The guild that remembers what others forget.
Litterae ex Sepulchris
The Vermillion Playhouse paid its performers in copper sceats, watered wine, and the occasional opportunity to sleep with someone marginally less desperate than themselves. Phaphhrd considered this an improvement over his previous employment, which had involved guarding a merchant’s warehouse for the promise of silver that never materialized and the certainty of violence that always did.
He stood on the small stage at the back of the tavern-theatre—the Vermillion was neither quite tavern nor quite theatre, occupying the uncomfortable middle ground that Kasdim seemed to specialize in—and prepared to sing the Ballad of the Northern Lover, which he had written himself during a particularly maudlin evening and now performed three times weekly to audiences who were too drunk to notice the autobiographical elements.
The audience tonight was the usual Vermillion crowd: merchants’ clerks spending money they would later regret, courtesans between appointments, a scattering of thieves casing the room, and in the corner booth, the woman Phaphhrd was trying very hard not to look at directly lest his concentration shatter into a thousand embarrassing pieces.
Ivlis.
She was not the most beautiful woman in Kasdim—that honor belonged to some temple prostitute or aristocrat’s daughter or possibly to some entity that was not technically a woman at all, this being Kasdim, where categories had a tendency to blur. But she was the most beautiful woman who had ever looked at Phaphhrd with something other than fear, commercial interest, or the calculation of how much he might be worth as a corpse.
She was an actress with the Vermillion’s dramatic company, which meant she worked the main stage while Phaphhrd worked the back room. She had dark hair, dark eyes, and a smile that made him forget every woman he had ever known, including the one he had loved and lost in the Cold Waste, whose memory he had sworn never to betray.
He was betraying it now, every time Ivlis smiled at him. He was betraying it and he didn’t care, which was perhaps the greatest betrayal of all.
Stop thinking about her, Phaphhrd told himself. Sing the song. Collect the coppers. Try not to make a fool of yourself.
This was, he reflected, becoming increasingly difficult.
The Ballad of the Northern Lover was a twelve-verse affair that told the story of a barbarian who fell in love with a civilized woman, lost her to circumstances both tragic and preventable, and spent the rest of his life wandering the world in search of something to fill the void she had left behind. Phaphhrd had written it in three hours while drunk on the cheap wine the Vermillion provided to its employees, and he had been performing it ever since with the growing suspicion that it was perhaps too honest to be good art.
The audience, as usual, paid minimal attention. The clerks talked amongst themselves. The courtesans assessed potential clients. The thieves continued their professional evaluation of the room’s valuables.
Only Ivlis watched him with anything like genuine interest, and that interest made him sing better than he had any right to, his voice filling the smoky room with a resonance that surprised even himself.
“She came to me like spring’s first thaw,” he sang, “when all my world was winter. She warmed the ice within my heart, and I was hers forever.”
The verses unwound, each one a small confession wrapped in the acceptable disguise of fiction. The northern lover lost his woman to a jealous rival. The northern lover wandered south, seeking warmth he would never find. The northern lover discovered that some wounds never heal, they only scar over, and sometimes scars are worse than wounds because you learn to live with them.
When Phaphhrd finished, there was scattered applause—more than usual, actually, which might have been the effect of Ivlis’s presence in the corner booth, or might have been the genuine quality of his performance. He bowed, collected the coppers that landed near the stage (the Vermillion’s patrons considered it a mark of sophistication to throw their appreciation rather than hand it over), and retreated to the bar to wait out the rest of the evening.
“You sang well tonight,” said Markhas, the bartender, sliding Phaphhrd his customary cup of watered wine. Markhas was a barrel-chested man with the look of someone who had spent time in the fighting pits before deciding that pouring drinks was a more sustainable career path. “The tall lady’s watching you.”
“I know.”
“You going to do anything about it?”
“I’m going to drink this wine, collect my pay, and go home to my extremely empty room.”
Markhas snorted. “You’re a fool.”
“This has been established.”
“She’s been watching you for three weeks now. Every time you perform. Sits in the same booth, orders the same wine, watches you like you’re the only thing in the room worth looking at.” Markhas leaned forward conspiratorially. “In my experience, that means something.”
“In my experience,” Phaphhrd said, “it means she’s working up to asking me for something I won’t want to give.”
“That’s a cynical view.”
“I learned from the best.”
This was true. The Grey Ratter had been Phaphhrd’s partner, his companion, his other half for the better part of five years now, and the Ratter’s cynicism had rubbed off on him like soot from a chimney. Phaphhrd had arrived in Kasdim as a romantic idealist, convinced that the world was full of wonder and that love could conquer any obstacle. The Ratter had systematically disabused him of these notions while simultaneously demonstrating that cynicism and sentiment were not actually opposites—that you could expect the worst from people and still be disappointed when they delivered it.
Speaking of which.
“Have you seen the Ratter lately?” Phaphhrd asked.
Markhas frowned. “Who?”
“The Ratter. My partner. Small fellow, quick hands, usually wearing grey. Drinks here at least twice a week, owes you money from last month’s card game.”
Markhas’s frown deepened. “I don’t know anyone by that name. And I’d remember if someone owed me money.”
Phaphhrd felt something cold settle in his stomach. “You’re joking.”
“Do I look like I’m joking?”
He did not. Markhas looked genuinely confused, as if Phaphhrd had asked about someone who had never existed, as if the name “Grey Ratter” meant nothing at all.
“Describe him,” Phaphhrd said. “My partner. The man I’ve been working with for five years. The man who helped me rob the Temple of Tranquil Drowning last autumn and split the take with me right here at this bar.”
“You robbed the Temple of Tranquil Drowning alone,” Markhas said slowly. “You told me so yourself. Said it was the hardest job you’d ever pulled, and you barely got out alive. I remember because I poured you six drinks afterward while you complained about how much easier it would have been with a partner.”
The cold in Phaphhrd’s stomach spread outward, becoming ice, becoming winter.
“That’s not what happened,” he said, but his voice was uncertain now. The memory was there—the temple job, the narrow escapes, the Ratter’s quick thinking saving both their lives at least twice—but when he tried to focus on the details, they seemed to slip away, like water through fingers, like dreams upon waking.
“Look,” Markhas said, “I don’t know what you’re going on about, but I’ve got customers. Drink your wine. Go talk to the tall lady. Forget about this ‘Ratter’ person.”
He moved off to serve other patrons, leaving Phaphhrd alone with his watered wine and his growing dread.
Ivlis found him twenty minutes later, standing outside the Vermillion’s back entrance, staring at the three moons of Nehwon as if they might hold answers to questions he was only beginning to formulate.
“You look like a man who’s seen a ghost,” she said.
Her voice was warm, musical—the voice of a trained actress, capable of conveying any emotion on demand. But there was something genuine beneath the training, something that made Phaphhrd want to trust her despite every lesson the Ratter had ever taught him about trusting beautiful women.
“I think I might be the ghost,” he said.
“That’s very poetic. Also very mysterious.” She moved to stand beside him, close enough that he could smell her perfume—something floral, probably expensive, probably a gift from some admirer she hadn’t mentioned. “Are you going to elaborate, or shall I guess?”
“Do you know a man called the Grey Ratter?”
Ivlis tilted her head, considering. “I don’t think so. Should I?”
“He’s my partner. My best friend. We’ve worked together for five years, lived in adjacent rooms at the same boarding house, saved each other’s lives more times than I can count.” Phaphhrd turned to look at her. “And apparently, no one in Kasdim remembers that he exists.”
“That’s... concerning.”
“It’s terrifying is what it is.” Phaphhrd ran a hand through his hair, a nervous gesture he’d developed since coming south. “I can still remember him. Mostly. But the memories are slippery now—every time I try to focus on something specific, it’s like trying to hold smoke. And if I’m starting to forget him too...”
“Then either you’re going mad, or something very strange is happening.”
“In Kasdim, those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
Ivlis laughed—a genuine laugh, not an actress’s practiced chuckle. “No, I suppose they’re not.” She was quiet for a moment, then: “What are you going to do?”
“Find him. Or find out what happened to him. One or the other.” Phaphhrd looked at the moons again. “The Thieves’ Guild would know. They keep records of all their members, and the Ratter’s been a dues-paying thief since before I met him. If anyone can tell me whether he’s real or whether I’ve invented him out of loneliness and too much cheap wine...”
“The Thieves’ Guild doesn’t welcome casual visitors.”
“I’m not a casual visitor. I’m an associate member. Or I was, before I decided that singing for my supper was less likely to get me killed than stealing for it.” He smiled grimly. “Besides, the Ratter taught me how to get in through the back way. If I can still remember it.”
“You’re going now? It’s nearly midnight.”
“Midnight is the best time to visit the Thieves’ Guild. During the day, they actually enforce their security.”
Ivlis was quiet again. Then, surprising him, she reached out and took his hand. Her fingers were warm, her grip surprisingly strong for someone who made her living with her voice rather than her body.
“Be careful,” she said. “Whatever’s happening, whatever’s made your friend disappear from everyone’s memory—it sounds like the kind of thing that could happen to you too.”
“I know.”
“And when you come back...” She hesitated, and for a moment the actress’s mask slipped, revealing something vulnerable beneath. “Come find me. Tell me what you learned. I’d like to know.”
“Why?”
“Because you interest me, Phaphhrd of the Cold Waste. Because you sing like a man who’s lost something precious and hasn’t given up hope of finding it again.” She released his hand, stepped back. “And because I’ve had my fill of boring men. You, at least, seem likely to be entertaining.”
She turned and walked back into the Vermillion, leaving Phaphhrd alone with the moons and the night and the growing certainty that something was very, very wrong.
The Thieves’ Guild of Kasdim—formally known as the Honorable and Ancient Association of Redistributive Professionals, a name so pretentious that even its members rarely used it—occupied a building on Silver Eel Street that had once been a temple to a forgotten god. The god had been forgotten so thoroughly that no one could remember what it had been the god of, which either said something profound about the nature of divinity or something practical about the nature of Kasdim real estate.
Phaphhrd approached from the Marsh Gate district, taking the long way through alleys that the Ratter had shown him years ago. The memories were still there—turn left at the butcher’s shop, right at the fountain that never worked, straight through the courtyard where three different murders had been committed in the last decade—but they felt fragile now, like paper that might tear if he handled it too roughly.
The Ratter would know what’s happening, he thought. The Ratter always knows what’s happening. He’s the clever one. I’m just the one who’s good at hitting things.
But the Ratter wasn’t here. The Ratter was missing, or forgotten, or possibly had never existed at all, and Phaphhrd was going to have to figure this out on his own.
He found the back entrance where it had always been—a door disguised as a portion of wall, accessible only if you knew which brick to press and in what sequence. Phaphhrd pressed the bricks, felt the familiar click of the mechanism engaging, and slipped through the opening as the hidden door swung inward.
The Guild’s interior was warm, well-lit, and busy despite the late hour. Thieves worked when others slept, after all, and the Guild kept hours that would have horrified any respectable merchant. Phaphhrd moved through the entrance hall, past the training rooms where apprentices practiced picking locks and lifting purses, past the record halls where Guild clerks maintained meticulous files on every job, every member, every outstanding debt and favor.
He was halfway to the membership records when someone called his name.
“Phaphhrd! What brings you to our humble establishment?”
The speaker was a woman named Kresha, who had risen through the Guild’s ranks on a combination of administrative competence and a willingness to poison anyone who stood in her way. She was short, round, and possessed of a smile that never quite reached her eyes.
“Kresha.” Phaphhrd bowed slightly, the minimum courtesy the Guild required of associate members. “I’m looking for information about a colleague. The Grey Ratter.”
Kresha’s smile flickered. “Who?”
The ice in Phaphhrd’s stomach was a glacier now.
“The Grey Ratter,” he repeated. “Small man. Quick hands. Been a full member of the Guild for at least seven years. I know because I was with him when he paid his dues last spring.”
Kresha’s expression shifted from confusion to concern—not concern for Phaphhrd, but concern in the way that a bureaucrat becomes concerned when someone claims to have documents that don’t exist.
“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’ve never heard that name. Are you certain you’re not thinking of someone else?”
“I’m certain.”
“Then perhaps we should check the records together.” Her tone was gentle now, the way you might speak to someone who had suffered a recent blow to the head. “If this person exists in our files, we’ll find them. And if they don’t...”
Then I’m either mad or something worse is happening, Phaphhrd finished silently.
They went to the records hall together. Kresha consulted the membership rolls—massive leather-bound volumes that contained the name, description, and known aliases of every thief who had ever paid dues to the Guild. She searched under “Ratter,” under “Grey,” under every variation Phaphhrd could suggest.
Nothing.
She searched the job records, looking for any mention of the heists Phaphhrd remembered pulling with his partner. The Temple of Tranquil Drowning was there—but listed as a solo job, attributed to Phaphhrd alone. The Diamond of Duke Dasko was there—again, solo. The Laughing God Affair, the Merchant’s Daughter Caper, a dozen other jobs that Phaphhrd could have sworn were two-man operations...
All of them listed only one thief. Him.
“I don’t understand,” Kresha said, and for once her confusion seemed genuine. “You claim this person existed, but there’s no record of them anywhere. No membership, no jobs, no debts, no connections to any other Guild member. It’s as if...”
“As if they never existed at all.”
“Or as if someone went through our records and erased every trace of them.” She frowned. “But that would require access to our archives, knowledge of our filing system, and enough time to alter hundreds of documents without being caught. It’s not impossible, but it’s highly improbable.”
Phaphhrd thought about this. Thought about the Ratter’s skills, his connections, his ability to get into places he shouldn’t be able to reach.
And thought about who might want to erase a man so thoroughly that even his best friend could barely remember him.
“There’s another possibility,” he said slowly.
“Which is?”
“Magic.”
Kresha’s expression went cold. In Kasdim, magic was not forbidden—nothing was truly forbidden in Kasdim—but it was feared, respected, and generally avoided by sensible people. The Guild had standing arrangements with several wizards for necessary services, but those arrangements were kept at arm’s length, managed through intermediaries, never allowed to touch the Guild’s core operations.
“If magic is involved,” Kresha said, “then this is beyond my authority. You’ll need to speak to the Guildmaster.”
“Can that be arranged?”
“Come back tomorrow night. I’ll see what I can do.” She paused. “But Phaphhrd? If you’re right—if someone or something is using magic to erase people from memory—then you may be in danger too. The fact that you still remember this ‘Ratter’ person, even partially, suggests that you were close to them. Close enough to resist whatever effect is being used on everyone else.”
“Or close enough to be next.”
“That too.” She smiled her not-quite-smile. “Sleep well.”
Phaphhrd did not sleep well.
He lay in his narrow bed in his narrow room in the boarding house on the Street of the Silk Merchants, staring at the ceiling and trying to hold onto memories that seemed to fade every time he examined them too closely.
The Ratter’s face. He could still see it, mostly—the sharp features, the quick eyes, the sardonic twist of the mouth when something amused him. But the details were becoming uncertain. What color were his eyes? Grey, obviously—hence the name—but what shade of grey? The grey of storm clouds, the grey of old silver, the grey of ash from a fire that had burned too long?
