The Thread That Snapped

Soren felt it.

The exact moment the golden thread broke.

It wasn’t just an object.

It had been holding something together.

The moment it unraveled, his thoughts collapsed inward.

A tearing sensation—not in his body, but in his mind.

His memories twisted.

Not disappearing.

Returning.

And the moment they did—

The city changed.

The Collapse of Silence

The space around him shuddered.

The endless dark—the empty void where his other self stood—broke apart.

Not violently.

Not suddenly.

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Like paper being peeled away.

The dark was never real.

The room was never real.

It had been a layer.

A veil.

And now, Soren saw what had been beneath it.

He was not in a house.

Not in a void.

He was in Luthathel.

The real one.

Not the city he had been walking through. Not the city he had thought he understood.

The real one.

And it was wrong.

The City That Had Always Been There

The air was thick, heavy with the scent of something rotting.

The buildings were no longer just old—they were decayed.

The streets stretched unnaturally, twisting at impossible angles. The cobblestones were slick, glistening—not with rain, but with something darker.

The gas lamps flickered.

But their flames were black.

The city breathed.

Soren felt it beneath his feet, a slow, pulsing heartbeat.

This was Luthathel.

Not the version he had seen before.

Not the polite, ordered facade of the city.

This was what lay underneath.

And the worst part?

He remembered it.

Not as something new.

Not as something foreign.

As something he had always known.

His body trembled.

His other self watched him carefully, hands in his coat pockets.

“You see it now,” the double murmured. “The real city.”

Soren’s throat was dry.

His voice barely worked.

“I’ve… been here before.”

The double nodded.

“More times than you can count.”

The Memory That Shouldn’t Be

Soren staggered back.

His breath was uneven.

His thoughts were unraveling.

But the more they unraveled—the more he saw.

Flashes.

Pieces of something he had forgotten.

No.

Something that had been taken.

> A door that never led to the same place twice.

A voice whispering in his own handwriting.

A masked figure standing at the foot of his bed.

Laughter behind the mirrors.

And then—

The House of Amber.

The ballroom. The masked dancers.

The woman.

The name she had whispered—the name he had forgotten.

But now, he remembered.

And as soon as he did—

Everything twisted.

The Name That Was Never Supposed to Be Spoken

The whispering turned violent.

It did not come from a single place.

It came from everywhere.

The buildings.

The streets.

The city itself.

Soren gasped, his hands clutching his head. The noise—it was inside him.

His other self did not move.

Only watched.

“You said the name,” he murmured.

Soren’s chest heaved. “I—”

“You weren’t supposed to.”

The whispering grew louder.

It was no longer voices.

It was a presence.

Something moving beneath the city.

Something waking up.

The streets trembled. The sky darkened.

Soren’s vision blurred at the edges.

He looked at his other self.

A final, desperate question burned inside him.

“Who am I?”

The other Soren smiled.

“You’ve always been here.”

Then, the city swallowed him.