The knock at my door came soft as a dying heartbeat, yet every fiber in me knew it wasn't some drunk merchant or a lost canal worker. Not here. Not in this part of the city.
My hand hovered over the drawer where I kept the loaded plasma scalpel — modified, illegal, but beautifully precise. I thumbed the latch.
"Varin," came the voice again. Low, controlled, but laced with the kind of quiet authority you only heard from people who held the power to erase you — not your memories — you.
I slid the drawer open, fingers curling around the hilt of the scalpel.
"Say your business," I called, keeping my tone flat.
A pause. Footsteps shifted beyond the warped wooden door.
"Blackwell has eyes everywhere," the voice replied. "But even they can't see what I've brought you."
That earned a flicker of attention.
I cracked the door, just enough to see the silhouette — tall, cloaked in deep grey, the faint outline of circuitry laced into the inner seams of the coat. I couldn't see his face, but the insignia stitched above his collar was unmistakable.
A crow feather embedded in a keyhole.
The sigil of the Mnemonic Order — rogue mind-weavers, the original architects of memory manipulation before the Consortium took it and twisted it into a marketable vice.
I unlatched the door fully, keeping my other hand out of view.
"Inside," I said, stepping back.
He entered with the fluid grace of someone trained to slip through shadows. His face, once revealed beneath the hood, was angular — older than me, pale eyes set beneath dark brows — but it wasn't his features that unsettled me.
It was the scar.
Running from his temple down to the corner of his lip, faint but unmistakable — the aftermath of a memory extraction gone wrong.
"You're not here by accident," I said, eyes narrowing.
"No one knocks on a Forger's door by accident," he agreed, scanning the room — my worn furniture, exposed copper lines running along the walls, the faint hum of the stabilizer still cooling on the workbench.
He reached into his coat, pulled out a shard of translucent glass — fractured along the edges, its center pulsing with faint, living light.
"What is that?" I asked, stepping closer.
"It's a memory," he replied. "A dangerous one."
I frowned. Memories were neural imprints, stored in circuits, not physical objects. But then the light refracted, and I saw it — images flickering beneath the glass like ripples on water.
A corridor. A locked door. My face — younger, bloodied — behind it.
My chest tightened.
"I don't remember this," I muttered, pulse quickening.
"You're not supposed to," the man said, voice steady. "They buried it — deep."
"They…?" I pressed.
"The Consortium. The Solis family. And whoever paid for your cage."
The name hit like a blade's edge — Solis. The same signature from the ledger I stole. Pieces sliding together too fast.
"You're saying this is my memory?"
He nodded once. "And only a fragment. There's more — buried, fractured, scattered across Altaran like breadcrumbs."
I clenched my jaw, every instinct urging caution.
"Why bring this to me now?" I asked.
"Because someone's hunting those fragments." His gaze hardened. "And if they piece together the truth before you do… it won't just be your memories that die."
I paced the room, mind unraveling possibilities. If this was real — if there were pieces of my own past hidden in physical form — it meant the manipulation went beyond neural forgeries.
"You're from the Mnemonic Order," I said. "You oppose Blackwell. You want me to… what? Work with you?"
A faint smile ghosted his lips. "You're already in the fire, Varin. You either burn, or you learn to forge yourself again."
He set the glass shard on my workbench, the faint glow casting shadows across the room.
"Altaran remembers everything," he whispered, turning to leave. "But it buries the sharpest memories deepest."
With that, he slipped out the door, vanishing into the morning fog.
I stared at the shard, its fractured glow pulsing steady, like a heartbeat forgotten.
My face behind that door, I thought. Bloodied. Younger. Erased from my mind… but not from the city.
And outside, the city pulsed on — dark, hungry, waiting.