Phaphhrd couldn’t remember.
He closed his eyes and tried to reconstruct a specific memory: the night they had met, five years ago, when Phaphhrd had been fresh from the Cold Waste and stupid enough to pick a pocket that already had a hand in it. The Ratter’s hand, as it turned out. They had both frozen, staring at each other across the shared victim’s coat, and then the Ratter had smiled and said...
What had he said?
Phaphhrd couldn’t remember.
The memory was there, the shape of it, but the content was fading, replaced by a grey fog that seemed to be spreading through his mind like rot through wood.
I’m forgetting him, he realized. Just like everyone else. The only difference is that I know it’s happening.
He sat up, lit a candle, and began to write.
If he was going to forget the Grey Ratter, then at least he would leave himself notes. Names, dates, descriptions—everything he could still remember, committed to paper before it slipped away entirely. The candle burned low and he lit another. The ink ran out and he found more. The night grew old around him, and still he wrote, fighting against the tide of forgetting with the only weapon he had left.
When dawn finally came, he had filled seventeen pages with cramped, desperate handwriting.
And he could no longer remember the Ratter’s eyes at all.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
The thing about hiding from a woman who wanted to kill you, the Grey Ratter reflected, was that it gave you far too much time to think about all the other women who had wanted to kill you over the years.
He was currently wedged into a space between two buildings on Copper Lane—not an alley, which would have suggested a width sufficient for human passage, but rather a gap that might charitably be called a crevice. The Ratter had found it three days ago while fleeing from Sheelris, who had discovered the minor matter of the emeralds, and he had been using it intermittently ever since.
The emeralds were not, strictly speaking, his fault.
They had belonged to a merchant named Voskos, who had acquired them through means that were probably illegal but definitely profitable, and who had been foolish enough to store them in a lockbox that the Ratter could open in his sleep. The theft itself had been routine. The fence had been Sheelris, which was where things had become complicated.
Sheelris was beautiful in the way that certain venomous flowers are beautiful—all dark curves and darker promises, with eyes that suggested she was constantly calculating the precise moment when betrayal would become more profitable than loyalty. The Ratter had been involved with her, off and on, for the better part of two years, which was approximately eighteen months longer than his usual romantic entanglements.
She had paid him for the emeralds. Then she had discovered that Voskos was connected to the Overlord’s tax collectors, which made the theft approximately ten times more dangerous than advertised. Then she had decided that the Ratter was a liability that needed to be eliminated before the tax collectors came looking for explanations.
Hence the hiding.
“You can’t stay in there forever,” said a voice from the mouth of the crevice.
The Ratter pressed himself deeper into the gap, which was saying something given that the gap was already pressing back. “I can try.”
“Sheelris has people watching your rooms. Your drop points. The three taverns you drink at. The other two taverns you pretend you don’t drink at.” The voice was familiar—Grellak, one of the Guild’s information brokers, a man whose profession consisted of knowing things and selling them to interested parties. “She’s also put a price on your head. Three hundred silver sceats, alive preferred but dead acceptable.”
“Only three hundred? I’m offended.”
“You should be. Marnak the Fingerless got four hundred last month, and all he did was steal some silverware.”
The Ratter emerged from the crevice, brushing dust and cobwebs from his grey clothing. Grellak was waiting at the mouth of the gap—a thin, anxious-looking man whose perpetual expression of worry was less a reflection of his emotional state than a professional affectation designed to make people trust him with their secrets.
“What do you want, Grellak?”
“To warn you. As a professional courtesy.”
“Professional courtesy doesn’t exist. What do you really want?”
Grellak’s worried expression deepened, which was impressive given how deep it already was. “Something’s wrong at the Guild.”
“Something’s always wrong at the Guild. It’s the nature of the institution.”
“Not like this.” Grellak glanced over his shoulder, as if expecting someone to materialize from the shadows. In Kasdim, this was not an unreasonable precaution. “Members are disappearing. Not dying, not leaving—disappearing. And when they disappear...”
“Let me guess. No one remembers them.”
Grellak’s eyes widened. “You know?”
“I suspected.” The Ratter had been hearing whispers for weeks—fragments of conversation that stopped when he approached, Guild members looking confused when asked about colleagues they should have known. He had attributed it to the usual paranoia that accompanied life in Kasdim, but paranoia in Kasdim was often just pattern recognition by another name. “Who’s gone?”
“That’s the problem. I can’t remember. I know I should remember—I feel the absence, like a missing tooth—but when I try to think about who, specifically...” Grellak trailed off, his expression shifting from worry to something closer to fear. “It’s like trying to remember a dream. The harder I focus, the more it slips away.”
The Ratter felt a chill that had nothing to do with the shadows between buildings.
“How many?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a dozen. Maybe more.” Grellak was sweating now, despite the cool evening air. “I’ve been keeping records. Written records, because I can’t trust my memory anymore. Every time I notice that gap, that absence, I write down what I can. But even the records don’t help—when I read them back, the names don’t mean anything. Just sounds. Just letters arranged in order that used to mean something.”
“Show me.”
They moved through back alleys to Grellak’s rooms—a cramped space above a tannery, which meant the smell kept casual visitors away and the price stayed reasonable. The information broker’s walls were covered in papers, notes, strings connecting fragments of information in patterns that probably made sense to someone with Grellak’s particular form of obsession.
“Here.” Grellak pulled down a sheaf of papers from one wall. “Three weeks of records. Every time I noticed something wrong, I wrote it down.”
The Ratter studied the pages. Names, dates, descriptions—but Grellak was right. The names were just sounds, patterns of letters that refused to coalesce into people. Markhal Silveneyes. Thessa of the Weeping Street. Old Dennakal. He could read them, but they meant nothing.
“You knew these people?” he asked.
“I must have. Why else would I write them down?” Grellak’s voice cracked. “But I can’t remember. I can’t remember any of them. And I’m starting to wonder—what if I’m next? What if tomorrow I wake up and no one remembers me, and I can’t remember myself, and everything I’ve ever been just... stops existing?”
“Melodramatic,” the Ratter said, but without conviction.
“You haven’t been paying attention. You’ve been hiding from your girlfriend—”
“She’s not my girlfriend.”
“—from the woman who wants to kill you, and you haven’t noticed what’s happening around you.” Grellak grabbed the Ratter’s arm, grip surprisingly strong for someone who looked like a stiff wind might carry him off. “Three weeks ago, we had a conversation about your partner. The tall northerner. Remember?”
The Ratter went very still.
“What did I tell you?” Grellak continued. “What did I say about him?”
“I don’t...” The Ratter closed his eyes, reaching for the memory. Three weeks ago. Grellak. A conversation about... about...
There was nothing there. Not a gap, exactly—more like a blur, a smeared place in his memory where something had been and now wasn’t.
“Phaphhrd,” the Ratter said, and the name came out like a prayer, like something he was terrified of losing. “We talked about Phaphhrd.”
“Did we? What did I say?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Neither do I.” Grellak released his arm. “But I wrote it down. Look.”
He pointed to a line halfway down one of the pages: Told the Ratter that the northerner has been asking questions. Someone noticed. Someone is interested.
“Someone noticed what?” the Ratter demanded. “Interested in what?”
“I don’t know. I wrote the words, but I don’t know what they mean anymore.” Grellak sat down heavily, looking older than his years. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Whatever’s happening—whatever’s erasing people—it’s not just erasing them. It’s erasing everything about them. Every conversation, every memory, every trace. And it’s getting worse.”
The Ratter looked at the papers, at the names that meant nothing, at the gaps in his own memory that he hadn’t noticed until now. Phaphhrd had been asking questions. Someone had noticed. And the Ratter, hiding from Sheelris and her price on his head, had been too distracted to realize that his partner might be in danger.
“Where is he?” the Ratter asked. “Phaphhrd. Where is he right now?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if anyone knows.” Grellak’s voice was hollow. “But if he’s been asking questions about this, and if someone noticed...”
He didn’t need to finish the sentence.
The Ratter left Grellak’s rooms and moved through Kasdim with the particular kind of speed that came from genuine fear.
It was not a feeling he enjoyed. The Grey Ratter had built his adult life around the careful management of risk, the precise calculation of danger, the comfortable certainty that any situation could be handled with sufficient cleverness and sufficient willingness to cheat. Fear was an emotion for amateurs, for people who didn’t understand that the universe was fundamentally indifferent and that survival was just a matter of being slightly more ruthless than whatever was trying to kill you.
But this was different.
He couldn’t remember the last time he had spoken to Phaphhrd. Couldn’t remember when they had last shared a drink, planned a job, complained about the weather or the government or the specific breed of idiot that seemed to populate Kasdim in ever-increasing numbers. The memories should have been there—five years of partnership, of friendship, of the closest thing to brotherhood either of them had known since leaving their respective homes—but when he reached for them, they slipped away.
Not gone. Not yet. But fading, like writing exposed to rain, like footprints filling with snow.
I’m forgetting him, the Ratter realized. The same thing that’s happening to everyone else is happening to me. And if I forget him completely...
Then he would be alone. Truly alone, in a city that ate the alone ones, that specialized in isolating people from the support structures that kept them human. Without Phaphhrd, the Ratter was just another small man with quick hands and a talent for being places he shouldn’t be. Without Phaphhrd, he was...
He pushed the thought away. Self-pity was a luxury he couldn’t afford.
The Ratter made for the boarding house on the Street of the Silk Merchants, where both he and Phaphhrd kept rooms. It was a risk—Sheelris’s people might be watching—but he needed to know if his partner was still there, still real, still someone who existed in more than just fading memory.
The boarding house was dark when he arrived. The landlady, a thick-armed woman named Mistress Halvari, sat in her usual chair by the entrance, counting the day’s receipts with the single-minded focus of someone who believed that money was the only thing in the world that couldn’t betray you.
“Mistress Halvari.” The Ratter slipped in through the side entrance, keeping to shadows out of habit. “Is my partner here? The northerner. Tall, loud, incapable of passing a woman without falling slightly in love with her.”
Mistress Halvari looked up from her counting, and her expression was the worst thing the Ratter had ever seen.
It was the expression of someone who had no idea what he was talking about.
“Your partner?” she said slowly. “You don’t have a partner. You’ve always lived alone, ever since you came here four years ago.”
“Five years,” the Ratter corrected automatically. “And I don’t live alone. I live in rooms 6 and 7, and Phaphhrd lives in room 8, which shares a wall with mine. We’ve argued about his singing through that wall at least a hundred times.”
“Room 8 is empty. Has been for years.” Mistress Halvari was looking at him with something that might have been concern, might have been the calculation of whether he had finally lost his mind and become a liability she needed to remove from her premises. “Are you feeling all right? There’s a healer three streets over who handles cases of—”
“I’m fine.” The Ratter’s voice was sharp, sharper than he intended. “Just—let me check. Let me see for myself.”
He didn’t wait for permission. The stairs were familiar, worn smooth by years of traffic, and his feet knew the way without conscious thought. Room 6, his door, still closed. Room 7, used for storage, unchanged. Room 8...
Room 8’s door stood open.
The Ratter stepped inside and found nothing.
Not emptiness—the room was furnished, the same sparse furniture that filled all the boarding house rooms—but nothing that belonged to a person. No clothes in the wardrobe. No personal items on the dresser. No sign that anyone had ever lived here, ever slept here, ever sat by the window looking out at the street below and composing terrible love songs that he refused to admit were autobiographical.
The Ratter stood in the middle of the empty room and felt the last of his certainty crumble.
Phaphhrd was gone.
Not dead—that he could have handled, that he had prepared for in the abstract way that all people in dangerous professions prepare for the deaths of colleagues. But gone. Erased. Removed from the world so completely that even the people who had known him, who had shared meals with him and cursed at his singing and borrowed money they had no intention of repaying—even they had forgotten he had ever existed.
Not me, the Ratter thought fiercely. I still remember. Not everything, not all the details, but enough. His name. His face. The way he laughed when something genuinely amused him, which was different from the polite chuckle he used at parties. The way he fought, all controlled violence and surprising grace for someone his size. The way he...
But even as he catalogued the memories, he could feel them slipping. Fading. Becoming less real with every passing moment.
He needed to find Phaphhrd. Or, failing that, he needed to find whatever was erasing him.
And then he needed to make it stop.
The Ratter left the boarding house through the window, dropping two storeys into the alley below with a practiced ease that he barely registered. His mind was already elsewhere, racing through the possibilities.
Someone—or something—was systematically erasing people from memory. Not from existence, necessarily—Grellak’s records suggested that the forgotten ones might still be alive somewhere, still walking around with memories intact, just... unremembered. But that was almost worse, wasn’t it? To exist in a city full of people who had no idea you were real?
The Guild was the obvious starting point. If members were disappearing, there would be records—not the public records that Grellak had been keeping, but the private ones, the ones that the Guild maintained for internal purposes. Membership rolls. Dues payments. Job assignments. The kind of information that was written down not because anyone cared about history, but because the Guild’s bureaucracy demanded documentation the way normal organizations demanded results.
But the Guild was dangerous now. Something was wrong there, Grellak had said. Something more than the usual political maneuvering and backstabbing that characterized any organization of professional criminals.
The Ratter weighed his options and found them all lacking.
He needed information. He needed leverage. He needed to understand what he was fighting before he could fight it.
And he needed, more than anything, to remember.
The decision was made before he consciously recognized it: the Ratter was going to the House of Many Doors—the Guild’s headquarters—and he was going to break into the archives, and he was going to find out what was happening to his city and his colleagues and his partner, or he was going to die trying.
Given his current romantic situation, death might actually be the less complicated option.
He moved through Kasdim’s streets with the particular kind of invisibility that came from long practice—not stealth, exactly, but more a talent for being unremarkable. The Grey Ratter was small, grey-clad, and possessed of a face that people tended to forget even without magical assistance. He had cultivated this forgettability carefully, had made it into a professional asset, and now it served him as it always had: doors passed by unguarded, corners turned without incident, witnesses whose eyes slid past without ever quite focusing on him.
The House of Many Doors loomed ahead, its facade a testament to the Guild’s peculiar combination of secrecy and ostentation. The building had forty-seven doors visible from the street, and probably twice that many hidden throughout its interior. Only three of them were real exits. The rest led to dead ends, traps, or in at least one case, a room containing a very hungry something that the Guild fed periodically with people who asked too many questions.
The Ratter knew which doors were safe. Or rather, he had known—the knowledge was still there, but it felt uncertain now, as if the information itself might have been tampered with.
He chose the servants’ entrance, around the back, through a passage that required climbing a wall and crossing a roof and dropping through a skylight that wasn’t supposed to be there. The passage was familiar, which was reassuring. The familiarity felt thin, which was not.
Inside, the Guild was quiet. The hour was late, and most of the membership would be out working or drinking or engaged in the various forms of entertainment that thieves preferred when they weren’t actively stealing. The Ratter moved through empty corridors, past doors that led to offices and meeting rooms and the occasional thing best not thought about too carefully.
