The rain had stopped, but the city hadn't finished weeping.
Water pooled in the hollows of Kappa-Echo's broken streets, turning the district into a shattered mirror. Lira's boots disrupted the reflections with every step—fragments of her face splintering into a hundred warped iterations, each one drowning a second later. The buildings leaned like drunkards baptizing themselves in the flooded gutters, their facades slick with luminous algae that pulsed in time with their footsteps. Somewhere, a broken speaker gargled a half-remembered melody, the notes warping as they traveled across the water's surface.
"We're not alone here," Lira said. Her breath fogged the air, but the mist didn't dissipate—it clung, as if the humidity had teeth.
Plato dragged his fingers through a curtain of ivy sagging under the weight of its own dampness. "No," he agreed. Water dripped from his wrist onto the pavement, and for a moment, the droplets spelled something unreadable before surrendering to the cracks. "This place remembers us better than we remember ourselves."
---
The Church of Unwritten Memory rose from the mist like a corpse breaching a still pond.
Its walls were built from paragraphs erased from history, the mortar between its stones mixed with ink and regret. The entire structure listed to one side, as if the foundation beneath it had softened into something between liquid and lament. Water cascaded down its slanted steeple in a thin, silver veil, collecting in a basin at its base—a font filled not with holy water, but with unspoken words.
The Third approached, his boots leaving no ripples in the shallow flood. He pressed his palm to the church's door, and the wood groaned like a ship taking on water. "Something is humming," he murmured. "Deep under."
Plato wiped condensation from his brow. "A resonance?"
"Deeper." The Third's pupils dilated, black swallowing blue. "A vein."
---
The Descent
The altar was a mouth.
They found it cracked open, a spiral staircase coiling downward into the dark—each step slick with condensation, each railing trembling under their grip like the ribs of a drowned thing. The walls were lined with mirrors, but their reflections were wrong: Plato saw himself with hollow eyes, Lira with a blade buried in her own ribs, the Third with his skin peeled back to reveal circuitry rusted by saltwater.
The air grew thicker the deeper they went. Not humid. Saturated. As if the darkness itself had been submerged and never dried. Their clothes stuck to their skin. Their breath came in wet gasps.
Then—
The Silence.
A chamber so black it felt less like absence and more like consumption. The water around their ankles was perfectly still. No ripple. No echo. Just the weight of something ancient pressing against their eardrums.
A voice spoke without sound.
"You were warned."
The Third collapsed. Glyphs erupted across his skin, glowing the feverish blue of drowning lungs. Lira's blade rang out—a metallic scream swallowed instantly by the wet dark. Plato stood his ground, water seeping into his boots, his pulse throbbing in his temples like a second heartbeat.
"You are the vein," he said.
The voice laughed—or something adjacent to laughter—a sound like bubbles rising through a corpse's throat.
"No. I am what the vein is trying to forget."
And then—
It emerged.
A thing of liquid and liminality, its body a collage of fractured metaphors: a spine of shattered hourglasses, a chest cavity filled with submerged letters, a face that flickered between their own features like a reflection in storm-churned water. It moved without disturbing the surface tension. It knew their names without speaking them.
And the chamber—
The chamber was filling.
Water rose from nowhere, from everywhere, climbing their thighs with the inevitability of a tide they'd forgotten to outrun.
Lira bared her teeth. "You're just a memory."
The thing tilted its head, droplets cascading from its hair like a waterfall in reverse.
"Aren't we all?"
And the water swallowed their voices whole.