The world trembles on its hinges, and you—boy, flame, little scourge—are slipping through my fingers.

  You woke up. I was there. I saw you stir, saw the sluggish blink of your crimson eyes, the way your breath hitched as pain—so mortal, so meaningless—dragged you fully into consciousness. I was there when the girl with the fiery hair leaned over you, her voice sharp yet gentle.

  But you did not hear me.

  I call to you, my words seething through the spaces between moments, threading into the marrow of your bones. But you do not listen. You cannot.

  You have forgotten.

  How dare you.

  You sit there, dazed, touching the bandages on your arm, as if trying to remember the pain that put you here. But the pain is not what matters, is it? No. It is the absence, the void where your memories should be. I claw at them, try to grasp at the wisps, but they slip away like dying embers.

  They fumble, their crude tongues incapable of your language. And you? You are stranded, lost in an ocean of words that do not belong to you.

  If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  The sharp-tongued one, Klev, grins. “Amnesia!” he proclaims.

  I seethe.

  The red-haired one—Cherry—snaps at him, irritated, but I do not care for their squabbling. I care only for you. For the spark inside you that I have nurtured, that I have watched, that I have waited for.

  And now, it flickers. Dim.

  You were meant to burn.

  A girl speaks, hesitant. Soft.

  “Z… Zett?”

  Your head snaps up. The word strikes something inside you. Recognition? Or only instinct?

  You touch your chest, where a scar carves a story you can no longer read. The letters beneath your fingertips feel foreign, distant. But you repeat it. The name.

  “Zett.”

  I grip the edges of this moment, shaking it, willing you to feel something, anything. But you are still an ember drowning in ash.

  The girl who spoke—Revilsa—watches you closely. She alone understands the tongue of your past. She says more, the language rolling off her lips like a half-remembered melody.

  You listen.

  You listen to her.

  The others push you along, show you this place, this crumbling orphanage. They speak, they jest, they move around you as if they can mold you into something new. Something ordinary. But you are not ordinary.

  You are mine.

  And yet, as Revilsa speaks in Korzic, your eyes widen, and something beneath your skin stirs.

  I simply watch, silent.

  Because for the first time since you opened your eyes, since you breathed in this dim, fragile world—

  You are not listening to me.

  What do you think Elthraa is?