The Wastes

Sera had walked for so long that her legs were beginning to give out. She was so far from the city that she decided it was safe to stop for a moment and rest.

The first thing she noticed was that the darkness beyond the Boundary was not complete. A pale light pierced the sky, sourceless and cold, illuminating a landscape that should not have existed. Ash seemed to cover everything. It crunched beneath her boots, puffed up in small clouds with each step, and settled on her shoulders and in her hair like gray snow. The rain had stopped the moment she crossed the Boundary, as if even the weather was afraid of this place.

She collapsed against the remains of a wall. It might have been a building once, but who could have lived in such a place? Now it was little more than a jagged spine of stone rising from the ash, its purpose long forgotten. The crimson vial pressed against her chest where she had tucked it inside her coat, warm and pulsing with that patient heartbeat.

Behind her, the silver light had begun to fade. The Lower Ward was gone—half of it, at least. It had been erased. Or unmade. The word surfaced in her mind unbidden, and she knew it was the right one even though she could not say how she knew.

Sera pressed her palms against her eyes and tried to breathe. She had to fight the urge to cry and shake.

We are what we remember. Take that away, and what remains?

The old man's words echoed in the silence. She had not asked for his philosophy. She had not asked for any of this. One moment, she had been walking home from a routine job, and the next her entire world had burned with silver fire.

Not burned. Erased.

She had a feeling that the distinction mattered, though she could not articulate why.

She tried to gather her thoughts long enough to assess her situation. Her knife was still at her belt. Vasha's coin purse remained in her pocket, though she doubted currency would mean much out here. She had no food, no water, no supplies of any kind. She had fled with nothing but the clothes on her back and a vial of memories that did not belong to anyone alive. It was beginning to get cold.

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

Sera pulled the vial from her coat and held it before her. The crimson light pulsed steadily, casting shifting shadows across the ash. It was beautiful in a terrible way, like watching a heart beat outside a body. The memory inside pressed against her awareness, vast and patient and impossibly old.

She could open it. She could absorb whatever truth it contained and understand why she was here, why the old man had died for her, why her mother had erased herself from Sera's memory to keep her hidden.

But the old man had told her to wait. He had told her not to open it until she was beyond the Boundary.

She was beyond the Boundary now. Still, something told her to wait a bit longer. Perhaps he had meant more than just the city's edge. There was a world out here, a world she knew nothing about. This felt like a choice that had to be made with a clear mind.

Her mind was not clear. Her mind was a storm of fear and grief and rage, and underneath it all, a growing seed of curiosity that she could not quite suppress.

Sera tucked the vial back into her coat and forced herself to stand. Her priority was to find shelter. In order to do that, she first needed to understand where she was. She had to stop thinking about the silver fire and the way people had simply vanished beneath it.

She climbed over the ruined wall and looked out across the Wastes.

The landscape stretched endlessly before her, gray on gray on gray. Ash dunes rose and fell like frozen waves. Skeletal structures jutted from the ground at irregular intervals, too weathered to identify but too deliberate to be natural. In the distance, something that might have been a tower leaned to one side, its upper floors long ago collapsed into rubble.

This had been a city once.

Before they rewrote everything.

Sera started walking.

The pale light did not change as she moved. There was no sun, no moon, no stars—just that sourceless illumination that turned everything the same shade of gray. Time passed, but she could not say how much. Her legs ached, and her throat burned with thirst. The ash coated her tongue with a bitter taste.

Just when she was about to give up hope, she came across a ruin more intact than most. It had four walls still standing, though the roof had collapsed. A doorway gaped dark and empty. Sera approached cautiously, her knife drawn, her senses straining for any hint of danger.

Nothing moved. Nothing breathed. The silence was absolute.

She stepped inside and found the remains of a home.

A table lay overturned in the corner, one leg snapped. Chairs had been scattered, their cushions rotted to nothing. Shards of pottery crunched beneath her boots. On the far wall, a frame hung crooked, the picture within faded beyond recognition.

People had lived here once. A family, perhaps. They had eaten at that table, sat in those chairs, and looked at that picture on the wall. They had lived ordinary lives in an ordinary home in a world that no longer existed.

And then the Archivists had erased it all.

Sera sank down against the wall, her back pressed to the cold stone, and let the silence wrap around her. The crimson vial pulsed against her chest, patient as ever.

We are what we remember.

She had no memories of her mother. Not a face, not a voice, not even a sensation of warmth. Her earliest recollections began in the orphanage, a gray building full of gray children waiting for families that would never come. She had assumed her parents were dead. Everyone in the orphanage assumed their parents were dead. It was easier than the alternative.

