Dream of the Unmaking

Kiren found… No … something wearing Kiren’s memories found—

Split. Torn. The sentence eats itself.

The Nightborn Maze bleeds through dimensions, walls that aren’t walls but living parchment screaming as she inscribes memories into the maze’s walls. The quill tip’s reality carving letters into a space where physics weeps quantum tears and forgets how to be consistent. But as soon as she finishes writing they immediately begin to unwrite themselves, taking the memory with it like ink dissolving in cosmic solvent.

Each corridor FOLDS… wrong… hurts… to perceive.

They shift with predatory hunger, passages that fold through dimensions of liquid suffering. Each corridor twists in ways forcing her to walk through spaces that don’t exist until her footsteps force them into being. The Gilded Quill moves without her permission—or perhaps her permission was never hers to give—scratching coordinates into Nightborn Maze’s membrane where stars scream their position fixed in the firmament and then die one by one by one by one by.

The skulls know. They always knew.

Ritalsin’s specimens line corridors’ throats now—each one whispering backwards through time what its name USED TO BE before being unmade from the world’s dreaming. Did she unmake them? Their hollow socket weeps not tears but the fossilized remnants of dreams and memories as they softly whisper to her.

“The ink remembers what never was
 The quill writes what cannot be unwritten
 Soon I will finish the sentence that began before words existed
And when the final period falls
there will be only the story that tells itself.”

In the walls of writhing formulae her reflection splits infinitely reflection KIREN¹ writing KIREN² who writes KIREN³ who writes KIREN⁴ who writes the next. Each reflection translucent, compassionate, wearing her face like a porcelain mask, and reaching toward her with desperate familiarity. Her sister? Her conscience? Her moral center before it was discarded continuously stacked on top of each other until the last one crumbles and reveals the THING THAT WAS NEVER HER at all.

You are the lie that poisons every truth,” her reflections speak with voices like tearing vellum, the Gilded Quill gleaming with promise in their hands. “Such power to unmake, to rewrite, to become the only story that matters. You were supposed to remember them, not erase them. Is that why she tore herself away from you?”

Her sister… herself… the reflections split… by the Maze’s corridors… into lives that should… never have been separate.
 
The creature from the dissection table floats beside her now, its too-many eyes opening to reveal they weren’t eyes at all but holes in the page of existence, and through them she glimpsed the truth: she was not learning. She was unlearning the world, one name at a time until only the unnameable remained.
 
Her hands WILL NOT STOP WRITING! The Quill moves to formulas that hang in the air all about her, each a possible history that slowly contracts into a single point as she unwrites it until finally it winks out like a flame of a candle being snuffed out by the returning darkness.

She tries to SCREAM but her voice emerges as cursive script, elegant letters that spell out her fear into the air.

“The manuscript was always complete. You are merely the punctuation at its end.”

Black sand pours from her mouth while the Nightborn Maze’s walls close in on her revealing themselves to be PAGES OF A BOOK she is trapped inside—reading—writing—being erased from—ALL AT ONCE!
 
In the impossible distance cosmic laughter echoes from beneath the Nameless Spires where Ossoyo’s hunger feeds on every dream she ever mistook for memory—SHE HAD BEEN FEEDING THEM TO THE VOID
ONE CAREFULLY RESEARCHED TRUTH AT A TIME—until that night, the night she escaped.
 
The vision SHATTERS like a mirror made of recursive nightmares each shard reflecting a different name she stole from existence and in the largest piece she sees her own name beginning to fade letter by letter as the Gilded Quill turns toward her own story.

One reflection remains, a pale figure reaching through dimensions, mouthing words in a language that unmakes itself as it is spoken.

“I will remember them. Even if you forget. Even if you erase yourself. Someone must remember what was lost.”
 
Kiren woke—No. Something woke that remembered being called Kiren. Gasping the taste of erased names still bitter on her tongue while somewhere she feared her sister continues writing In a language that unmakes itself as it spoken.