The archives were on the third floor, behind a door that required three keys and a specific sequence of touches to open. The Ratter had one of the keys—a privilege of his membership rank—and could improvise the other two with picks that had served him well for over a decade. The sequence of touches he knew from observation, having made it his business years ago to learn how the Guild’s senior members accessed their secrets.
The door opened. The archives waited beyond.
The Ratter stepped inside and began to search.
Three hours later, he emerged with seventeen pages of notes and a profound sense of unease.
The archives had confirmed everything Grellak had said, and more. Guild membership rolls showed gaps—spaces where names should have been, entries that ended mid-word or referenced people who didn’t appear anywhere else in the records. Dues payments had been received from sources that the ledgers didn’t identify. Job reports mentioned partners who weren’t listed in the completion rosters.
The Guild was being hollowed out from within, one forgotten member at a time.
But that wasn’t the worst of it.
The worst of it was the pattern the Ratter had noticed, buried in the inconsistencies like a message hidden in a coded text. The disappearances weren’t random. They weren’t targeting the weak or the isolated or the easily forgotten. They were targeting people who asked questions.
Markhel Silveneyes: questioned the new protocols for payment distribution.
Thessa of the Weeping Street: complained about irregularities in the Guildmaster’s accounts.
Old Dennakal: demanded an investigation into the death of his apprentice.
And there, in the records from three weeks ago, a notation that made the Ratter’s blood run cold:
Phaphhrd of the Cold Waste: inquiring about cult activity in the Temple District. Referred to senior council for evaluation.
His partner hadn’t been randomly forgotten. He had been deliberately forgotten. Targeted for elimination because he had asked questions about something the Guild—or someone within the Guild—didn’t want answered.
Cult activity. In the Temple District.
The Ratter had a new destination.
But first, he needed to write everything down. If the forgetting was progressing, if even he couldn’t trust his own memories, then written records were the only defense he had.
He found an alley, pulled out paper and pen, and began to write, racing against the fading of his mind:
His name is Phaphhrd. He is seven feet tall and terrible at cards. He sings when he thinks no one is listening, and he is better than he admits. He came to Kasdim five years ago, fleeing something in the Cold Waste, and he found me trying to pick the same pocket he was trying to pick. We have been partners ever since. He is the only person I trust. He is the only person who trusts me. He is...
The Ratter paused, pen hovering over paper.
He is my friend.
He wrote the words quickly, as if committing them to paper might somehow anchor them in reality, might keep them from fading the way everything else was fading.
Then he folded the paper, tucked it into his shirt, and went looking for answers.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Morning found Phaphhrd at the gates of the House of Many Doors, holding his seventeen pages of notes like a weapon and feeling approximately as foolish as he had ever felt, which was saying something given the breadth of his experience with foolishness.
He had not slept. The candles had burned down and been replaced and burned down again, and through it all he had written and rewritten and crossed out and started over, trying to capture the essence of a man who was becoming less real with every passing hour.
The Ratter’s eyes were grey. He was mostly certain of that. The specific shade remained elusive, but the color itself was anchored now in black ink on white paper, and that would have to be enough.
The Guild’s main entrance—one of the three that actually functioned as exits—was guarded by two men who looked like they had been carved from the same block of disapproving granite. They watched Phaphhrd approach with the careful attention of people whose job required them to be suspicious of everyone, even people they had seen a hundred times before.
“Name and business,” the one on the left said.
“Phaphhrd of the Cold Waste. Associate member, dues paid through the end of the month.” Phaphhrd reached into his coat and produced his membership token, a small bronze disc embossed with the Guild’s symbol. “I need to speak with the Guildmaster.”
The guards exchanged glances.
“The Guildmaster doesn’t see associate members without an appointment,” the one on the right said.
“Then I need to speak with whoever oversees membership records. There’s been an error—someone has been removed from the rolls who shouldn’t have been.”
Another exchange of glances. The left guard’s expression shifted slightly, becoming not hostile but wary.
“What name?”
“The Grey Ratter.”
Phaphhrd watched their faces carefully. Watched for the flicker of recognition, the slight widening of eyes that would indicate they knew the name, remembered the man. What he saw was worse: complete and genuine incomprehension.
“Never heard of him,” the left guard said.
“He’s a full member. Has been for seven years. Small man, grey clothes, quick hands. He specializes in high-value acquisitions—jewelry, documents, the occasional blackmail material. He’s worked with me on at least twenty jobs.”
The right guard was shaking his head. “You’ve worked alone, Phaphhrd. Everyone knows that. The northerner who sings badly and works without a partner. That’s your reputation.”
“That’s not—” Phaphhrd stopped himself, took a breath. Arguing with guards was pointless; they knew what they knew, and what they knew had been altered by whatever force was rewriting the city’s memories. “Fine. I need to see the membership records. Personally. There’s an error, and I intend to correct it.”
“You’ll need to file a request with the Records Office. Third floor, fourth door on the left. They’re open after the tenth bell.”
Phaphhrd looked at the sky. The sun was perhaps an hour past rising, which meant he had approximately three hours to wait.
“I’ll wait inside,” he said.
The guards let him pass. They didn’t remember the Ratter, but they remembered him, which suggested that whatever was happening wasn’t affecting everyone equally. The question was whether that made him safer or more dangerous.
The House of Many Doors was busy despite the early hour. Guild members moved through the corridors with the purposeful urgency of people who had stolen something important and needed to convert it to cash before the rightful owner noticed. Phaphhrd found an alcove near the Records Office and settled in to wait, using the time to review his notes and shore up the memories that kept trying to slip away.
The Ratter taught me how to pick locks, he wrote. I was terrible at it—my fingers are too large for the delicate work—but he insisted I learn the basics. “You never know when you’ll need to open something,” he said, “and I won’t always be there to do it for you.”
The irony was bitter enough to taste.
He was adding details about their first meeting—both of them reaching for the same mark’s purse, their hands colliding, the moment of frozen surprise before the Ratter had grinned and suggested they split the take—when someone sat down beside him.
She was a small woman with the kind of forgettable face that suggested professional training, dressed in the simple grey robes that lower-ranking Guild members wore when they wanted to blend in. She smelled faintly of ink and old paper.
“You’re asking questions,” she said quietly.
Phaphhrd’s hand moved instinctively toward his sword before he caught himself. The House of Many Doors was supposed to be neutral ground, violence forbidden under penalty of extremely creative consequences, but “supposed to be” was doing a lot of work in that sentence.
“I’m looking for information about my partner.”
“The Grey Ratter.” The woman’s voice was barely above a whisper. “You’re one of the few who still remembers.”
“You know the name?”
“I know what’s happening.” She glanced around, checking for observers with the practiced paranoia of someone who had learned that paranoia was just another name for sensible precaution. “Not here. There’s a room on the fifth floor, third door from the stairwell. Meet me there in one hour.”
“Who are you?”
“Someone who wants the same thing you want.” She stood up, movements casual, like someone who had simply been resting her feet. “One hour. Don’t be late, and don’t be followed.”
She was gone before Phaphhrd could respond, vanishing into the crowd with the ease of long practice. He watched the space where she had been and wondered whether he was walking into a trap or an opportunity, and whether there was really any difference in a city like Kasdim.
The fifth floor of the House of Many Doors was technically restricted to senior Guild members, but Phaphhrd had learned long ago that “restricted” was just another word for “requires more creativity to access.” He climbed a service stairwell that the cleaning staff used, avoided two patrols by the simple expedient of looking like he belonged there, and arrived at the third door from the stairwell with five minutes to spare.
The room beyond was small, dusty, and clearly hadn’t been used for its original purpose in years. Broken furniture filled one corner. Stacks of old ledgers occupied another. The woman in grey robes sat on a crate near the window, her face illuminated by the pale light filtering through dirty glass.
“You came alone,” she said.
“You asked me to.”
“I asked you not to be followed. Coming alone was your choice.”
Phaphhrd closed the door behind him, positioned himself with his back to the wall and his hand near his sword. “You said you know what’s happening.”
“I know pieces. Fragments. The whole picture is... difficult to assemble, when pieces keep disappearing.” The woman’s mouth twisted in something that wasn’t quite a smile. “My name is Thessaly. I was the Guildmaster’s personal secretary for six years. Three weeks ago, I started noticing inconsistencies in the records. Names that didn’t match. Payments from sources that didn’t exist. It was subtle at first—the kind of thing you could dismiss as clerical error—but it got worse.”
“And when you asked questions?”
“I stopped asking questions. Because I saw what happened to people who asked questions.” Thessaly’s voice was flat, controlled, the voice of someone who had learned to suppress emotion in the name of survival. “They forgot. Not the questions—the askers. One day someone would complain about irregularities, and the next day no one could remember they had ever existed. Their rooms were empty. Their files were missing. Their partners looked at you blankly when you mentioned their names.”
“Like the Ratter.”
“Like dozens of people. Maybe hundreds. I started keeping my own records, hidden records, but even those...” She pulled a leather folder from her robes, handed it to Phaphhrd. “Half the entries don’t make sense anymore. I know I wrote them, but I can’t remember what they mean.”
Phaphhrd opened the folder. Lists of names, dates, descriptions—and yes, gaps, places where the writing trailed off or referred to people identified only by pronouns. She was investigating the treasury discrepancy. He had discovered something in the Temple District. They were planning to expose— but expose what, and who were they?
“The Grey Ratter is mentioned here,” he said, finding the name on the third page. G.R. has made contact with northern associate. Both asking questions about cult activity. Both have been flagged for observation.
“He was flagged three weeks ago. Whatever happened to him, it happened between then and now.” Thessaly leaned forward. “But here’s the thing I don’t understand. You still remember him. I can feel it when you say his name—the weight of real memory, not just words on paper. Why? Why can you remember when no one else can?”
It was a good question. Phaphhrd had been asking himself the same thing since the forgetting began.
“We’re partners,” he said finally. “We’ve been together for five years. We’ve saved each other’s lives more times than I can count. Maybe... maybe that kind of connection is harder to erase.”
“Or maybe you’re next.” Thessaly’s voice was gentle, but the words were not. “The forgetting doesn’t happen all at once. It spreads, like a stain. First strangers forget, then acquaintances, then friends. By the time the people closest to you start losing the memories, there’s usually not much left to save.”
“Then I need to find him before that happens.”
“You need to find whoever is doing this. The Ratter isn’t the disease—he’s a symptom. Someone is wielding this power deliberately, targeting specific people, and until you stop them at the source...”
“Where do I start?”
Thessaly was quiet for a long moment. When she spoke, her voice was barely audible.
“The Temple District. That’s where all the threads lead. Something is worshipped there—something old, something hungry. It doesn’t have a name anymore, or rather, its name has been... unremembered. Like everything else it touches.” She stood up, gathering her robes around her. “I can’t tell you more than that. I’ve already said too much. If they realize I’m sharing information...”
“They? Who are they?”
“I don’t know. That’s the terrible part.” Thessaly moved toward the door, then paused. “One more thing. The Guildmaster—he’s changed. Not obviously, not in ways that anyone else seems to notice, but he’s different. Colder. Like something important was removed and he doesn’t remember it ever being there.”
“You think he’s involved?”
“I think everyone in power is involved, whether they know it or not. That’s how it works. The forgetting doesn’t just erase people—it erases the connections between them. And once the connections are gone, the people who remain stop being... themselves.” She opened the door, checked the corridor. “Find your partner. Find the source. And if you can’t stop it...”
“Yes?”
“Run. Get out of Kasdim while you still remember who you are.”
She was gone before he could respond, leaving Phaphhrd alone with her folder and his notes and the growing certainty that he was already too deep to run.
The Records Office was staffed by a single clerk, a narrow-faced man with the expression of someone who believed that proper documentation was the only thing standing between civilization and chaos. He looked at Phaphhrd with the patient contempt that bureaucrats reserved for people who wanted things.
“Name and purpose,” he said.
“Phaphhrd of the Cold Waste. I need to access the membership records for a colleague who may have been improperly removed.”
“Name of the colleague?”
“The Grey Ratter.”
The clerk consulted his ledger, running a thin finger down columns of names with the practiced efficiency of someone who had performed this task ten thousand times.
“No such member exists,” he said.
“That’s the problem. He did exist. He was a full member for seven years. I need to see his file.”
“If no member exists by that name, there is no file.” The clerk’s tone was the auditory equivalent of a door being closed. “Is there anything else?”
Phaphhrd considered several responses, most of them involving varying degrees of violence. None of them would be productive.
“I’d like to see the records from three weeks ago,” he said instead. “Membership additions and deletions. Any unusual activity.”
“Those records are restricted to senior members and Guild officers.”
“Then I’d like to file a formal inquiry requesting access.”
The clerk’s expression suggested that Phaphhrd had just asked to be granted access to the sun. “The process for formal inquiries takes approximately six weeks. Forms must be submitted in triplicate, reviewed by the appropriate committee, and approved by the Guildmaster’s office before access can be granted.”
“Six weeks.”
“Minimum. There is currently a backlog.”
Of course there was. Whatever was happening in Kasdim, it had created the perfect bureaucratic defense: by the time anyone navigated the official channels, they would have forgotten why they were asking in the first place.
“Thank you for your assistance,” Phaphhrd said, and the words tasted like ash.
He left the House of Many Doors through the same entrance he had used that morning, pausing at the threshold to look back at the building that had once represented everything he and the Ratter had worked for. The Guild was their safety net, their professional network, their guarantee of survival in a city that consumed the isolated. Now it felt like enemy territory.
The Temple District, Thessaly had said. That was where the answers were.
But Phaphhrd had been a thief long enough to know that rushing into unknown territory was a good way to become unknown yourself. He needed information. He needed allies. He needed, more than anything, to find the Ratter—because whatever was happening, he couldn’t face it alone.
The irony was not lost on him. Five years of partnership, of working together, of complementing each other’s strengths and covering each other’s weaknesses, and now, when it mattered most, he was utterly alone.
Or was he?
Ivlis was still at the Vermillion. She had believed him last night, or at least had been willing to listen. She wasn’t a thief, wasn’t part of the Guild’s web of connections and obligations, but she was real and she remembered him and that had to count for something.
He would go to her. He would tell her everything Thessaly had said. And then, together, they would figure out how to find his partner before the last memories faded away.
It was not a perfect plan. It was barely a plan at all.
But it was better than standing alone in the shadow of a building that had forgotten one of its best members ever existed.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
The Temple District was a maze of ancient stone and older gods, and the Grey Ratter moved through it with the careful attention of someone who understood that holiness and hospitality were not synonyms.
But as he walked, his mind kept drifting backward—not to memories of Phaphhrd, which he was desperately trying to preserve, but to older memories, deeper ones. The memories of how he had become what he was.
Perhaps, he thought, if I remember who I was, I can hold on to who I am.
Twelve years ago
The boy who would become the Grey Ratter was called Mouse.
