Hole Beneath The World

The Cliffside Realms forgot.

Not suddenly. Not all at once. But like a body dying from the extremities inward, numbness, then fading, then silence. Streets still held shape, but not sequence. People still spoke, but only to echoes. No one remembered when the market last opened. No one remembered the names of the towers they lived in. A boy ran crying for his father, but forgot who he was looking for halfway down the street. A baker opened his shop to serve bread that had no recipe. He wept into the dough without knowing why.

And the statues wept with them.

The Hall of Stilled Names sat beneath the third tier, carved into the rock wall that bordered the old trade road. It had once been a place of reverence, a long, echoing corridor lined with effigies of those who had given their names to the city: protectors, builders, martyrs, composers of law and silence.

Now, it trembled.

The Proxy stood at the entrance.

He had not come here intentionally. His steps no longer aligned with purpose. He moved like a message half-remembered, scattered, rearranged. The Spiral Mark on his wrist itched constantly now, as if trying to remember a form it had not yet taken. Each beat of it felt like a skipped breath.

He stepped inside.

The light shifted.

Not dimmer. Just older.

The air in the Hall felt layered, as though time had not exited, merely stacked. Footsteps echoed out of order. He moved left and heard the sound of motion from the right. He whispered a word and it repeated back before he said it.

The statues stood in rows.

Tall. Broad. Cracked. Their faces were chiseled with reverence, their stances composed in poise or defiance. Each bore a name carved at its base, or had, once. Now, the names flaked like dried ink.

Sand pooled around their feet.

It streamed slowly from their eyes.

The Proxy watched.

One statue, a woman with an outstretched hand, jerked, like a puppet being yanked through time. Her gaze shifted downward. Her name erased itself in one long, slow trickle.

The stone beneath it sighed.

A second statue fell.

Its echo remained a few seconds longer. Then that, too, faded.

He moved forward, and the hall tried to forget him.

The air grew thick. Each step took effort. His outline began to blur. Fingers miscounted themselves. A memory surfaced of a man with his face, offering a name he didn't recognize. The Spiral Mark flared, burned, then hissed like a brand being exposed to ice.

He stumbled.

The walls no longer held words.

He turned in place, and for a moment, he did not know where he had come from.

Not just the Hall.

Not just the Realms.

Everything.

No name.

No memory.

No shape.

Only the Spiral remained.

It moved.

Not a mark now, a glyph, rotating, incomplete, trying to stabilize. It pulsed once, twice, then sank into his skin like ink into dry parchment. A tether. A failing one, but enough.

The Proxy screamed.

Not out loud, into the spiral.

Into the space where a name should have been.

The Hall responded.

A pressure wave. Dust burst upward from every statue's base. Half-formed names flickered on their pedestals, then reversed. Backward letters. Folded words. One statue turned its head. Another wept blood instead of sand. Then silence collapsed inward.

And when it passed, the Proxy stood alone.

Half the statues were gone.

The Spiral on his arm now crawled up his neck.

He could feel his own weight again.

He existed.

Barely.

But the Hall had tried to erase him.

And failed.

He walked to the far end.

There was one pedestal left uncarved.

Just a block of stone. No statue. No name.

The Proxy stepped closer.

And for a moment, saw himself standing on it, older, faceless, unraveling.

He blinked.

It was empty again.

He turned away.

And left the Hall of Stilled Names behind him, its silence hanging like the end of a sentence no one would finish.