It stepped through the door like it owned the space.
Seven feet tall. Barefoot. Limbs made of pallid flesh stitched with ink-wrapped iron. Its mask was a polished oval, blank, with a single seam down the center. Its left arm ended in a hooked instrument once used to remove ritual tongues.
It paused—scanning.
Alric didn't breathe.
> "Initiating correction."
The Custodian raised its arm. Lines of glowing script spun through the air, surrounding Alric like a cage of light. Words designed to erase his ability to resist. Words he didn't even recognize.
> "NOW."
Noxa's voice ripped through his mind.
> "Perform it. Recall. Take the door. Pay the price."
Alric staggered to the mirror.
He didn't understand what to do. But something instinctual began to form—a pattern in his thoughts, not of words, but of intention.
He lifted his marked arm. The glyph flared white-blue.
> What door? What memory?
> "You must remember a door that once existed."
> "I don't—"
> "Lie to yourself. Believe it. That is the shape of magic."
Alric reached for the cracked wall beyond the mirror.
He remembered a door there—not because it was real, but because he needed it to have been.
And something answered.
A glowing outline surged into being—lines of soft, bending light forming a doorframe over shattered stone.
But it wavered.
> "The memory is not stable."
> "Then take something else," Alric snarled aloud. "What do I give?!"
> "You. Something only you remember. Give it to me."
Alric shook, breath breaking.
He didn't want to. He didn't want to lose something real.
But the Custodian moved now, its limbs unfolding, its metal-tipped fingers tracing symbols into the air.
> "Erase."
> "Forget."
> "Submit."
Alric gritted his teeth.
Then, slowly, he let go of a memory.
---
A beach.
Bright, sunlit. A quiet inlet from his childhood, years before the Obscurati. A woman sat beside him—laughing.
His mother.
Her voice: "You always bring home books you're not supposed to."
He had clung to that moment. Remembered her eyes. Her hands, calloused from binding old texts.
> "Take it," he whispered. "Take it."
---
The door solidified.
Light flared. Noxa screamed, a strange, joyous sound.
Alric ran.
The doorway folded open like peeling cloth, revealing a spiral descent—not real stairs, but something between time and place.
He didn't think. He believed.
And that belief was enough.
He dove through.
Behind him, the Custodian's voice crackled:
> "Target… anomaly… lost…"
The world warped.
The light dimmed.
The memory vanished.
---
He collapsed on stone.
Alric gasped, coughing, hands against cold, wet rock. His skin burned from the glyph. The world around him was unfamiliar: rusted iron beams, old chains, dried ink stains across the floor.
He was somewhere far beneath the city now.
Safe, for a moment.
> "Noxa…" he rasped.
> "Yes."
> "What did I just do?"
> "You remembered a lie so hard, the world believed it. That is magic."
> "And what did you take from me?"
> "…Nothing you'll miss. Not at first."
Alric looked down at his hands.
And realized he couldn't recall the sound of his mother's voice.
Not the shape of it.
Not even if it was soft or stern.
It was gone.