He was small, even for his age, with quick hands and quicker wits and a face that adults found difficult to take seriously. He lived in the cellar of a tavern on the edge of Kasdim’s Pleasure Quarter, earning his keep by sweeping floors and emptying slops and occasionally stealing small items that wouldn’t be missed, or at least wouldn’t be missed immediately.
He was eleven years old, and he had been alone for as long as he could remember.
“You have potential,” said the wizard.
The wizard was named Dolesquin, and he had appeared in the tavern three days earlier with the manner of someone who was accustomed to being both feared and obeyed. He was old—ancient, even—with a white beard that reached his belt and eyes that seemed to see things that weren’t there. He had watched Mouse work for those three days, saying nothing, observing with the patient attention of a predator studying prey.
“Potential for what?” Mouse asked.
“Magic.” Dolesquin smiled, and the smile did not reach his eyes. “You have the gift. Untrained, unrefined, but present. The way you move, the way you make people look past you without seeing—that’s not just skill. That’s nascent sorcery, waiting to be shaped.”
Mouse had heard stories about wizards. Everyone in Kasdim had heard stories about wizards. The stories all agreed on one thing: wizards were dangerous, and getting involved with them was a good way to end up dead or worse.
“I’m not interested,” he said.
“Yes, you are.” Dolesquin’s smile widened slightly. “You’re eleven years old, sleeping in a cellar, surviving on scraps and stolen trinkets. I’m offering you a chance to become something more. Power. Knowledge. The ability to shape the world according to your will.”
“What do you want in return?”
“Service. You would become my apprentice. Learn my methods. Assist in my work. In time, if you prove worthy, inherit my knowledge when I am gone.”
Mouse was young, but he was not stupid. “And if I prove unworthy?”
“Then you return to your cellar, no worse than before.” Dolesquin spread his hands. “I offer opportunity, not obligation. The choice is yours.”
It was not, of course, a real choice. The wizard had already decided what Mouse would do; he was simply allowing the boy the illusion of agency. But Mouse did not know that yet, and the prospect of power—real power, not just the petty influence that came from stealing and lying—was too tempting to resist.
“I’ll come with you,” he said.
“Excellent.” Dolesquin placed a hand on Mouse’s shoulder, and the touch was cold, colder than any human hand should be. “You will not regret this decision.”
This was the first lie Mouse would learn to identify. There would be many more.
Ten years ago
The wizard’s tower was located in the foothills east of Kasdim, in a region that maps tended to leave blank for reasons that became obvious once you tried to navigate there. Paths that should have led straight twisted back on themselves. Distances that should have taken hours to cover stretched into days. The landscape itself seemed designed to discourage visitors.
“This is intentional,” Dolesquin had explained during Mouse’s first week. “Privacy is essential for magical work. The spells that protect this place were cast by wizards far more powerful than myself, in an age when such protections were necessary. I merely maintain them.”
The tower was larger inside than outside—another magical effect that Mouse learned to accept without fully understanding. His room was on the third floor, a small chamber with a bed, a desk, and a window that looked out on a view that changed depending on the time of day and the phase of the moon.
His training began immediately.
“Magic,” Dolesquin told him, “is the art of convincing the universe that things should be other than they are. It requires three things: knowledge of what is, imagination of what could be, and will sufficient to force the change.”
Mouse learned. He memorized incantations in languages that had never been spoken by human tongues. He studied diagrams that made his eyes water if he looked at them too long. He practiced techniques of concentration and visualization until his mind ached and his body trembled with exhaustion.
Dolesquin was a demanding teacher. Mistakes were punished with pain—not cruel pain, but instructive pain, the kind that drove lessons deep into muscle and memory. Success was rewarded with more lessons, harder challenges, higher expectations.
“You have talent,” the wizard said, “but talent is nothing without discipline. I have seen gifted students burn themselves out through carelessness. I have seen promising apprentices destroy themselves because they reached for power before they understood what they were grasping. You will not make these mistakes.”
Mouse—still called Mouse in those early years—believed him. Wanted to believe him. Dolesquin was the closest thing to a father he had ever known, and the approval that came with successful lessons felt like the acceptance he had spent his childhood craving.
He did not notice, at first, the darker aspects of his training.
Eight years ago
The first time Dolesquin asked Mouse to kill someone, he refused.
“It’s just a vagrant,” the wizard said. “A man no one will miss. His life serves no purpose; his death will serve many. The spell requires sacrifice, and sacrifice requires death.”
“Find someone else.” Mouse was fifteen now, no longer quite so small, though still shorter than most boys his age. His voice had deepened, his hands had steadied, and his magical abilities had grown to the point where Dolesquin trusted him with increasingly complex work. “I won’t do it.”
“You will.” Dolesquin’s voice was calm, patient. “This is part of your training. The power you seek cannot be obtained through clean methods. All magic requires payment, and the most powerful magic requires the greatest payment. This is simply how the universe operates.”
“Then I’ll find a different path to power.”
Dolesquin laughed—a dry, rasping sound that had no humor in it. “There is no different path. Every wizard who has ever lived has faced this moment. Some refuse, and they remain mediocre, capable of party tricks and minor enchantments. Some accept, and they become powerful beyond imagining.” He stepped closer, and his eyes—Mouse had never noticed how dead those eyes were, how empty of anything like human feeling—bored into the boy’s soul. “You have too much potential to waste on mediocrity. You will do what is necessary, or you will leave this tower and never return.”
Mouse left.
He walked out of the tower and into the twisted landscape surrounding it, expecting at every moment to be struck down by some magical punishment, some retaliation for his defiance. Nothing happened. The paths, which had confused and misdirected him countless times before, led him straight to Kasdim’s gates in a single night’s walking.
He slept in the cellar of the same tavern where Dolesquin had found him. The owner didn’t recognize him—four years had changed him too much for that—but he was allowed to stay in exchange for work, just as before.
For three months, Mouse lived as though the tower had been a dream. He picked pockets. He slept in cold corners. He told himself that he had made the right choice, that refusing Dolesquin’s demand had been an act of moral courage.
Then he discovered what the wizard had done in his absence.
Eight years ago, continued
Her name was Mirya.
She was a girl Mouse had known before Dolesquin, in the early years of his street-rat existence. They had been friends, or something close to it—two children surviving in a city that didn’t care whether children survived or not. When Dolesquin had taken Mouse away, Mirya had been the only person who noticed his absence.
She had looked for him. Had asked questions. Had made herself visible to people who preferred that certain things remain invisible.
When Mouse returned to Kasdim, Mirya was dead.
“It happened three months ago,” the tavern keeper told him. “Same night you turned up on my doorstep, now that I think about it. They found her in an alley near the Temple District. Whatever killed her, it wasn’t... natural. The city guard took one look and decided they didn’t want to investigate.”
Mouse went to the alley. The bloodstains were still there, preserved somehow against rain and time, forming patterns that made his newly trained eyes see things he wished he couldn’t see. Magical symbols. Sacrificial geometry. The precise arrangement of death that Dolesquin’s spells required.
The vagrant he had refused to kill would have died cleanly, quickly. Mirya had died neither.
Mouse understood, then, what the wizard had done. Not a punishment—nothing so simple as that. A lesson. A demonstration of what happened to people who defied Dolesquin’s will. And a gift, twisted though it was: Mirya’s death had completed the spell that Mouse had refused to participate in, and the power that spell had generated was still there, in the stained stones and the lingering magic, waiting to be claimed.
All Mouse had to do was accept it.
He stood in that alley for a very long time.
And then he claimed the power.
Seven years ago
The spell he used to kill Dolesquin was one the wizard had never taught him.
Mouse had found it in the tower’s library, in a book that was supposed to be locked away, protected by wards that only Dolesquin could breach. But the wizard had underestimated his apprentice’s determination, and Mouse had spent six months—six months of pretending to have forgiven, of returning to training, of playing the role of obedient student—learning how to bypass those wards.
The spell was called the Grey Consumption. It was black magic of the darkest kind, powered by grief and rage and the terrible clarity that came from having nothing left to lose. It consumed the caster even as it destroyed the target, leaving both of them changed forever.
When it was over, Dolesquin was dead.
And Mouse was grey.
Not just his clothes, which he had always worn in muted shades. His eyes were grey now, where they had been brown. His hair was grey, where it had been black. His skin had taken on a greyish pallor that no amount of sun could warm. Even his voice was grey—flat, colorless, stripped of the emotional variation that made speech human.
He had become the Grey Ratter. The name came later—a joke, at first, from a fellow thief who had remarked that he scuttled through shadows like a grey rat—but it fit. The boy called Mouse was dead. The man called Ratter was something else entirely.
Something dangerous. Something empty. Something that had traded pieces of himself for power and wasn’t entirely sure the exchange had been worth it.
Now
The Ratter stood at the edge of the Temple District, memory settling around him like a familiar weight.
He hadn’t thought about Dolesquin in years. Hadn’t let himself think about Mirya, about the choice he had made in that alley, about the things he had given up to become what he was. Those memories were dangerous—not because they were painful, but because they reminded him of who he had been before the greyness, before the emptiness, before he had learned to fill the void with cynicism and bitter humor.
Phaphhrd had helped with that. The northerner was everything the Ratter wasn’t—romantic where the Ratter was cynical, openly emotional where the Ratter was carefully controlled, full of a warmth that the Ratter couldn’t feel but could appreciate, the way a blind man might appreciate descriptions of a sunset.
Without Phaphhrd, the Ratter was just... grey. Grey thoughts in a grey mind, moving through a grey world toward grey ends.
I will not let that happen, he told himself. I will find him. I will save him. I will not lose another person to forces beyond my control.
The resolution felt hollow, which was appropriate. Everything felt hollow when you’d traded your capacity for feeling away.
But hollow or not, it was enough to keep him moving. The Temple District waited ahead, full of answers he needed and dangers he probably wasn’t prepared for.
The Grey Ratter adjusted his grey clothing, checked the knives hidden in his grey boots, and walked into the shadows.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Ivlis found him at the stage door of the Vermillion Theatre, just as the morning rehearsals were beginning. She was dressed in costume—or partial costume, at least—her dark hair pinned up for whatever role she was preparing to play, her face marked with the beginnings of theatrical paint.
“You look terrible,” she said.
“I haven’t slept.”
“I gathered.” She pulled him inside, through the backstage maze of ropes and painted flats and half-dressed performers who barely glanced at them. The theater was its own world, with its own rules, and visitors were simply absorbed into the chaos without comment. “Come. My dressing room. We can talk there.”
The room was small but private—a privilege of leading players—and furnished with the accumulated debris of dozens of roles. Costumes hung from every available surface. Wigs lined one wall like decapitated heads. A small mirror, surrounded by candles, reflected back a space that seemed larger than it actually was.
Ivlis closed the door and turned to face him. “Tell me what you found.”
So he told her. About the Guild’s empty records. About Thessaly and her warnings. About the Temple District and the forgetting and the growing certainty that something ancient and terrible was waking beneath Kasdim’s streets. She listened without interrupting, her dark eyes steady on his face, her expression revealing nothing.
When he finished, she was quiet for a long moment.
“This is real,” she said finally. “You believe this is real.”
“I know it sounds—”
“I’m not questioning whether you believe it. I’m asking whether I should believe it.” Ivlis sat down on a trunk, her hands folded in her lap. “A week ago, I would have dismissed this as madness or drug-induced fantasy. Today...” She shook her head. “Today I’ve been noticing things. Gaps in conversations. Fellow actors who mention colleagues I’ve never met. A stagehand who swears we did a play last season that I have no memory of.”
“The forgetting is spreading.”
“Or I’m going mad alongside you.” Her smile was thin. “Though I suppose that would be its own kind of romantic, wouldn’t it?”
Phaphhrd found himself laughing, despite everything—a short, surprised sound that seemed out of place in the context of ancient horrors and disappearing friends. “You’re not what I expected,” he said.
“What did you expect?”
“An actress. Someone who performs emotions rather than feeling them.”
“All actors feel. That’s what makes the performance real.” Ivlis stood up, moved to stand in front of him. This close, he could see the texture of the paint on her face, the careful construction of the beauty she presented to her audience. “I feel things, Phaphhrd. I feel them strongly. What I’ve learned to do is control when and how those feelings appear.”
“Is that what you’re doing now? Controlling?”
“I’m deciding whether to help you.” Her eyes met his. “You need someone. You’ve lost your partner, or he’s been stolen from you, and you’re facing something beyond your understanding. I can see it in the way you move, the way you hold yourself—you’re used to having someone at your back, and now there’s no one there.”
“And you’re considering volunteering for the position?”
“I’m considering whether you’re worth the risk.” She reached up, touched his face—a gesture that was either practiced intimacy or genuine emotion, and he couldn’t tell which. “Tell me something true. Something you’ve never told anyone. Not because I need to know it, but because I need to know that you’re capable of honesty when it matters.”
Phaphhrd thought about deflecting. About offering some safe partial truth that would satisfy her without exposing anything that mattered. That was what the Ratter would do—give enough to seem vulnerable without actually becoming so.
But the Ratter wasn’t here. And Ivlis was looking at him with eyes that seemed to see through the performance he presented to the world.
“I ran away,” he said.
“From what?”
“From everything.” He moved to the window, looking out at the street below without really seeing it. “I was born in the Cold Waste, in a clan that traveled the ice fields following the great herds. My mother was a snow witch—one of the women who control the weather, who speak to the spirits of frost and storm. She was powerful. She was feared. And she had plans for me that I couldn’t accept.”
Seven years ago
The Cold Waste was not a place; it was a condition.
Phaphhrd had been born in the traveling tents of the Snow Clan, under skies that were perpetually grey and stars that burned cold and distant. His father had died when he was young—a hunting accident, or so his mother claimed, though the other snow witches whispered different stories when they thought no one was listening.
His mother’s name was Mor, and she was the most powerful witch the clan had produced in three generations.
“You will be great,” she told him, over and over, throughout his childhood. “You will lead the clan when I am gone. You will make alliances with the spirits of ice. You will take a wife from among the daughters of the southern chiefs, and your children will rule the entire Waste from sea to sea.”
Phaphhrd had no interest in any of this.
What he wanted was music. Singing. The old songs that the skalds performed around winter fires, tales of heroes and monsters and loves that transcended the boundaries of death. He would sneak away from his mother’s lessons to listen to the traveling musicians who sometimes visited the clan, memorizing melodies and lyrics with the obsessive dedication that Mor wanted him to apply to the ways of weather-magic.
“Music is weakness,” Mor told him. “A distraction for lesser men. You were born for greater things.”
But Phaphhrd had seen the way people responded to the singers. The way their faces transformed when a particularly beautiful passage moved through the cold air. The way they wept at tragedies and laughed at comedies and seemed, for a few precious moments, to forget the brutal reality of life on the ice.
That was power. Not the power his mother wanted for him, but power nonetheless.
When he was sixteen, a trading caravan arrived from the southern cities. Among them was a troupe of performers—actors and musicians who traveled with the merchants, providing entertainment in exchange for protection and provisions. They stayed with the clan for three weeks, performing every night, and Phaphhrd fell in love twice over: once with their craft, and once with a woman named Vlana.
