Hole Beneath The World

The city no longer recognized itself.

Streets folded into one another. Names peeled off signs like dead bark. The sky flickered. Not between weather patterns, but between eras. In one blink, it was overcast. In another, it was wrong, painted in colors the world had never agreed upon. Time stuttered and bled backward, leaking minutes from places that no longer existed. People walked with mirrored shadows. A man sold memories from a cart that collapsed before he could name his price. Someone screamed, but it played in reverse.

The Proxy did not run.

There was nowhere to run to.

He stood in the hollow of a half-erased plaza, surrounded by buildings that pulsed in and out of phase. Their windows opened to stairwells that had never been built. Every breath he took echoed twice: once now, and once from a mouth that had not yet opened. His presence was a wound in continuity. The silence zones around him rippled wider, not suppressing sound, but erasing the idea of cause and effect.

He felt the Hole watching.

Not above. Not below. Around.

It did not speak in language. It never had. But this time, its pressure took shape. Not a word, but a question. Something that pressed against the inside of his thoughts like water behind glass.

Why did you leave them?

No voice. No tone. Just the weight of the question pressing down like gravity twisted sideways.

The Proxy staggered.

He had not expected that.

He had prepared for whispers, commands, even threats. But not this.

The question burrowed deep. Not into memory, but under it, to places where memories had been removed, cauterized, or rewritten. His body trembled. Vision split. He fell to one knee and the stone beneath him looped the sound of impact, playing it back three times, each with a different weight. His breathing caught in his chest, and he felt a moment from his past drag itself forward, unbidden, fractured.

A field.

A scream.

Someone running.

A hand pulled free.

Then nothing.

Why did you leave them?

He didn't remember.

But he felt it.

Guilt, sharpened by absence. The guilt of forgetting someone who had once trusted him. The guilt of survival without understanding what had been lost. The kind of guilt that does not belong to a specific event, but to a pattern. A soul-habit.

He gasped, but no sound came.

Instead, the plaza flickered.

A flashback slammed into the moment like a tidal wave of misfiled footage.

He stood in a corridor, narrow, dark, bleeding at the edges.

A girl. Young. Familiar. She reached for him.

He turned away.

A voice, hers? saying, Please.

Another version of himself walked past. Older. Eyes blank.

He watched that version pause.

Then speak.

"I had to."

The flashback bled forward.

Now a room. A ritual. A scream silenced before it finished.

Someone else screaming. Not you. Not now. Not here.

Back in the present, the Proxy rose to his feet. The ground beneath him buckled, then reformed. Spiral patterns unfurled across the plaza. Marks carved themselves into the air, sigils without language. They hovered briefly, then spun apart like broken syntax.

His Spiral Mark burned.

Then cracked.

Just a hairline. Just a tremor.

But enough.

A moment of balance tipped.

The Hole pressed closer.

Why did you leave them?

Not louder. Just deeper. Closer to the root.

He closed his eyes.

And answered, not in speech, but in surrender.

Because he was afraid.

Because they would have died.

Because he didn't believe he could save them.

Because he hadn't known who they were.

Because the world had rewritten itself before he could act.

Because he had already left before he had the choice.

All of these were true.

The Hole accepted the answer the way gravity accepts falling.

And the silence deepened.

Around him, the plaza began to disintegrate. Not destructively. Elegantly. As if the place had fulfilled its narrative purpose and was now being redacted by the universe itself. Bricks unstacked. Voices unspoke. Time folded inward.

The Proxy turned.

A new corridor had appeared.

No lights.

Just memory residue, echoes of moments he had not lived, but which remembered him.

He stepped inside.

The corridor closed.

The question lingered behind him like a bruise.

He had answered.

But the Hole would ask again.

And next time, it would not ask with words.