The headache wasn't a pain. It was a hollow space.
It sat behind Lyric Veyne's eyes, a vacuum where a history should have been. Lyric opened their eyes, expecting the ceiling of a bedroom, a familiar crack in the plaster, maybe the morning light filtering through cheap blinds.
Instead, there was only the damp gray of stone and the smell of ozone mixed with rotting garbage.
Lyric pushed up from the ground. The cobblestones were slick with a greasy mist. The alleyway was narrow, framed by towering brick buildings that seemed to lean inward, blocking out the sky. A single neon sign buzzed somewhere above, flickering with a color that hurt to look at—a violent violet.
Who am I?
The name came to the surface like a bubble in a swamp: Lyric Veyne.
It felt right. It tasted like ownership. But that was it. There was nothing attached to the name. No face of a mother, no memory of a childhood home, no reason for being facedown in a back alley in a city that hummed like an overloaded circuit board.
Lyric looked down at their hands. They were pale, slender, and trembling. There was grime under the fingernails.
"Okay," Lyric whispered. The voice was raspy, unused. "Okay. Stand up. Figure it out."
A rat skittered near Lyric's boot, sniffing at the leather. It was a mangy thing, missing half an ear, its eyes beady and wet. Without thinking—driven by a sudden, inexplicable urge for contact, for proof of existence—Lyric reached out.
The index finger brushed the coarse fur of the rat's spine.
There was no sound. No flash of light.
The rat simply… wasn't there anymore.
Lyric blinked. The hand was hovering in empty air. The damp spot on the cobblestones where the creature had been standing was dry, as if nothing had ever touched it.
Lyric pulled the hand back, chest tightening. I saw a rat. I'm sure I saw a rat.
But as the thought formed, it began to dissolve. The image of the mangy ear, the wet eyes—it frayed at the edges. The harder Lyric tried to hold onto the mental image, the slippery it became, like trying to hold water in a clenched fist.
What rat?
Lyric stood up, swaying slightly. The alley was empty. It had always been empty. Why had they reached out? There was nothing there to touch.
"I need water," Lyric muttered, stumbling toward the mouth of the alley. "I need… I need to remember."
Stepping out of the alley was like stepping into a kaleidoscope.
The street was crowded, a churning river of people, machines, and noise. But it wasn't the chaotic noise of traffic; it was the noise of commerce.
"Happy childhoods! Get your happy childhoods here! pristine condition, summer of '98!" a vendor shouted from a stall draped in velvet.
"Language skills! High fluency French! One-time injection, never stumble over a conjugation again!" screamed another.
Lyric stood frozen against the brickwork, eyes wide.
The city—Mnemos, the word floated up from the void in Lyric's mind—was built on memory. It was everywhere. Above the street, massive holographic billboards replayed moments on loop: a first kiss, the taste of a perfect steak, the adrenaline of a skydive.
Experience the thrill without the risk, the ad promised. Buy the memory today.
People moved with purpose. Some looked dazed, their eyes glassy, stumbling out of clinics with bandages on their temples. Others looked sharp, predatory, scanning the crowd. Lyric noticed a man in a tailored suit exchanging a glowing blue vial with a street urchin. The urchin looked terrified; the man looked hungry.
Lyric pulled their jacket tighter. It was a dark, canvas coat, slightly too big. Inside the pocket, fingers brushed against cold metal.
Lyric pulled it out. It was a pendant—a simple circle of tarnished silver with a jagged crack running down the center. It looked old. Worthless.
Do I remember this?
Lyric stared at the metal. Nothing came. No emotion. No flashback. Just the cold weight of it. But unlike the… whatever was in the alley… the pendant didn't disappear when held. It felt solid. Anchoring.
"Hey! You!"
Lyric flinched, shoving the pendant back into the pocket.
A woman was marching toward them. She wore a heavy leather apron stained with ink, and her eyes were mismatched—one brown, one a swirling, artificial blue. She looked furious.
"You're back," the woman spat, stopping inches from Lyric's face. She smelled of chemicals and old paper. "I thought you skipped town."
Lyric stared at her. "I… do I know you?"
The woman let out a sharp, incredulous laugh. "Funny. Real funny, Veyne. You got the goods, or are you here to beg for an extension?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," Lyric said, backing up until their heels hit the wall. "I don't remember you."
The woman's expression shifted. She squinted, leaning in. The mechanical eye whirred softly, focusing. "You're serious. You look… blank. Someone wipe you? A debt scrub?"
"I woke up in the alley," Lyric said, the honesty spilling out before it could be checked. "I don't know who I am. I just know my name."
The woman's face hardened. In Mnemos, a person without memories wasn't a victim; they were a target. Or worse—a blank slate waiting to be written on.
"You owe me," the woman growled, stepping closer. She reached out, grabbing Lyric's collar. "You owe me three weeks of high-grade sorrow. You promised to harvest it from the Widow's District. Don't play dumb with me."