Vlana was the troupe’s lead actress. She was small, dark-haired, fierce in ways that the women of the Snow Clan were not permitted to be fierce. She had grown up in the southern cities, had learned to navigate worlds that Phaphhrd could barely imagine, and when she looked at him—really looked at him, not just at the tall northern boy who attended every performance—she saw something that no one else had ever seen.
“You’re wasted here,” she told him, the night before the caravan was scheduled to leave. “You have talent. Real talent. I can hear it in your voice when you think no one is listening.”
“My mother would never allow me to leave.”
“Your mother doesn’t own you.”
It sounded so simple when Vlana said it. So obvious. Of course he could leave—he was a grown man, nearly seventeen, capable of making his own choices. The fact that his mother was a snow witch who could summon blizzards and speak to the spirits of frost was surely not an insurmountable obstacle.
“Come with us,” Vlana said. “Join the troupe. Learn the craft properly. See what you can become when you’re not living in her shadow.”
Phaphhrd should have said no. Should have recognized the danger, the impossibility, the inevitable consequences of defying Mor’s will.
Instead, he said yes.
The escape was harder than either of them anticipated.
Mor had known, of course. Had sensed her son’s growing attachment to the performer, had watched the subtle shifts in his attention during the caravan’s stay. She had prepared countermeasures.
“You think you can leave me?” Her voice was the voice of winter itself—cold, patient, utterly without mercy. “You are my blood. My legacy. You belong to the ice.”
The blizzard she summoned lasted for three days. When it finally broke, Phaphhrd and Vlana were miles away from the caravan, lost in the white wilderness, slowly freezing to death.
They found shelter in an ice cave. They huddled together for warmth, telling each other stories to stay awake, knowing that sleep meant death. Vlana talked about the cities she had seen, the plays she had performed, the life she wanted to build when they finally reached somewhere safe. Phaphhrd talked about the songs he wanted to sing, the music he heard in his head, the joy he felt when he performed for people who actually wanted to listen.
On the third day, Vlana stopped talking.
Phaphhrd held her for hours after she died, too frozen to cry, too exhausted to feel anything except a grey numbness that would become all too familiar in the years to come.
When the storm finally broke, he walked out of the cave and into the thin winter sunlight, carrying Vlana’s body in his arms. He walked south, away from the ice, away from his mother, away from everything he had ever known. He walked until he couldn’t walk anymore, then collapsed in the snow and waited to die.
Instead, traders found him. Merchants from Kasdim, returning from their northern expedition, who discovered a frozen giant clutching a frozen woman and decided, for reasons that probably had more to do with potential profit than compassion, to save what could be saved.
Phaphhrd woke up in a warm bed, in a city he had never seen, with no memory of how he had gotten there and no reason to do anything except grieve.
He buried Vlana in Kasdim’s public cemetery, in a grave he couldn’t afford to mark. He found work where he could—as a guard, as a laborer, as anything that would pay enough to keep him alive while he figured out what to do with a life that no longer seemed worth living.
And then, one night, he picked a pocket that already had a hand in it.
Now
“The Ratter saved me,” Phaphhrd told Ivlis. “Not in any dramatic way—he didn’t pull me from a burning building or fight off attackers on my behalf. He just... was there. When I needed someone. He made jokes that weren’t funny until they were. He talked to me like I was a person instead of a failure. He helped me remember that there were things in the world worth living for.”
Ivlis had listened to the entire story without interrupting. Now she moved to stand beside him at the window, close enough to touch but not touching.
“You loved her,” she said. “Vlana.”
“I thought I did. I was sixteen. I didn’t know what love meant.” Phaphhrd turned to face her. “I know more now. I know that love isn’t just a feeling—it’s a choice you make every day to stay with someone despite all the reasons you should leave. I know that the Ratter is the only person since Vlana who has made me feel like staying is worth it.”
“That’s a lot of weight to put on a friendship.”
“It’s not just friendship. It’s... partnership. The sense that there’s someone in the world who has your back, who complements your weaknesses, who makes you more than you could be alone.” He paused. “I don’t expect you to understand. You have the theater. You have your craft. But for someone like me, who came from nothing and lost everything...”
“Stop.” Ivlis’s voice was sharp. “You think I don’t understand loss? You think performers don’t form bonds that go beyond ordinary friendship? The theater is a family, Phaphhrd, and I have lost people from that family who mattered as much to me as your Ratter matters to you.”
“Then help me. Help me find him. Help me stop whatever is erasing people from the world.”
Ivlis was quiet for a long moment. Outside, the sounds of the city filtered through the window—carts on cobblestones, vendors hawking wares, the endless murmur of a hundred thousand lives being lived in ignorance of the horror growing beneath them.
“I’ll help,” she said finally. “Not because I understand what you’re fighting—I’m not sure anyone does—but because you need someone, and I’m choosing to be that someone.” She took his hand, and her grip was surprisingly strong. “But Phaphhrd? If we survive this, you owe me dinner. Somewhere expensive. With actual wine, not the watered swill they serve at the Vermillion.”
“If we survive this, I’ll buy you the whole restaurant.”
“I’ll hold you to that.”
They stood together at the window, watching the city they were about to try to save, and for the first time since the forgetting began, Phaphhrd felt something other than despair.
It wasn’t hope, exactly. But it was close enough.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
The Temple District smelled of incense, blood, and something older than either.
The Grey Ratter had been prowling its narrow streets for hours now, using techniques that Dolesquin had taught him centuries ago and that he had refined through years of practice. He moved through shadows, blended into crowds, became so unremarkable that even people looking directly at him failed to register his presence.
It was magic, of a sort. Residual magic—the term Dolesquin had used for the scraps of power that remained after the greater magics had burned themselves out. The Ratter couldn’t cast spells, not anymore, but he could still touch the edges of what he had once been capable of. The greyness that had consumed him had taken his fire but left the embers.
The cult, he had learned, was called the Faceless.
He had picked up the name from whispered conversations, from notices posted in places they shouldn’t have been posted, from the careful investigation that was his particular specialty. The Faceless served something they called the Unremembering—an entity that had existed beneath Kasdim long before Kasdim existed, something that fed on identity and memory and the essential components of selfhood.
The information matched what Grellak had told him. What his own observations had confirmed. The forgetting wasn’t random—it was deliberate, systematic, a harvest of human minds conducted by people who believed they were serving a higher purpose.
The question was: where did they operate?
The Temple District was full of shrines and holy places, ranging from the grand temples of established gods to tiny wayside altars maintained by cults with single-digit memberships. Any of them could be a front for the Faceless. All of them required investigation.
The Ratter was investigating the seventh shrine of the evening—a small, nondescript building dedicated to a goddess of lost things—when he heard the screaming.
The scream came from an alley two streets over. It was not the scream of someone being attacked or injured—those the Ratter knew well and could ignore with practiced detachment. This was something different. This was the sound of a person whose self was being torn apart, layer by layer, memory by memory.
He moved toward the sound, caution warring with curiosity and something that might have been compassion if he still had the capacity for such things.
The alley was narrow, hemmed in by buildings that leaned toward each other as if sharing secrets. At its end, lit by a single flickering torch, three figures in white robes surrounded a fourth figure—a man, ordinary-looking, middle-aged, dressed in the clothes of a merchant or clerk—who was on his knees with his hands pressed against his skull.
“Please,” the man was saying. “Please, I don’t understand, I don’t know what you want—”
“We want nothing from you,” one of the robed figures said. The voice was gentle, almost kind. “We offer release. Freedom from the burden of identity. The Unremembering welcomes all who seek peace.”
“I don’t want peace! I want to go home! I want—” The man’s voice cracked, shifted, became uncertain. “I want to go... to go...”
He trailed off, his expression going blank.
“Where do you live?” another robed figure asked.
“I... I don’t...” The man looked at his hands as if he had never seen them before. “I don’t remember.”
“What is your name?”
“My name is...” He frowned, forehead wrinkling in desperate concentration. “My name is... I had a name. I’m sure I had a name. Everyone has names, don’t they? Names are... they’re how people know who you...”
His voice faded to nothing. The light went out of his eyes—not literally, but metaphorically. One moment he was a person, struggling, fighting to hold onto himself. The next he was... a shell. A body without an occupant. Breathing, existing, but no longer being in any meaningful sense.
“The Unremembering accepts your offering,” the first robed figure said, and there was genuine reverence in the tone. “Go now. Wander. Be forgotten.”
The shell that had been a man stood up slowly, mechanically, and walked past the robed figures toward the alley’s exit. It walked past the Ratter without seeing him, without responding to his presence, without any indication that it was aware of anything at all.
It walked into the street and kept walking, and the Ratter had no doubt that it would walk until it collapsed, and that no one who saw it would remember it had ever been there.
The robed figures remained in the alley, speaking to each other in low tones. The Ratter pressed himself deeper into the shadows and listened.
“That makes twelve this week.”
“The Unremembering grows stronger. Each offering feeds it, and each feeding makes the next offering easier to obtain.”
“The Master says we will be ready soon. The final ritual requires a greater sacrifice, but once it is completed...”
“The Unremembering will wake fully. And when it wakes, the entire city will be cleansed. Every identity erased. Every memory consumed. A city of blank faces, pure and empty, waiting to be refilled with the truth that the Unremembering provides.”
The Ratter felt something cold settle in his stomach. Not fear—he had traded away the capacity for fear along with so much else—but recognition. He understood, now, what he was facing.
The Faceless didn’t want to destroy Kasdim. They wanted to purify it. To erase the accumulated complexity of human identity, the tangled webs of relationship and memory and self, and replace it all with... nothing. Blank slates. Empty vessels. A city of the forgotten, ready to be shaped by whatever the Unremembering decided they should become.
It was monstrous. It was horrifying. And it was exactly the kind of thing that the old Kasdim gods had always been capable of, if you read the ancient texts closely enough.
“What about the one the Master mentioned? The northern singer?”
The Ratter’s attention sharpened.
“He has been prepared. The ritual is already working on him—his memories are fragmenting, his connections weakening. Soon no one will remember him, and he will be ready for the final sacrifice.”
“And his partner? The grey one?”
“Still searching. Still remembering. He is... resistant to the Unremembering’s touch. The Master is not certain why.”
“Could he interfere?”
“He’s one man. What can one man do against the Unremembering?”
The robed figures laughed—soft, gentle laughter, the kind of laughter that came from people who believed absolutely in their cause and couldn’t imagine anyone successfully opposing it.
The Ratter decided it was time to disabuse them of that notion.
He struck from the shadows, as he always did.
The first robed figure went down without a sound, the Ratter’s knife severing something important before the man could react. The second turned, began to raise a hand in what might have been a spell or might have been a defensive gesture, and found the Ratter’s second knife buried in his throat.
The third ran.
The Ratter let him run for three steps, then threw. The knife caught the fleeing cultist between the shoulder blades, and he collapsed in a heap of white robes and spreading blood.
Silence settled over the alley. The torch continued to flicker. The Ratter moved among the bodies, searching for information.
He found it in the robe of the second man: a small leather journal, filled with cramped handwriting that detailed the cult’s operations, their schedule, their hierarchy. Names of members—though the names meant nothing, were probably pseudonyms, masks within masks. Locations of shrines and meeting places. And, most importantly, a description of the “final ritual” that would fully wake the Unremembering.
The ritual required three sacrifices. Three people who had been “prepared” through gradual forgetting, their identities weakened to the point where they could be consumed entirely. The consumption would provide the Unremembering with enough power to extend its reach across the entire city, forgetting everyone simultaneously.
The three sacrifices were already identified. Their names were listed in the journal, though two of them meant nothing to the Ratter.
The third name was Phaphhrd.
The Ratter stood in the alley, surrounded by bodies, holding evidence that his partner was being groomed for sacrifice to an ancient horror, and tried to think.
The logical thing to do was find Phaphhrd immediately. Warn him. Get him out of Kasdim before the ritual could be completed.
But the journal also contained information about the ritual’s location and timing. If he went to warn Phaphhrd now, he would lose the opportunity to stop the ritual entirely. The cult would simply choose new sacrifices and proceed with their plan.
What would Phaphhrd do? the Ratter wondered. What would the stupid, romantic, sentimental fool do if our positions were reversed?
The answer was obvious. Phaphhrd would try to save everyone. He would refuse to accept that stopping the ritual and warning his partner were mutually exclusive options. He would insist, with the peculiar stubbornness of the genuinely good, that there had to be another way.
The Ratter was not good. Not anymore. But he had spent five years being influenced by a man who was, and some of that influence had seeped into the grey emptiness where his moral compass used to be.
He tucked the journal into his shirt and began to move.
There was another option. Phaphhrd was not the only person who could take action. The Ratter could do what he did best—gather information, identify weaknesses, plan approaches that no one else would think of—and use that knowledge to undermine the cult while also warning his partner.
He needed help. He hated needing help, hated admitting that any problem existed that he couldn’t solve alone, but this was bigger than one man. Even a man who had traded his humanity for power.
The wizard Sheemba had her tower in the swamp outside the city. She was inscrutable, dangerous, probably planning something terrible, but she was also opposed to the cult—the journal mentioned the “swamp witch” as an obstacle to be overcome. The enemy of my enemy, and all that.
But first, the Ratter needed to write everything down. The journal. His observations. The location of Phaphhrd, if he could determine it.
He found a quiet corner, pulled out paper, and began to compose a message for a partner who might not remember him by the time it arrived:
Phaphhrd—
If you’re reading this, you may not remember who I am. That’s part of what we’re fighting. My name is the Grey Ratter. We’ve been partners for five years. You are the closest thing I have to a friend, which is saying something given that I’m not capable of friendship in any normal sense.
There is a cult called the Faceless. They serve something called the Unremembering. It’s an ancient entity that consumes identity and memory. They are going to sacrifice you to wake it fully.
I’m going to stop them. But I need you to stay alive long enough for me to do it.
The woman at the Vermillion Theatre—Ivlis—seems to care about you. Trust her. Trust anyone who still remembers your name.
And if this is the last message I’m able to send, know this: You saved me. Not in any way that makes sense, not through any dramatic act of heroism. You simply existed, and your existence made my existence bearable.
That’s the closest thing to love I’m capable of expressing. I hope it’s enough.
—The Ratter
He folded the note and considered how to deliver it. A messenger, perhaps. Someone who didn’t know him, who wouldn’t be affected by the forgetting because they had no memories of him to lose.
It was not a perfect plan. But it was better than nothing.
The Grey Ratter emerged from the alley, leaving three bodies and a lot of questions behind him, and went to find a wizard.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
The summons arrived in the form of a small silver serpent that crawled through the window of Ivlis’s dressing room and delivered its message by sinking its fangs into Phaphhrd’s hand.
“What in the—” he started, shaking the creature loose. It landed on the floor, coiled once, and spoke in a voice like dry leaves rustling across stone.
“The Eleven Eyes require your presence. The place where the streets forget themselves. Come before midnight, or don’t come at all.”
The serpent dissolved into silver mist and was gone.
