By IMERPUS RELUR
--
The knife appeared in Imer's hand without warning—without memory of picking it up. Not summoned. Not gifted. It was simply there, as if it had always been. As if it had been waiting.
He turned it slowly in his palm.
No markings. No reflections. Just a blade forged of absence. The kind of edge that didn't slice through flesh but through meaning.
"It knows me," he said aloud. "No… it remembers me."
The wind had quieted. The sky remained still. But beneath Imer's feet, the ground murmured. Tiny tremors. Not earthquakes—but whispers. Like something below was listening.
A step forward.
The blade pulsed.
A step back.
Silence.
He smiled. "So you want a dance."
He moved again, this time tracing a circle. Each step a memory. Each breath a symbol. His shadow bent unnaturally behind him, stretching further than logic would allow. The knife sang—barely audible—but clear in frequency.
A tone he hadn't heard since the Womb of Mirrors.
Then came the voice.
"You gave me your name."
It came not from outside, but inside. Not from above, but below the ribs. It was the blade. No—it was the sin inside the blade. Or perhaps… the memory of a sin he never committed.
Imer tightened his grip. "Then give it back."
Silence.
He waited.
Then: a shift.
The world around him unfolded—not like paper, but like truth being unwrapped too quickly. Trees curled backward. Stones lifted. Time buckled. And there, standing across from him, was another Imer.
Older. Not in years, but in regret.
"I took your name so I could survive," the other said.
"And I forgot mine to become real," Imer answered.
The two approached. The knife hummed louder.
They didn't speak. There was nothing left to explain. No logic to decode.
Only a single act:
Imer handed the knife to his other self.
The older self wept.
Then slit his own throat.
But no blood poured.
Only language.
Symbols spilled from the wound—characters that crawled like insects, rearranging themselves mid-air, forming a single sentence:
"Your sin was not devouring. It was forgetting why you were hungry."
And then he vanished.
Imer stood alone again, but not empty.
The knife was back in his hand.
Only now, it carried his name properly.
He wasn't sure what that name meant anymore.
But he was ready to find out.
He looked to the horizon. A new city loomed in the distance—glimmering, imperfect, alive.
He began walking.
But not as the Sin Eater.
As something else.