Panic spiked in Lyric's chest. The woman's grip was tight.
"Let go," Lyric gasped.
"Not until I get my memories, Veyne!"
Instinct took over. It wasn't a decision; it was a reflex, a survival mechanism wired into muscles that remembered what the mind had forgotten.
Lyric's hand shot up and grabbed the woman's wrist. Skin on skin.
No.
The thought came too late.
The sensation was instantaneous. It wasn't heat, and it wasn't cold. It was a sudden absence. It felt like walking down a staircase and missing a step—that stomach-dropping lurch of gravity failing.
The woman's eyes went wide. The anger in them didn't fade; it simply vanished, replaced by a vacuous confusion.
She blinked. Her grip on Lyric's collar loosened, then fell away entirely.
She looked at her own hand, then at Lyric. She looked at Lyric's face, searching for recognition, for context, for anything.
"I…" She stammered. She looked around the busy street, disoriented. "I was… was I doing something?"
Lyric pressed back against the wall, heart hammering against ribs like a trapped bird. It happened again. Just like the… the thing in the alley.
"You were walking," Lyric whispered, the lie tasting like ash. "You just stopped."
The woman rubbed her temple. "Right. Walking. I need to get back to the shop. I have… inventory."
She looked at Lyric one last time. There was no recognition. No anger about a debt. No demand for 'high-grade sorrow.' It was as if Lyric Veyne had never existed in her world.
"Excuse me," she mumbled, stepping around Lyric and merging back into the crowd.
Lyric watched her go, trembling.
I erased it, Lyric thought, looking at their own hand with horror. I didn't just erase the debt. I erased me. I erased her memory of me.
A chilling realization followed. If Lyric touched her long enough… would she have forgotten her shop? Her name? How to breathe?
Lyric shoved their hands deep into the coat pockets, terrified of accidentally brushing against a passerby. This wasn't a power. This was a curse. In a world where memory was currency, Lyric was a walking black hole.
Hunger gnawed at Lyric's stomach, grounding the panic.
They needed to move. Standing still attracted attention. Lyric began to walk, keeping elbows tucked in, weaving through the gaps in the crowd to avoid contact.
The city of Mnemos was a labyrinth. The architecture was a hodgepodge of eras—Victorian brickwork fused with chrome cybernetics. Pipes hissed steam onto the streets, and drones buzzed overhead carrying glowing canisters of blue fluid.
Lyric passed a shop window. THE MEMORY BANK, the gold lettering read. Inside, people sat in comfortable chairs with wires attached to their temples, faces slack with bliss as they uploaded their days in exchange for credits.
Is that what happened to me? Lyric wondered. Did I sell everything? Did I sell my childhood for a sandwich?
No. The hollowness felt too clean. Too surgical.
Lyric turned a corner into a market square. Here, the trade was more physical. Stalls displayed physical objects—trinkets, lockets, old toys—tagged with emotions.
"Teddy bear, attached memory of a mother's hug, very potent!" a hawker yelled.
Lyric paused at a stall selling mirrors. For the first time, they saw their reflection.
Dark hair, messy and cut short. Eyes that were a startling shade of gray, almost silver, matching the overcast sky. There were dark circles under them. The face was young—eighteen, maybe nineteen—but the expression was old. It was the face of someone who was already tired.
"You looking to buy, kid?"
The stall owner was a heavy-set man polishing a brass locket.
"Just looking," Lyric said softly.
"Looking costs time. Time is memory." The man grunted. He eyed Lyric's coat. "You look like you've got nothing to trade. No aura."
"Aura?"
"You're flat, kid. No emotional resonance. You empty?" The man's voice dropped to a whisper, half-suspicious, half-pitying. "You a Hollow?"
"I don't know what that is."
"Better keep walking then. The Guilds don't like Hollows cluttering up the market. Bad for business. Makes the customers nervous."
Lyric backed away, but as they turned, their shoulder bumped into a stack of crates.
The crates wobbled. Lyric instinctively reached out to steady them.
Don't touch it!
Lyric yanked the hand back at the last second. The crates toppled, spilling onto the cobblestones. Glass shattered.
"Hey!" The merchant roared. "You break it, you pay for it! That was a 1950s wedding memory! Pure joy!"
"I didn't touch it!" Lyric shouted, hands up.
"You knocked it over!" The merchant came around the stall, face red. "That's 500 Mnems!"
A small crowd began to gather. In Mnemos, a public dispute was entertainment. It was a memory worth keeping, maybe even worth selling later if it got violent enough.
"I don't have money," Lyric said, backing up.
"Then I'm taking it out of your head," the merchant snarled. He pulled a device from his belt—a wicked-looking extraction syringe with a glowing tip. "Hold him!"
Two burly bystanders grabbed Lyric's arms.
Panic exploded.
"Let go!" Lyric screamed.
The contact was unavoidable.
Lyric thrashed, skin brushing against the forearm of the man on the left, and the wrist of the man on the right.