Phaphhrd stared at his hand. Two small puncture wounds marked the skin, but they weren’t bleeding—instead, they glowed faintly with a light that seemed to come from somewhere deeper than his flesh.
“That was magic,” Ivlis said, her voice carefully controlled. “Old magic. The kind that my grandmother used to tell stories about.”
“That was a wizard named Ningaudrelle.” Phaphhrd flexed his hand, watching the glow pulse in time with his heartbeat. “The Ratter mentioned him sometimes. One of the two great sorcerers who... interfere with people like us. People who attract interesting problems.”
“And you’re going to answer his summons?”
“I don’t have much choice.” He gestured at the glowing wounds. “This isn’t just a message. It’s a tracking spell. He’ll know where I am until I meet with him, and if I refuse...”
“What happens if you refuse?”
“I don’t know. That’s rather the point, isn’t it?” Phaphhrd began gathering his things—his sword, his notes, the small collection of supplies he had assembled for the investigation that kept getting postponed. “Wizards trade in uncertainty. They make you afraid of possibilities rather than actualities.”
Ivlis caught his arm. “I’m coming with you.”
“That’s not—”
“Don’t tell me it’s not safe. Nothing in this city is safe, and I’m not going to sit in a dressing room waiting to find out whether you survived a meeting with a wizard.” Her grip tightened. “Besides, you said you needed someone at your back. I’m volunteering.”
Phaphhrd looked at her—at the determination in her eyes, the set of her jaw, the way she held herself like someone who had made a decision and wouldn’t be moved from it—and felt something shift in his chest. Not quite the feeling he had carried for Vlana, not quite the partnership he shared with the Ratter, but something real nonetheless.
“You’re stubborn,” he said.
“I’m practical. There’s a difference.”
“The Ratter used to say something very similar.”
“Then he and I would have gotten along.” Ivlis released his arm. “Now, where is this place where streets forget themselves?”
The answer, it turned out, was a small plaza in the oldest part of Kasdim, where seven streets converged in a pattern that made no geographical sense. Each street was named, but the names changed depending on which direction you approached from. Maps of the area contradicted each other. Longtime residents gave conflicting directions with equal confidence.
It was the kind of place that felt like a mistake in reality’s fabric, and according to local legend, it had been that way since before Kasdim was built.
Phaphhrd and Ivlis arrived just before midnight, approaching from the east through streets that seemed to twist and double back despite their best efforts to walk straight. The plaza itself was empty, lit only by a single street lamp that cast shadows in directions that didn’t quite align with the light source.
“Charming,” Ivlis murmured.
“The Ratter always said that wizards prefer places where reality is... flexible.” Phaphhrd’s hand went to his sword. “Easier to work their magic when the universe is already confused.”
“How reassuring.”
A voice spoke from everywhere and nowhere: “You came alone, but not alone. Interesting choice.”
The shadows in the plaza shifted, gathered, coalesced into something that might have been human if humans had eleven eyes arranged in a constellation across their face. Ningaudrelle of the Eleven Eyes emerged from the darkness as if reality itself were giving birth to him, wrapped in robes that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it.
“Phaphhrd of the Cold Waste,” the wizard said. “I have been watching you with great interest.”
“Then you know why I’m here.”
“You’re here because I summoned you. The reasons you came are your own.” Several of the eleven eyes blinked independently, creating a nauseating ripple effect across Ningaudrelle’s face. “But yes, I have some understanding of your situation. Your partner has been marked for sacrifice. Your memories are fragmenting. The city is being consumed by something ancient and hungry.”
“Can you stop it?”
“Perhaps.” Ningaudrelle moved closer, and Phaphhrd had to fight the urge to step back. Being near the wizard felt like standing at the edge of a cliff—not dangerous, exactly, but intensely aware of how easy it would be to fall. “The question is whether I want to stop it. The Unremembering is old, and old things command a certain respect. Its cult has been worshipping here since before Kasdim had streets to forget themselves in.”
“You’re considering letting them succeed?”
“I’m considering all possibilities.” The wizard’s voice was mild, conversational. “The Unremembering’s awakening would reshape the city in fundamental ways. Some of those changes might be advantageous. Some might not. I require more information before I decide which outcome to support.”
Ivlis spoke up, her voice steady despite the fear that Phaphhrd could sense beneath her calm exterior. “And we’re supposed to provide that information?”
Eight eyes turned toward her while three remained focused on Phaphhrd. “The actress. Yes, I’ve noticed you as well. An unexpected variable in a situation that I thought I understood.” Ningaudrelle’s lips curved in something that might have been a smile. “You love him, or think you might. That’s useful.”
“Love is useful?”
“Love is leverage. It makes people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do. Act against their interests. Take risks that cold calculation would reject.” The wizard’s smile widened. “The man you’re trying to protect, the Grey Ratter—he doesn’t love. He’s incapable of it. But he feels something for Phaphhrd that functions similarly. A bond. An attachment. Something that makes him predictable in ways that a truly rational actor would not be.”
“You know where he is?” Phaphhrd asked, seizing on the implication.
“I know where he will be. Tonight, in fact. He’s going to seek out my... counterpart. Sheemba of the Devoid.” Ningaudrelle spat the name like a curse. “She has her own interests in this matter, and she will try to use him, just as I am trying to use you.”
“Use us for what?”
“Information. Action. The things that wizards need but cannot always obtain themselves.” The eleven eyes all focused on Phaphhrd now, creating an intensity of attention that felt almost physical. “The Unremembering is powerful, but it can be bound. It has been bound before, ages ago, by wizards who understood what they were dealing with. I want to understand it the same way they did. I want to know whether it should be bound again, or whether its awakening should be permitted—and guided—toward outcomes that serve my purposes.”
“And what do we get in return?”
“Knowledge. The cult’s locations. Their schedule. The identity of their Master, if you’re very fortunate.” Ningaudrelle produced a small scroll from his robes and extended it toward Phaphhrd. “This contains what I know. Use it well, and you might—might—be able to save your partner before the final ritual.”
Phaphhrd took the scroll, not because he trusted the wizard but because refusing would have been pointless. “And if we fail?”
“Then the Unremembering wakes, the city is consumed, and I adapt to the new reality as I have adapted to every other change in my very long existence.” The wizard began to dissolve back into shadows. “You have three days, Phaphhrd of the Cold Waste. Use them wisely.”
“Wait.” Phaphhrd stepped forward. “The Ratter. You said he’s meeting with Sheemba. Where? When?”
Ningaudrelle’s voice came from everywhere and nowhere, already fading: “The swamp to the east. Before dawn. Hurry if you want to reach him in time. And remember, singer of songs and teller of tales: some partnerships are worth more than cities. Some are worth more than the world.”
The shadows released their hold on reality, and the wizard was gone.
Phaphhrd stood in the plaza, holding the scroll that contained information he wasn’t sure he could trust, facing the choice that the wizard had presented with such calculated precision.
He could use the scroll’s information to investigate the cult, to try to stop the ritual, to save the city.
Or he could go east, to the swamp, to reach the Ratter before Sheemba could sink her hooks into him.
He couldn’t do both. The distances were too great, the time too short.
“What are you thinking?” Ivlis asked.
“I’m thinking that wizards are terrible people.”
“That’s not a decision.”
“No.” Phaphhrd unrolled the scroll, scanning the contents. Locations. Names. A map of the cult’s network through Kasdim’s temples and secret places. “But this is information we need. Information that could save everyone, not just one person.”
“Phaphhrd...”
“The Ratter is clever. He’s survived worse than one meeting with a swamp wizard. If I go chasing after him now, I lose the chance to actually stop what’s happening.” He rerolled the scroll and tucked it into his coat. “He would understand. He would tell me I was being sentimental if I abandoned the mission for him.”
“Would he?”
Phaphhrd was silent for a long moment.
“No,” he admitted finally. “He would tell me to do exactly what I’m doing. And then he would be hurt that I listened to him.”
“Then don’t listen.” Ivlis moved to stand in front of him, blocking his path. “Go east. Find him. I can investigate the cult locations—I’m an actress, remember? I’m good at going places I shouldn’t be and convincing people I belong there.”
“It’s too dangerous.”
“Everything is dangerous. That’s not an argument.” She took the scroll from his coat, began scanning its contents. “I can do this. I want to do this. Let me help you save both of them—your partner and your city.”
Phaphhrd looked at her—at this woman he had known for less than a week, who was offering to risk her life for a cause that wasn’t hers, for a man she barely knew—and felt something he hadn’t felt since Vlana’s death.
Hope.
“The locations on that scroll are Temple District, mostly. Start with the shrine on Copper Street—Thessaly said it was suspicious. If you find evidence of cult activity, don’t engage. Just observe and report.”
“Where will I report to?”
“The Vermillion. I’ll meet you there by dawn, with or without the Ratter.” He gripped her hand briefly, intensely. “Be careful.”
“Be faster.”
She was gone before he could respond, moving into the darkness with a confidence that suggested she had done this kind of thing before. Phaphhrd watched her go and hoped, with something that felt almost like prayer, that he wasn’t making the worst mistake of his life.
Then he turned east, toward the swamp, and began to run.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
The swamp east of Kasdim had no name, or rather, it had dozens of names, none of which anyone agreed on.
The locals called it the Drowned District, claiming it had once been a prosperous neighborhood before the waters rose. Traders called it the Shortcut That Isn’t, because maps suggested it offered a quicker route to the eastern roads while experience demonstrated that the maps were liars. The Grey Ratter, approaching it in the pre-dawn darkness, called it several things that his mother would have found objectionable if he’d had a mother or any memory of what objectionable language might have meant to her.
The swamp was not just wet. It was aggressively wet. It wanted you to know that it was wet. It expressed this desire through fog that clung to your skin like damp cloth, mud that sucked at your boots with genuine enthusiasm, and a general atmosphere of moistness that suggested the entire landscape had been recently and thoroughly wept upon.
The Ratter slogged through it because he had no choice. The journal from the dead cultists had mentioned Sheemba of the Devoid as an obstacle to the Unremembering’s plans. If the cult considered the swamp witch a problem, then the swamp witch might be willing to help solve the cult.
It was not sophisticated reasoning. But sophisticated reasoning required time and resources that the Ratter didn’t have.
“You walk like a man who has never been in a swamp,” said a voice from the darkness ahead.
The Ratter stopped, his hand going to his knife. “I’ve been in worse places.”
“That may be true. But you have not been in this place, and this place does not appreciate visitors who assume they understand it.”
The speaker emerged from the fog: a figure in dark robes, hood drawn up to conceal the face—except that where a face should have been, there was nothing. Not darkness, not shadow, but a void that the eyes refused to focus on, that the mind refused to acknowledge existed.
Sheemba of the Devoid.
“You came seeking my assistance,” she said. It was not a question.
“I came seeking information. Whether that constitutes assistance depends on what you tell me.”
“Pragmatic. Good. Ningaudrelle’s pet would have arrived with demands and expectations. You arrive with nothing but desperation and a handful of borrowed notes.” The void where her face should have been tilted, as if studying him. “Show me what you found.”
The Ratter hesitated, then produced the journal. There was no point in concealment—if Sheemba wanted the journal, she would take it. Wizards did not negotiate with people like him; they simply imposed their will and called it collaboration.
Sheemba’s hands—which were visible, at least, emerging from her sleeves as perfectly ordinary human hands—took the journal and opened it. Pages turned without visible reading, the void of her face directed toward the text but incapable, surely, of actually seeing it.
“Adequate,” she said finally. “You’ve discovered the obvious. The Faceless serve the Unremembering. The Unremembering requires sacrifice to fully wake. Your partner is one of the designated offerings.” She closed the journal and handed it back. “You want to know how to stop this.”
“Can you help?”
“I can provide information. Action is your responsibility.” Sheemba turned and began moving deeper into the swamp. “Follow. There are things I need to show you that cannot be shown in the mire.”
The swamp witch’s dwelling was not what the Ratter had expected.
He had anticipated a hut, perhaps, or a cave—something suitably sinister and uncomfortable, the kind of place wizards built when they wanted to discourage visitors. What he found instead was a structure that seemed to have grown from the swamp itself: walls of living wood, roof of woven reeds, floors of packed earth that was somehow dry despite the surrounding water.
Inside, the space was larger than the exterior suggested—another piece of wizard architecture that the Ratter had learned to accept without understanding. Shelves lined the walls, filled with jars and bottles and objects he preferred not to examine too closely. A fire burned in a central pit, its smoke rising through a hole in the ceiling that didn’t appear to exist from outside.
“Sit,” Sheemba said. “You have questions. I will answer some of them.”
The Ratter sat on a stool that materialized behind him. “Why help me? You’re a wizard. You don’t do things for free.”
“I do things that serve my interests. Currently, my interests align with yours.” Sheemba moved around the room, gathering items from various shelves. “The Unremembering is old. Older than Kasdim, older than the civilization that existed before Kasdim, older than memory itself. It was imprisoned long ago by wizards who understood what they were dealing with.”
“Why was it imprisoned? What does it actually do?”
“It consumes. Not flesh, not life, but identity. The essence of self. When the Unremembering takes a person, that person continues to exist physically, but everything that made them them is gone—memories, personality, the accumulated weight of choices and experiences that define who someone is.” Sheemba placed a bottle on a table near the Ratter. “Drink this.”
“What is it?”
“Something that will help you resist the Unremembering’s influence. You’ve already been exposed—you can feel it, can’t you? The way memories of your partner slip and slide, become uncertain?”
The Ratter had noticed. It was getting worse. “What’s in it?”
“Nothing that will harm you. Nothing that will give me power over you. Simply a protection against the specific magic you’re fighting.” The void of her face seemed to study him. “I am offering this freely because your survival serves my purposes. If that is not sufficient assurance, leave now and face the Unremembering without protection.”
The Ratter considered. Then he drank.
The liquid was cold, bitter, and left his throat feeling scraped raw. But almost immediately, he felt something shift—the memories of Phaphhrd, which had been fading like ink in sunlight, seemed to stabilize. The details he had been losing came back, not perfectly, but better than they had been.
“Good,” Sheemba said. “Now you can listen without the distraction of your own forgetting.”
The wizard’s explanation was thorough and, in its own way, horrifying.
“The Unremembering was not always malevolent,” Sheemba said. “In the earliest ages, it served a purpose—it was the thing that allowed people to forget trauma, to heal from wounds of the spirit, to move past events that would otherwise destroy them. But like all things that consume, it grew hungry. It wanted more. It began taking memories that hadn’t been offered, identities that hadn’t consented to erasure.”
“And the wizards bound it.”
“The wizards bound it. Eleven of them, working together, created a prison that would hold the Unremembering as long as certain conditions were maintained.” Sheemba pulled down a scroll from one of her shelves and unrolled it on the table. “The prison requires regular attention. Rituals must be performed. Sacrifices—small ones, voluntary ones—must be offered to keep the entity placated without feeding its growth.”
“But the rituals stopped?”
