The silence in the ruins of the theater had the taste of eternity. The air felt frozen, as if the world were holding its breath. The burnt curtains floated slowly, dancing a funereal waltz above the stage. And at the center of this mausoleum, there was him.
The nameless man.
He walked through the ashes, seeking an exit, but everything seemed built to hold him back. The gutted architecture of the theater resembled a broken skull; its corridors, torn nerves; its columns, bones eaten away by the centuries.
In a burnt-out box, he found a notebook. Not a diary, no. A collection of shadows. Forgotten symbols, absurd maps, names scribbled and then crossed out until the paper tore. The Codex. Or rather… what was left of it.
As he brushed its pages, everything shifted.
He found himself in a place without contours. A space without ground, without sky, without air. Threads of light floated around him, weaving an infinite web. He was falling — slowly, endlessly. But it was not the fall that chilled him.
It was the faces.
They watched him, suspended in the threads like eternal spiders. Some blurry, others frozen in a grimace. All were staring at him. Among them, only one was clear.
A child. Or a traitor. The one who had killed him.
He screamed. No sound came out.
Then, he woke up.
His face was wet with tears. He did not know why. He still did not know who he was. But a phrase looped in his head, like a worm whispering in the marrow:
"You are the Author of Forgetting."
— The Author of what? he murmured.
And then, the theater vanished.
The walls melted like salt in the rain. The ground became fluid, then nothing. He found himself in a dark, bent street, where the rain fell like shards of glass. The buildings seemed to scream silently, stretched towards a lightless sky.
He walked.
A beggar with a melted face stared at him. A skinned dog growled. A little girl with empty eyes handed him a rose made of ashes.
— "You have returned," she simply said.
He stopped.
— "Who am I?"
The little girl shrugged. Her smile did not reach her eyes.
— "The one who wrote everything. The one who destroyed everything."
Then she vanished. Only the rose remained, suspended in the air like a final heartbeat.
Then he saw it.
A mirror stood at the end of the street. Huge. Inhuman. Alive.
But it did not reflect him.
It reflected his crimes.
Memories he did not recognize, but felt deeply true. A throat-slit child. A woman thrown into the flames. A city ravaged by his hands.
He staggered.
And a voice, sweet as warm blood, rose from the void:
"Break it… or watch. But choose."
The mirror moved closer.
He gritted his teeth, clenched his fists. He screamed. And struck.
The glass shattered. The pieces fell like a rain of truths.
Among them, a fragment gleamed. Engraved in the silver surface, a single letter: E.
He picked it up, trembling. He still did not know his name.
But he knew one thing:
Someone was writing this story in his place.
And he intended to take the pen back.