The effect was a ripple in reality.
The man on the left blinked, his face going slack. He looked down at his hands, confused, as if waking from a nap. He let go.
The man on the right frowned, the aggression draining out of him like water from a cracked cup. "Why am I holding you?" he muttered, releasing Lyric.
The merchant stopped, the syringe poised in mid-air. He looked at the two men, then at Lyric. He didn't understand what had happened—he hadn't felt the erasure—but he saw the result.
"What did you do?" the merchant whispered. "You didn't pay them. You... you hexed them?"
Lyric didn't wait to explain. The hole in the crowd was open.
Lyric ran.
They ran until their lungs burned and the neon lights of the market faded into the gloom of the industrial district.
Lyric collapsed behind a dumpster, gasping for air. The damp cold of the stone seeped into their jeans.
They looked at their hands again. They were trembling violently.
I'm a monster.
The realization settled heavy and cold in Lyric's chest. The power wasn't just erasing memories. It was erasing cause and effect. It was breaking the fundamental rules of how people interacted. If Lyric touched someone, the connection was severed. If Lyric killed someone, would the world forget the body?
Lyric squeezed their eyes shut, trying to summon a happy memory to combat the fear. A birthday? A friend? A pet?
Nothing came. Just the gray fog.
And then, a terrifying thought.
The rat.
Lyric searched the mind. I touched a rat in the alley.
Lyric remembered the idea of the rat. They remembered the words "rat" and "alley." But the image? The sensory detail? It was gone.
Lyric couldn't remember what the rat looked like.
A sob caught in Lyric's throat.
It erases it for me too.
Every time Lyric used this power, they lost a piece of the world. If they erased a person, they wouldn't just be saving themselves—they would be condemning themselves to forget that person ever existed.
If Lyric fell in love and touched their lover... they would become strangers instantly.
"Cruel," Lyric whispered into the silence of the alley. "It's a cruel joke."
Clap. Clap. Clap.
The sound of slow, deliberate applause echoed from the fire escape above.
Lyric froze. They looked up.
Standing on the metal grating, silhouetted against the smog-choked moon, was a figure. They wore a long coat that seemed to absorb the light, and their face was hidden behind a smooth, featureless mask made of white porcelain.
"Bravo," a voice called down. It was synthesized, distorted, impossible to identify as male or female. "Messy execution. Terrible form. But the raw potential? Staggering."
Lyric scrambled to their feet, back against the dumpster. "Who are you?"
The figure leaned over the railing. "Someone who remembers you, Lyric Veyne. Even when the rest of the world is starting to forget."
"You know me?" Lyric demanded. "Did you do this to me? Did you take my memories?"
"Take?" The figure laughed, a harsh, metallic sound. "Oh, no. We didn't take anything. You gave it away. You paid the price."
"Price for what?"
"For the power to cut the strings," the figure said. They dropped a small object over the railing. It clattered onto the cobblestones at Lyric's feet.
Lyric hesitated, then looked down. It was a photograph. A polaroid.
It showed Lyric, looking slightly younger, smiling. Lyric's arm was around someone else—a silhouette that had been burned out of the photo with a cigarette lighter. A black hole where a person used to be.
"Who is that?" Lyric asked, voice trembling.
"That," the figure said, stepping back into the shadows, "is the first thing you erased. And if you want to know why... you're going to have to survive long enough to find us."
"Wait!" Lyric shouted, reaching out.
But the fire escape was empty. The figure was gone.
Lyric stood alone in the dark, the rain starting to fall, holding a picture of themselves smiling at a ghost.
Chapter 1 End.
Chapter 1 Summary & Status Report
New Memories / Information:
Lyric Veyne (MC) wakes up with total amnesia in the city of Mnemos.
The Power: Lyric discovers that skin-to-skin contact erases the target from memory. This works on living things (the rat, the debt collector, the thugs) and seemingly inanimate objects (implied with the rat, confirmed with interactions).
The Cost: Lyric also forgets the specific sensory details of whatever they erase (cannot recall the image of the rat).
The World: Memories are currency. People trade them for skills and emotions.
The Artifact: Lyric has a tarnished silver pendant that seems immune to the "fading" effect of the world.
The Mystery: A masked figure claims Lyric chose this fate and gave up their memories for this power.
Current Inventory:
Tarnished Silver Pendant.
Burnt Polaroid (Lyric + Erased Silhouette).
Canvas Coat (stolen/found?).
Consequences:
Erased: A stray rat (erased from existence/memory).
Erased: A memory debt owed to a woman (she forgot Lyric and the debt).
Erased: The aggression/intent of two thugs (they forgot why they were holding Lyric).
Status: Wanted? Likely. The merchant witnessed the event, even if he doesn't understand it. The "Guilds" dislike "Hollows" (people with no memory aura).
Cliffhanger:
Who is the silhouette in the photo that Lyric erased?
Who is the masked observer?