“The knowledge was lost. The wizards who created the prison died or moved on or simply forgot what they had done. Over centuries, the prison weakened. The Unremembering began to dream, and its dreams touched the minds of susceptible people. Some of those people became the first Faceless.”
“And now they’re trying to wake it.”
“They’ve been trying for generations. But the prison, even weakened, required specific conditions to be broken entirely. The cult has finally accumulated enough forgotten souls to meet those conditions.” Sheemba tapped the scroll. “This is a diagram of the original prison’s structure. The bindings that hold the Unremembering. If you can identify which bindings have already been broken and which still hold, you may be able to reinforce the remaining bonds before the final ritual.”
The Ratter studied the diagram. It was complex—a web of interconnected symbols and lines, representing relationships between magical forces that he could barely comprehend.
“I’m not a wizard,” he said. “I couldn’t cast a spell if my life depended on it.”
“You could once. The potential is still there, buried beneath the greyness that consumed you when you killed your master.” Sheemba’s voice was matter-of-fact. “But that’s not why I’m showing you this. I’m showing you because you need to understand what you’re fighting. The Unremembering isn’t a monster that can be killed with swords. It’s a force of nature, like the tide or the wind. You don’t fight it—you redirect it.”
“How?”
“The final ritual requires three sacrifices: three people whose identities have been weakened to the point of imminent collapse. If you can strengthen those identities—restore their memories, reconnect them to the people who knew them—the ritual will fail. The Unremembering will remain bound.”
“And Phaphhrd?”
“Is one of the three. The others are...”—Sheemba consulted something the Ratter couldn’t see—”a former Guildmaster named Korvallis, and a temple priestess named Amaranthine. Both have been missing for weeks, their identities already largely consumed. Your partner is newer, his forgetting less complete. If you can reach him in time, if you can remind him who he is...”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“I do.” Sheemba produced a small crystal from her robes and handed it to the Ratter. “This will lead you to him. Follow its light. But be warned: the cult knows your connection to him. They will be watching for you.”
“They’ve been watching for me since I started asking questions.”
“Yes. But now they have reason to act. You’ve killed three of their members. Taken their journal. Threatened their plans.” The void of Sheemba’s face somehow conveyed something that might have been amusement. “They will try to kill you, Grey Ratter. They may succeed. But if you die before you can reach your partner...”
“Then the ritual succeeds and everyone in Kasdim becomes a blank slate.”
“Everyone except me. I have... arrangements.” Sheemba moved toward the door, which opened without being touched. “Go now. Dawn is coming, and you have a long way to travel.”
“Wait.” The Ratter didn’t move. “Why are you helping me? Not the convenient answer about aligned interests. The real reason.”
The void of Sheemba’s face was silent for a long moment.
“Because Ningaudrelle wants the Unremembering awakened,” she said finally. “He believes he can control it, redirect it, use its power to extend his influence across the entire region. He is wrong, but his wrongness will affect me, will threaten the careful arrangements I have made for my own survival. By helping you stop the ritual, I thwart his plans and preserve my position.”
“So we’re pawns.”
“All mortals are pawns in wizards’ games. The question is whether the game you’re playing is one worth winning.” She gestured toward the swamp outside. “Go, Grey Ratter. Find your partner. Save your city. And when this is over, remember that Sheemba of the Devoid helped you when others would not.”
The Ratter stepped out into the dawn-lit swamp, the crystal glowing faintly in his hand, and began to follow its light.
Behind him, the wizard’s dwelling began to fade, becoming less real, returning to whatever dimension it occupied when not in use. By the time he looked back, there was nothing but mist and water and the endless grey of a swamp that had forgotten it had ever contained anything else.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
The crystal led the Grey Ratter out of the swamp and toward Kasdim’s eastern gate just as the sun crested the horizon. He was exhausted, mud-soaked, and deeply suspicious of everything Sheemba had told him, but the protection she had given him was working—his memories of Phaphhrd were stable now, clear and solid in a way they hadn’t been for days.
He remembered the shape of his partner’s face. The specific timber of his voice when he was amused versus when he was pretending to be amused. The way Phaphhrd moved when he was fighting, all controlled power and surprising grace. The night they had met, both of them reaching for the same pocket, the moment of frozen surprise before the Ratter had decided that this ridiculous giant was either a threat or an opportunity.
He had chosen opportunity. It was the best choice he had ever made.
The crystal pulsed brighter as he approached the gate, suggesting that Phaphhrd was somewhere ahead. The Ratter quickened his pace despite his exhaustion, driven by something that might have been hope if he were still capable of such emotions.
Phaphhrd saw the small grey figure emerge from the morning mist and felt something unknot in his chest that he hadn’t realized was tied.
“Ratter!”
He had been waiting at the eastern gate since before dawn, having failed to reach the swamp in time to intercept his partner. The decision to wait rather than chase had been difficult, but ultimately pragmatic—better to let the Ratter come to him than to pursue someone who was better at disappearing than anyone Phaphhrd had ever known.
The Grey Ratter stopped a few feet away, studying him with those flat grey eyes that always seemed to be calculating something.
“You remember me,” the Ratter said.
“Of course I remember you. I’ve spent the last three days trying to convince people that you exist.”
“Most people don’t remember. The forgetting is spreading.”
“I know.” Phaphhrd wanted to embrace him—that’s what you did when you found someone you’d been afraid you’d lost—but the Ratter had never been comfortable with physical affection, and five years of partnership had taught Phaphhrd to respect that distance. “I met with Ningaudrelle. He told me about the cult, the ritual, the three sacrifices.”
Something flickered across the Ratter’s face. “Ningaudrelle contacted you? When?”
“Last night. He summoned me to the plaza where streets forget themselves.”
“Interesting.” The Ratter’s expression was closed, unreadable. “I met with Sheemba. Just now, in the swamp. She also told me about the ritual.”
“And?”
“And I suspect they gave us different information.” The Ratter produced a folded paper from his coat. “Let’s find somewhere private. We need to compare notes.”
They found a small room in a tavern on the Street of Forgotten Commerce—a name that had become darkly appropriate given recent events. The Ratter ordered food and drink that neither of them touched, while Phaphhrd spread Ningaudrelle’s scroll on the table beside the Ratter’s journal and notes.
“Start with what Ningaudrelle told you,” the Ratter said.
Phaphhrd summarized: the cult’s locations throughout the Temple District, the identity of key members, the timeline for the final ritual. The scroll contained maps, names, schedules—operational intelligence that would allow them to target the cult’s infrastructure.
“He wants us to investigate,” Phaphhrd concluded. “Find evidence, expose the cult, let the city’s authorities deal with them.”
“The city’s authorities don’t remember the people who’ve already been forgotten. They won’t believe a threat they can’t perceive.” The Ratter’s voice was flat. “What else?”
“He said the Unremembering could be controlled. That its awakening might not be entirely negative if properly directed.”
“Directed by him, presumably.”
“He didn’t say that explicitly, but... yes. That was the implication.”
The Ratter nodded slowly. “Sheemba said something different. She said the Unremembering can’t be controlled—it’s a force of nature, like the tide. The original wizards didn’t try to dominate it; they bound it, trapped it, created conditions that would keep it contained.”
“And the cult is trying to break those conditions.”
“By feeding it forgotten souls. The three sacrifices are the final components—three identities so weakened that consuming them will shatter the remaining bonds.” The Ratter tapped the journal. “She gave me a diagram of the binding structure. If we can identify which bonds are still intact and reinforce them...”
“We prevent the awakening entirely.”
“Or at least delay it.” The Ratter was quiet for a moment. “There’s something else. Sheemba said Ningaudrelle wants the Unremembering to wake. He thinks he can use its power for his own purposes.”
Phaphhrd absorbed this. “So we’ve been given information by two wizards with opposite goals.”
“And neither of them told us the complete truth. They gave us pieces that serve their interests and left out pieces that don’t.”
“How do we know which pieces are real?”
“We don’t.” The Ratter’s smile was thin and humorless. “Welcome to dealing with wizards.”
They spent the next hour comparing information, looking for overlaps and contradictions.
The cult’s existence was confirmed by both wizards—that much they could trust. The location of key shrines matched between Ningaudrelle’s scroll and the journal the Ratter had taken from the dead cultists. The timing of the ritual was consistent: three days from now, at the dark of the moon.
But the solutions differed.
Ningaudrelle’s approach was aggressive: attack the cult directly, eliminate their leadership, prevent the ritual through force. His information supported this strategy—it was tactical, operational, focused on the enemy’s vulnerabilities.
Sheemba’s approach was subtle: strengthen the three sacrifices, restore their identities, make them unsuitable offerings. Her information was more esoteric—focused on the nature of the binding, the mechanics of identity and memory, the weaknesses of the Unremembering itself.
“We need both approaches,” Phaphhrd said finally. “Attack the cult to buy time, strengthen the sacrifices to ensure the ritual can’t succeed even if we fail.”
“That requires splitting up. One of us investigating the cult while the other searches for the sacrifices.”
“I know.”
They looked at each other across the table, and the unspoken question hung in the air between them: After everything we’ve been through to find each other, how can we separate again?
“I should handle the cult investigation,” the Ratter said. “I’m better at infiltration. At gathering information without being seen.”
“And I should find the sacrifices. Two of them are unknown, but we know where one of them is.” Phaphhrd’s voice caught slightly. “You. The cult has been preparing you for sacrifice. Your identity has been weakening for weeks.”
“Sheemba gave me something—a protection against the forgetting. I can feel it working.”
“But you’re still a target. If they can’t use you as a sacrifice, they’ll try to eliminate you.”
“They’ll try to eliminate both of us regardless. We’ve killed their people, stolen their information, threatened their plans. We’re not going to survive this by being careful.” The Ratter stood up, began gathering his notes. “Find the other two sacrifices. Former Guildmaster Korvallis and a temple priestess named Amaranthine. If you can locate them, if you can start rebuilding their identities, it buys us options.”
“And if I can’t find them?”
“Then we rely on plan A: destroy the cult before they can complete the ritual.” The Ratter paused at the door. “Phaphhrd. I know what you did—leaving Ivlis to investigate the cult locations while you came looking for me. That was...”
“Stupid? Sentimental? The kind of thing you always tell me not to do?”
“What I was going to say was necessary. You needed to find me. I needed to be found.” The Ratter’s grey eyes met Phaphhrd’s for a long moment. “We work better together than apart. That’s not sentiment—it’s tactical reality.”
“The Grey Ratter admitting that he needs someone. Alert the historians.”
“Don’t get used to it.” But there was something almost warm in the Ratter’s voice. “Meet back here at dusk. We’ll compare what we’ve learned and adjust our plans.”
“And if one of us doesn’t make it back?”
“Then the other one finishes the job.” The Ratter’s expression was flat, unreadable. “That’s how it works. That’s how it’s always worked.”
He was gone before Phaphhrd could respond, slipping out the door and into the morning crowds with the practiced invisibility that made him so effective at what he did.
Phaphhrd sat alone in the small room, surrounded by papers and plans and the lingering scent of food neither of them had touched, and tried to remember why he had thought finding his partner would make things easier.
Outside, the Grey Ratter paused in an alley to compose himself.
The meeting had gone well. They had a plan, or something close to it. Information from both wizards, filtered through professional cynicism, gave them a reasonable chance of success.
But seeing Phaphhrd—actually seeing him, hearing his voice, confirming that he was real and solid and not just a fading memory—had affected the Ratter in ways he hadn’t anticipated. Something had loosened in his chest, some knot of tension he hadn’t realized he was carrying.
Sheemba was right, he thought. The attachment is a weakness. It makes me predictable. It makes me vulnerable.
But she was also wrong. Because the attachment was the only thing that had kept him moving through the swamp, that had driven him to seek out wizards and steal journals and kill cultists. Without Phaphhrd, without the connection between them, the Ratter would have run. Would have taken his skills and his cynicism and disappeared to some distant city where the Unremembering’s reach couldn’t find him.
The attachment is a weakness. But it’s also strength. The question is which one wins.
He tucked the thought away for later examination and began moving toward the Temple District.
There was a cult to destroy.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
The Temple District of Kasdim was a place where the divine and the commercial had long since reached an accommodation.
Every god, demon, and spiritual entity that had ever attracted even a handful of worshippers maintained some presence here—from the great temples of the Overlord’s official pantheon to the cramped shrines of imported deities that catered to sailors, merchants, and refugees from distant lands. The air smelled of incense, charred offerings, and the particular desperation that arose when people asked the infinite for help with the finite.
Phaphhrd moved through the crowds with the careful anonymity of someone who had learned not to draw divine attention. The gods of Kasdim were real—everyone knew this—and their attention was rarely beneficial. Better to pass unremarked, unnoticed, a face in the crowd that no celestial eye would bother to examine closely.
He was looking for the Shrine of Accepted Diminishment.
According to Ningaudrelle’s scroll, this was where the cult called the Faceless had established their primary presence—an old temple to a god of humility that had been slowly corrupted into something darker. The location made a certain terrible sense. A god that taught the virtue of self-abnegation, of becoming less so that others might become more, would provide excellent cover for an entity that consumed identity entirely.
The shrine occupied a narrow building between a temple to Glibskull, god of merchants, and a slightly larger establishment dedicated to the Weeping Mother, goddess of grief and childbirth. Its facade was deliberately modest—grey stone, no ornaments, a simple door that might have led to a storage room rather than a place of worship.
Phaphhrd noted the small symbol carved above the lintel: a face with features gradually fading, becoming smooth and blank. The mark of the Unremembering, hidden in plain sight.
He didn’t enter immediately. Instead, he found a position across the street—a small alcove beside Glibskull’s temple that offered a view of the shrine’s entrance—and settled in to watch.
Over the next three hours, Phaphhrd observed seventeen people enter the Shrine of Accepted Diminishment and fourteen leave.
The mathematics were troubling.
Some of those who entered were obviously cultists—he recognized the particular way they moved, the carefully blank expressions, the robes that seemed designed to blend into crowds. But others looked like ordinary citizens: a merchant clutching a ledger, a woman who might have been a seamstress, an elderly man with the weathered look of a retired sailor.
The merchant came out. The seamstress came out. The sailor did not.
Phaphhrd watched and waited and felt the familiar tension building in his muscles—the readiness for action that had been trained into him in the Cold Waste, where hesitation meant death and observation was merely the precursor to violence.
But this wasn’t the Cold Waste. This was Kasdim, where the direct approach usually got you killed, and the Ratter’s voice in his head reminded him that he was supposed to be gathering information, not starting fights.
Find the sacrifices, the Ratter had said. Rebuild their identities.
The sailor had been old, weathered, forgettable even before whatever had happened to him inside that shrine. Was he one of the three? Had Phaphhrd just watched a man become a sacrifice?
There was only one way to find out.
Phaphhrd entered the shrine as the afternoon shadows lengthened, adopting the hunched posture and shuffling gait of someone who had come to confess sins rather than investigate them.
The interior was dim, lit by candles that seemed to absorb more light than they produced. The walls were bare grey stone, unadorned by the usual religious imagery—no statues, no paintings, no symbols of the god this temple supposedly served. Just emptiness, deliberate and profound.
