Aren Solace had always been careful with names.
Not just other people's names. His own, too.
Names carried weight. Names carried memory. Names remembered you back.
His notebook was old, soft at the edges, corners bent, the ink faded in places but meticulously cared for. Every line mattered.
Every letter mattered. Aren kept it tucked beneath his mattress, pressed flat, as if the bed itself were trying to swallow it whole.
He never wrote new names. Not in the morning. Not at night. Only names that already existed names that had survived him long enough to be worth remembering.
Morning was safe. Morning diluted fear into routine.
Today, he flipped to the last page. Empty. Good. That meant nothing new had happened.
At school, Aren sat quietly in the back row, watching the classroom flow like a river he could never touch. Faces, gestures, fleeting expressions. Patterns. He noticed everything, yet said nothing. Observation was safe. Interference was costly. Memories had consequences.
The teacher called attendance, and Aren's name rang out. He answered quietly. The word felt solid, real. Like a tether to the world that he didn't quite trust.
During lunch, he sat alone, observing the ebb and flow of social currents. Friends clustered in predictable groups, their laughter rising and falling. Some faces carried the same smiles every day, some eyes hid something darker. Aren cataloged it all who flinched when others laughed, who glanced too often at their phone, who avoided a particular seat. He noticed, but he did nothing. That was another rule he had learned early: Observe. Do not interfere.
The day should have ended normally. But it didn't.
On his way home, a drizzle had begun, fine and sharp against the concrete. Aren took the long route through the old pedestrian tunnel, where shadows clung to the walls like old secrets. Most people avoided it. He usually avoided it. But today, he didn't have a choice. The rain was heavier than expected, and the tunnel offered shelter, even if only a thin one.
Then he heard it a voice, high, pleading, broken by fear. Another, deep and angry, sharp like a knife scraping against stone.
Aren froze.
The notebook pressed against his side, heavy and insistent. He had rules. He had always had rules. Observe, do not act. And yet, his legs moved before his mind had decided why.
Inside the tunnel, the man had the woman's wrist pinned. His grip was firm, practiced. The woman's face was pale, her eyes wide and desperate. Aren's gaze flicked around, cataloging how many steps? How far from the wall? Could he block the exit? Could he shout? He knew all the answers. And he did nothing.
Then Aren saw it.
A name. Floating, impossible, shimmering faintly above the man's head. Letters made of light that seemed to breathe.
His heart thundered.
The notebook was in his bag, tugging at him, insisting. His hands shook as he reached for it. Pen in hand, he hovered over the page, trembling. Every fiber of him screamed not to touch it. But every instinct whispered the same thing: This is what it's for.
He wrote the name.
The air shifted. Not with wind or sound, but with subtle wrongness, like a language suddenly losing meaning.
The man blinked. He looked around, confused. Then, as if a shadow had been peeled away, he was gone. Not dead. Not hurt. Gone. As though he had never existed.
The woman stared at him, then past him, blank and trembling. Her voice, which had been screaming, now only echoed faintly against the walls. Aren stumbled backward.
Silence enveloped him. Rain pattered on the tunnel floor, a steady, indifferent rhythm.
Outside, the city continued. People hurried, umbrellas bouncing, buses groaning along wet streets. Life was indifferent to the erasure that had just occurred.
At home, the television murmured in the background. The news anchor spoke of a lone woman found in the tunnel, wet and shaking. "Authorities report no suspects… no witnesses recall seeing anyone else," she said. Aren's hands trembled. He closed the notebook, pressing it against his chest.
A space had opened in the world.
And only he could see it.
The First Taste of Consequence
Later that night, Aren sat at his desk, staring at the notebook. The name he had written burned faintly in his mind. He tried to recall the man's face, his voice, the angle of his posture. But it slipped like water through fingers. Already, Aren could feel something leaving him. Not physical. Not immediate. A weight of memory, gone.
He opened the notebook again. The page was blank now. No trace of the name. It was as if the act itself had been absolute, perfect.
Aren's chest ached. He could feel a subtle emptiness forming in the edges of his mind, like a corner of a room slowly fading into shadow.
He did not sleep that night. He stared at the ceiling, at the faint cracks in the plaster, counting them, naming them in his head, trying to anchor himself. But the memory of the man the one whose existence he had erased was already thinning. By morning, it would be like he had never been at all.
And Aren realized something chilling: the notebook did not just erase others. Each act of erasure stole pieces of him, too.
The thought should have terrified him. It didn't. Not fully. There was something intoxicating in it. Something powerful.
Something that whispered in the shadows: I can change the world. I can make it better. I can make it pure.
And Aren, trembling, almost believed it.