In the world behind the world, Michael drifts. He's in a place that feels both familiar and wrong, like the haunting déjà vu of a dream that slips through your fingers the moment you open your eyes. It's a city of shadow and light, a half-formed echo of memories that never found their place in history. Streets stretch out before him in impossible directions, leading nowhere and everywhere, each intersection a crossroad of memories lost.
Michael is a wanderer here, yet he feels oddly at home. In this place, he just is, stripped of labels, responsibilities, and ambitions. He has only himself and the whispers of lives long past, whispers that bleed into his mind with every step. As he turns a corner, a forgotten memory rushes at him like a wave.
A flicker of light; he sees a young woman, kneeling beside an ancient tree, her fingers tracing symbols into the soil. Her voice, a lullaby in a language he cannot recall yet feels deeply in his bones, filters through the fog.
"Every story ever told really happened," she whispers, but her words are meant only for herself, like a confession uttered to an empty room. Then she fades, vanishing into the ether as if her existence was a glitch in reality's fabric.
Michael stumbles, feeling her memory cling to him like an unfinished sentence. He can feel the weight of her sorrow, the urgency of her purpose—but why is it his to bear? That's when the truth begins to settle, like dust in the corners of his mind: He is not the first to remember.
Days—maybe hours—blur into each other as he pieces together fragments, visions of lives that were meant to be lost. There is an old man sitting by a river, hands stained with ink, whispering forgotten prayers into the water. A boy, eyes closed, dancing alone under a bleeding sky. A soldier, slumped against a stone wall, clutching a letter that never made it home. Each one vanishes before he can reach them, but each leaves something behind: a feeling, an image, a memory meant to be erased.
One night, he finds a strange book, its pages filled with stories he recognizes but knows he's never read. Tales of magic and murder, love and loss, but there's a warning scrawled on the inside cover:
To remember is to invite reality to rewrite itself.
He flips to a page and is met with his own face, his own story—but not the one he knows. In these pages, he has already crossed the line between observer and participant, each memory pulling him deeper into a story that no longer belongs to him alone. The book hums with life, a pulse beneath his fingertips, whispering the promise of power and danger.
Michael realizes he's been here before—not here in this exact memory, but in countless versions of it, trapped in an endless loop of remembrance and forgetting. He tries to throw the book into the mist, but it clings to his hand like a vice. He feels the weight of every memory it holds, each one clamoring for release.
But what is release in a world where memories shape reality? What happens when the stories forgotten by everyone else are remembered by one who shouldn't?
As Michael digs deeper into these lost stories, reality begins to distort. The sky fractures, colors blur, and the world begins to shift in response to memories reawakened. He finds himself drawn to a single name, one he doesn't recognize yet feels tethered to—Theo. With each step, fragments of Theo's life seep into Michael's own, like vines reclaiming an abandoned ruin.
In visions, he sees Theo as a flickering figure, someone who once walked the line between memory and reality, just as Michael does now. Theo was a guardian of these lost stories, one who once carried the burden Michael now bears, yet he left no trace beyond whispers in the wind. Who—or what—was Theo? And why does his memory feel so close, as if waiting to be unearthed?
Michael realizes that he isn't the only one who has seen the hidden layers of reality. There were others, countless souls who dared to remember, only to be devoured by the stories they tried to claim. Theo had vanished, yes, but something of him still lingered—a warning, a map, and a promise written in the echoes of forgotten things.
In this fractured world of memory and myth, Michael knows he is not safe. The stories he's begun to unravel aren't just forgotten—they're dangerous, claws reaching out to reclaim him, the one who dared to remember. Because in a world where every forgotten tale shapes reality, to remember is to become the story itself.