But the old man had said otherwise. Her mother had not died. She had hidden Sera. She had erased herself from Sera's memories to protect her daughter from the Archivists. From the truth.

Take that away, and what remains?

The question cut deeper than she wanted to admit. Sera had built her life on isolation, on distance, on the careful maintenance of walls between herself and everyone else. She trusted no one because trusting led to loss. She connected with no one because connection led to pain. She had convinced herself this was strength, this fortress of solitude she had constructed around her heart.

But if her mother had loved her enough to erase herself—to sacrifice the very knowledge of her existence to keep Sera safe—then someone had cared for her once. Someone had looked at a child and decided that child was worth dying for.

Worth being forgotten for.

The thought was almost too large to hold.

Sera closed her eyes and tried to sleep, but sleep would not come. Every time she began to drift, she saw the silver fire. She saw the robed figures with their featureless masks. She saw the old man's silver eyes, blazing with defiance as he bought her time to escape.

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

He had known this was coming. He had spent six decades preparing for it—gathering memories, protecting them from destruction, waiting for the one person who could carry the truth. Waiting for Sera.

And she had left him to die.

The guilt was irrational. There was nothing she could have done. The Archivists would have killed her too, and then the crimson vial would have been lost. The old man had made his choice, and he had made it with clear eyes. But rationality offered little comfort in the dark.

She did not sleep that night. She sat against the wall of the ruined house, the crimson vial clutched to her chest, and waited for dawn.

Dawn did not come. The pale light simply returned, almost unnoticeably less dark than before. Sera rose on stiff legs and stepped outside.

The Wastes looked different in the brighter light. Not better, exactly, but different. She could see further now, and what she saw made her stomach clench.

The ruins extended in every direction, but they were not uniform. Some structures were ancient, worn down to their foundations by centuries of ash and wind. Others looked almost new, their edges still sharp, their walls still intact. The destruction had not happened all at once. It had happened in waves, over years or decades or centuries, each wave erasing a little more of the world.

Before the Archivists decided what we were permitted to remember.

Sera began to walk again, following no particular path, simply moving because standing still felt too much like surrender.

And then she felt it.

A whisper of something at the edge of her awareness. Not sound, not sight, but something else—something that pressed against her consciousness with gentle insistence, like a hand trying to get her attention.

She stopped and turned, scanning the ruins around her. Nothing moved. Nothing breathed.

But something was there. She could feel it now, a presence embedded in the very stones. Not alive, exactly, but not dead either.

Sera approached the nearest wall and placed her palm against it.

The memory hit her like a wave.

A woman standing at a window, watching children play in the street below. Sunlight streaming through glass that no longer existed. The smell of bread baking in an oven. Laughter echoing from somewhere nearby. A moment of perfect, ordinary happiness, preserved in stone for longer than Sera could comprehend.

She jerked her hand away, gasping.

The memory faded, but it left traces behind—the sensation of sunlight on skin, the warmth of a home, the sound of laughter.

This had been a world once. A real world, with real people living real lives. Not the cold stratification of Valdris, with its wealthy hoarders and desperate sellers. Something warmer. Something better.

And the Archivists had erased it all.

Sera pressed her palm to the wall again, seeking more, but the memory had faded. Whatever had been preserved there was nearly exhausted, worn thin by centuries of isolation. She could sense echoes of other memories in the surrounding stones, but they were fainter still—fragments of fragments, impressions of impressions.

The world before had not been lost entirely. Pieces of it remained, hidden in the bones of the ruins, waiting for someone who could sense them.

Someone like her.

You are the last of them. The last Truth Keeper.

The old man's words took on new meaning now. Sera had never thought of herself as special. She was different, yes—that much she could agree with—but not special. She had the ability to protect memories, but that was not rare. There were many other keepers.

Now she understood she was more than that. She was not just a memory keeper. She was part of something older, something the Archivists had tried to destroy, something her mother had given everything to protect.

She was a Truth Keeper.

And somewhere out here in the Wastes, answers were waiting. The old man had pointed her toward the darkness beyond the Boundary. The crimson vial pulsed against her chest, and the memories embedded in the ruins whispered of a world that had existed before everything she knew.

The truth was out here. She simply had to find it.

Sera turned her face toward the deeper Wastes, where the ruins grew thicker, and the silence grew heavier. She did not know what she was looking for, but she knew she would recognize it when she found it.

She took a step forward. Then another.

Behind her, the ruins of the ordinary home faded into the ash. Ahead, the unknown stretched endlessly toward a horizon she could not see.

Sera walked on.