretched before her. It was a vast chamber lined floor to ceiling with shelves. And on those shelves sat thousands of crystal vials, each one glowing with soft internal light.

Sera recognized them as memory vessels. There were more than she had seen in her entire life, by a large margin.

"What is this place?"

"My life's work."

The old man moved through the chamber, his fingers trailing along the shelves.

"Sixty years of collecting. Protecting. Preserving what they would have destroyed."

"Who would have destroyed it?"

The old man turned, and in the glow of the memory vessels, his eyes were no longer milky blue. They were silver. Pure, molten silver, blazing with inner light.

"The Archivists."

The word struck Sera with physical force. Archivists were legends, stories told to frighten children. They were supposed to be myths, remnants of an age before Valdris, before the memory economy, before everything.

"Archivists aren't real."

"A lot of things considered myths are real, child. Some things are merely better hidden than others."

The old man coughed again, worse this time, and clutched a shelf for support.

"I am dying. I have days at most. Perhaps hours. When I die, the protections around this place will fail. Everything here will be found and destroyed. We are what we remember. Take that away, and what remains?"

"Then why show it to me?"

He reached into his coat and withdrew a single vial. Unlike the others, this one did not glow. It burned, deep crimson that pulsed like a heartbeat, casting shifting shadows across the floor.

"Because you are the only one who can carry this. The only one who can keep it."

He pressed the vial into her hands. The glass felt simultaneously warm and cold, and its terrifying look seemed ancient.

"This memory does not belong to me. It does not belong to anyone alive. It is from before."

"Before what?"

"Before they rewrote everything. Before the Archivists decided what we were permitted to remember."

His silver eyes bored into hers.

"This is the truth, child. The truth about what Valdris was. What it truly is. And what it must once again become."

Sera stared at the vial in her hands. The crimson light played across her skin, and she could feel the memory inside pressing against her consciousness, vast and terrible but somehow patient.

"Why me?"

"Because you are the last of them. The last Truth Keeper."

The old man touched her cheek with papery fingers.

"You chose this work, did you not? Protecting memories. Shielding them from those who would take more than they were owed." He smiled, though there was sadness in it. "You thought it was a chance. A skill that happened to be useful. But the blood calls to what it knows, child. Even when the mind has forgotten, the blood remembers."

Sera thought of all the years she had spent in extraction rooms, standing guard over strangers' precious moments. She had never questioned why she was drawn to this work. It had simply felt... right.

"They believed they had killed you all," the old man continued, "but your mother hid you well. She made me promise to find you when the time came."

His voice softened.

"And the time has come."

Before Sera could respond, the air split with a sound like tearing silk. The door behind them exploded inward, and through the cloud of splinters stepped figures in gray robes, their faces hidden behind smooth, featureless masks.

The old man's silver eyes widened. Not with fear, Sera realized. With recognition.

"Run," he said. "Take the memory and run. Do not open it until you are beyond the Boundary. Do not trust anyone who claims to help you. And do not, under any circumstances, let them take it."

"But how will I know what to do? Where to go?"

"Not everything beyond the Boundary is dead, child. Not everything was Unmade." His silver eyes burned into hers. "And when the time comes to open the vial—you will know. The blood always knows."

"What about you?"

He smiled, and his hands began to glow with the same silver light as his eyes.

"I have been dying for sixty years, child. It is simply time to finish."

Silver fire erupted from his palms, meeting the advance of the robed figures. The chamber shook. Memory vessels crashed from shelves, shattering on the floor, releasing decades of preserved recollections into the air.

Sera ran.

She fled through corridors that twisted impossibly, through doors that should not exist, emerging finally into the rain-soaked streets of the Lower Ward. Behind her, the building she had just left was engulfed in silver flame.

And spreading.

The fire moved wrong. It did not consume and leave ash. It simply erased, leaving nothing behind. Buildings vanished. People vanished. The very streets seemed to fold in upon themselves, removed from existence as if they had never been.

Sera ran until she reached the Boundary, the invisible line beyond which the city's laws meant nothing. Behind her, half the Lower Ward burned with silver light.

She stood at the edge of everything she had ever known, the crimson vial clutched to her chest, and watched her world end.

Then she turned and walked into the darkness beyond.

The truth was waiting. And for the first time in her life, Sera was afraid of what she might find.