A figure in grey robes approached from the shadows. Male, Phaphhrd thought, though the robes and hood made certainty difficult. The face beneath the hood was... not quite blank, but close. Features that seemed to slide away from observation, that refused to stay fixed in memory.
“Welcome, seeker,” the figure said. Its voice was similarly unfixed—neither high nor low, neither warm nor cold, a voice designed to leave no impression. “Have you come to accept diminishment?”
“I’ve come to understand it,” Phaphhrd said carefully. “I’ve heard that this place offers... relief. From the burden of being noticed.”
“The burden of being noticed.” The figure seemed to consider this. “Yes. That is one way to describe what we offer. Tell me, seeker—do you know what it means to be truly forgotten?”
“I think I’m beginning to learn.”
“Then you are already on the path.” The figure gestured toward the shrine’s interior, where Phaphhrd could see a low altar and, beyond it, a door that presumably led deeper into the building. “Most who come here seek escape from debts, from crimes, from the weight of reputation. They want to become someone new by becoming no one at all.”
“And do they succeed?”
“Some do. Those who truly embrace diminishment find that the world’s attention passes over them like water over stone. They become invisible in the truest sense—not hidden, but simply... unremarkable. Unremembered.”
Phaphhrd felt a chill that had nothing to do with the temple’s cool air. “And the others? Those who don’t succeed?”
“There is no failure here, seeker. Only degrees of acceptance.” The figure’s hood tilted, as if studying him more closely. “You are large. Memorable. The kind of man people notice despite himself. Diminishment would be difficult for you.”
“I have reasons to want it.”
“Everyone does. But reasons are not enough. Diminishment requires surrender. The complete release of everything that makes you you.” The figure moved closer, and Phaphhrd caught a glimpse of the face beneath the hood—smooth where features should be, like clay that had never been sculpted. “Are you prepared for that? Truly prepared?”
“I want to understand the process first. Before I commit.”
“Understanding is the enemy of acceptance. But very well.” The figure gestured toward the door beyond the altar. “The Master receives all seekers who wish to know more. He will explain what we offer, and what we require in return.”
The Master of Blank Pages. The cult’s leader. The one whose identity had been so thoroughly consumed that he had become a vessel for the Unremembering itself.
This is either an opportunity or a trap, Phaphhrd thought. Probably both.
He followed the grey-robed figure toward the door.
The chamber beyond was larger than the shrine’s modest exterior suggested—Kasdim’s buildings had a way of containing more space than they should, especially in the Temple District. This room was circular, its walls lined with alcoves containing... nothing. Empty niches where statues should stand, blank spaces where paintings should hang.
In the center stood a figure in white robes.
The Master of Blank Pages was tall—not as tall as Phaphhrd, but close—and moved with the careful precision of someone who had forgotten how bodies naturally worked. His face was smooth, utterly featureless, a mask of skin without eyes, nose, or mouth. And yet he clearly saw Phaphhrd, clearly heard the door close behind him, clearly turned to face the intruder with what might have been anticipation.
“A seeker,” the Master said. His voice came from everywhere and nowhere, resonating through the chamber without any visible source. “But not for diminishment. You smell of purpose, northerner. Of identity so strong it burns.”
So much for the disguise.
Phaphhrd straightened, abandoning the hunched posture. “I came looking for answers.”
“And you thought to find them by pretending to be what you are not? In a temple dedicated to the dissolution of pretense?” The smooth face tilted, and somehow conveyed amusement despite having no features to express it. “The Unremembering sees through all masks, northerner. It knows what you are. What you want. What you fear.”
“Then tell me.”
“You fear being forgotten. Not the forgetting of death—you people of the Cold Waste make peace with mortality young—but the forgetting of absence. You fear that if you are not noticed, not remembered, not seen, then you do not truly exist.” The Master moved closer, gliding rather than walking. “You came to this city to be someone. To matter. And now something threatens to make you no one, and you cannot bear it.”
The words landed like blows. Phaphhrd felt them in his chest, in his stomach, in the place where his heart beat with stubborn persistence.
“You know about the forgetting,” he said. “About the people who’ve been erased.”
“I am the forgetting, northerner. I am what remains when identity is consumed. I was someone once—I must have been, or there would be nothing for the Unremembering to inhabit—but what I was has been eaten, digested, transformed into fuel for something greater.” The Master spread his arms wide. “This is what we offer. Not death, but transcendence. The surrender of the small self so that the great Self might grow.”
“And the three sacrifices? The ones whose identities will complete the ritual?”
The smooth face went still. “You know about that.”
“I know many things. I know your cult has been preparing three victims—people whose identities have been weakened until they’re ready to be consumed entirely. I know the ritual happens in three days. I know you answer to something called the Unremembering.” Phaphhrd let his hand rest on the hilt of his sword. “What I don’t know is where you’re keeping them.”
“And you thought to extract this information through... what? Violence?” The Master laughed, a sound like wind through empty rooms. “I have no body to harm, northerner. No mind to threaten. No identity to leverage. I am a vessel, nothing more—a space where the Unremembering can touch the world.”
“Then I’ll find them another way.”
“You will fail. The ritual is already too far advanced to stop. Two of the sacrifices are prepared—their identities so diminished that even they don’t remember who they were. The third...” The smooth face turned toward the door through which Phaphhrd had entered. “The third has been resisting. Your small grey friend. But resistance is merely delayed acceptance. In the end, everyone forgets.”
The Ratter. They were still targeting him.
Phaphhrd drew his sword. “I’m going to stop you.”
“You cannot stop what has no beginning or end. The Unremembering has always existed, will always exist. It is the silence between heartbeats, the darkness between stars, the emptiness that gives form its meaning. We do not serve it—we are it, as all things eventually become.”
The grey-robed figures emerged from shadows Phaphhrd hadn’t noticed—six of them, then eight, then more, surrounding him with the coordinated movement of a single organism with many bodies.
“You came seeking answers,” the Master said. “Here is the only answer that matters: in three days, the Unremembering wakes fully. In three days, the forgetting becomes total. And in three days, nothing that was will remain to remember what it lost.”
Phaphhrd settled into a fighting stance. “Then I’d better make the next three days count.”
The grey-robed figures attacked as one.
Fighting in a confined space against multiple opponents was never ideal, but Phaphhrd had certain advantages. His sword was longer than any weapon the cultists carried. His reach exceeded theirs. And his will to survive—sharpened by thoughts of the Ratter, of Ivlis, of everyone who would forget him if he failed—burned with a heat that no amount of diminishment could extinguish.
He killed the first two before they could close with him, sweeping strikes that took advantage of their lack of coordination. These were not trained fighters—they were devotees, people who had surrendered enough of themselves that concepts like self-preservation had become foreign.
That made them dangerous in a different way. They didn’t flinch. They didn’t hesitate. They simply came, wave after wave, willing to die if it meant bringing him down.
Phaphhrd gave ground, retreating toward the door, leaving bodies in his wake. His sword grew heavy with blood and exhaustion, but he kept moving, kept fighting, kept being himself with a ferocity that felt like its own kind of prayer.
The Master of Blank Pages watched without interfering. Perhaps he couldn’t interfere—perhaps the vessel he inhabited was incapable of physical action. Or perhaps he was simply waiting to see how long Phaphhrd could resist before his identity, too, began to fade.
“You fight well,” the Master observed as Phaphhrd cut down another cultist. “But every life you take feeds the Unremembering. Every death adds to its strength. You cannot win this battle without losing the war.”
Phaphhrd reached the door, backed through it, and slammed it shut behind him. The shrine beyond was still dim, still quiet, still smelling of incense and desperation.
He ran.
Behind him, the Master’s voice echoed through the temple: “Remember me, northerner! Remember this moment! It will be the last clear memory you ever have!”
Phaphhrd emerged into the Temple District’s evening crowds and kept moving, putting distance between himself and the shrine, trying to process what he had learned.
The cult was real. The ritual was real. The Unremembering was waking, and in three days, everything would be forgotten.
And the Ratter was still a target. Still one of the three sacrifices, despite Sheemba’s supposed protection.
He had to warn him. Had to find the other two sacrifices. Had to somehow stop a ritual that even the Master claimed was unstoppable.
One thing at a time, he told himself, channeling the Ratter’s pragmatic voice. Find your partner. Compare notes. Make a new plan.
And pray to whatever gods might be listening that three days is enough time to save everything you love.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
The Thieves’ Guild archives occupied three floors beneath the House of Many Doors, accessible only to senior members and those who knew how to become senior members without actually earning the rank.
The Grey Ratter knew several such methods.
The first involved a service entrance near the kitchens, which led to a supply shaft that connected to the lower levels. The second required climbing through a ventilation system designed by an architect who had clearly never anticipated anyone small enough to navigate it. The third—which he chose tonight—exploited a weakness in the magical wards protecting the building’s foundation, a weakness he had discovered seven years ago and carefully kept secret against future need.
Future need had arrived.
He emerged into a dusty corridor three levels below street level, where the air smelled of old paper, older ink, and the particular mustiness of secrets kept too long in the dark. The archives stretched ahead of him—row after row of shelves containing the Guild’s accumulated records, its history of thefts and treaties and territorial arrangements dating back centuries.
Somewhere in this labyrinth was information about the Unremembering. The original binding. The wizards who had contained it. And, Sheemba had suggested, the weakness that the cult was exploiting.
The Ratter began to search.
Guild records were organized by date, by type, and by a third system that only the archivists truly understood. The Ratter had learned enough to navigate the basics, but finding information about something as old as the Unremembering required going deeper—into the restricted sections where records predating the current Guild hierarchy were kept.
These sections were protected by additional wards, locks, and a general aura of do not enter that the Ratter found more invitation than warning.
The lock on the restricted section door was masterwork quality—it took him nearly four minutes to pick, which was embarrassing. The wards were more concerning, but Sheemba’s crystal pulsed warm against his chest as he approached, and the magical barriers seemed to part around him like curtains.
She knew I would need to come here, he realized. This is part of her plan.
The thought should have been comforting. Instead, it reminded him how little he understood about the forces he was dealing with.
The restricted section contained records organized by subject rather than date. The Ratter moved through the stacks, reading labels by the light of a small lamp: PLAGUE YEARS. OVERLORD SUCCESSION. FOREIGN WARS. And finally, in a corner that seemed to absorb light: ARCANE THREATS.
He pulled the relevant folders and began to read.
The history of the Unremembering was older than the Ratter had expected.
According to the Guild’s records—which had been compiled from various sources over centuries—the entity had first manifested during the founding of Kasdim itself. The city had been built on the ruins of something older, something that the original settlers had disturbed when they began excavating for foundations.
“The diggers encountered a space that should not have existed,” one account read. “A void in the earth that contained nothing, not even darkness. Several workers fell into it and emerged changed—unable to remember their own names, unable to recognize their families, unable to hold any thought longer than a moment. They wandered the settlement for days before simply... stopping. Not dying, but ceasing to be anyone at all.”
The entity had nearly consumed the settlement entirely before a coalition of wizards managed to contain it. The binding had been complex, layered, designed to prevent the Unremembering from touching the world directly while still allowing some minimal interaction—enough to prevent the pressure of containment from building to catastrophic levels.
“The binding requires constant maintenance,” another document noted. “Left unattended, it will weaken over centuries. The sigils must be renewed every hundred years, the sacrifices must be properly selected and prepared, the rituals must be performed with exact precision.”
The Ratter felt cold settle into his bones.
Sacrifices. The ritual required sacrifices even to maintain the binding, not just to break it.
“Selection criteria for maintenance sacrifices: individuals whose identities are already weakened by circumstance—the forgotten, the abandoned, the deliberately unmemorable. They must consent, at least partially, to the diminishment they will experience. Forced sacrifice corrupts the binding rather than reinforcing it.”
He read further. The maintenance rituals had been performed regularly for centuries, overseen by a succession of wizards who had passed the responsibility from one generation to the next. But approximately two hundred years ago, something had changed.
“The last maintenance ritual was performed in the Year of the Frozen Moon. The wizard Thalesquin reported success, but subsequent observations suggest the binding was damaged rather than reinforced. Thalesquin disappeared shortly afterward, and no replacement has been appointed.”
Two hundred years without maintenance. Two hundred years of slowly weakening bonds.
No wonder the cult was confident. They weren’t trying to break something strong—they were applying pressure to something already crumbling.
The Ratter found the list of original binding wizards in a separate folder, protected by an additional ward that the crystal neutralized with apparent ease.
Seven names.
Seven wizards who had combined their power to contain the Unremembering.
He recognized two of them immediately: ancestors or predecessors of Ningaudrelle and Sheemba. The lineages of power extended back centuries in Kasdim, wizards passing their knowledge and their responsibilities to successors who might or might not be worthy of them.
The other five names were less familiar, but the records included notes about their successors. The Ratter cross-referenced, following the threads of magical inheritance through centuries of births, deaths, and betrayals.
Three of the original seven lineages had ended entirely—their successors killed, corrupted, or simply died without passing on the knowledge.
One lineage had merged with another through marriage, concentrating power but reducing redundancy.
And the fifth...
The Ratter stared at the name, not believing what he was reading.
The fifth lineage had become the Thieves’ Guild itself.
“Korvallis the Subtle, seventh-generation heir to the binding responsibility, determined that the Guild structure provided ideal cover for the maintenance of arcane obligations. He established protocols for selecting suitable sacrifice candidates from among the Guild’s membership—criminals whose identities were already weakened by aliases and false histories, who would consent to diminishment in exchange for the Guild’s protection of their remaining connections.”
Former Guildmaster Korvallis. One of the three sacrifices Ningaudrelle had mentioned.
The man who was supposed to maintain the binding had instead been prepared as a sacrifice to break it.
The implications unfolded in the Ratter’s mind like a map being opened.
The cult hadn’t appeared from nowhere. They had grown from within the Guild itself—from members who had discovered the binding responsibility and decided that breaking it served their purposes better than maintaining it.
The current Guildmaster—whoever that was, the Ratter couldn’t remember—might be part of the cult. The Guild’s security might be compromised. Everything he had assumed about the institution he had worked with for years might be wrong.
And Korvallis, the man whose responsibility it was to prevent exactly this disaster, had been systematically stripped of his identity until he couldn’t remember why his position mattered.
Elegant, the Ratter thought bitterly. Turn the guardian into the weapon. Use the very structure designed to prevent the awakening to cause it.
He began copying the relevant documents, working quickly but carefully. Phaphhrd needed to see this. They both needed to understand what they were really fighting.
Not just a cult, but a conspiracy that had infiltrated the most powerful institution in Kasdim’s criminal underworld.
Not just three days until a ritual, but two hundred years of accumulated neglect finally coming due.
And at the center of it all, the Ratter himself—chosen as a sacrifice not randomly, but because his connection to the Guild made him symbolically appropriate, and his weakening identity made him practically suitable.
They’ve been planning this for years, he realized. Maybe decades. The forgetting that’s been happening to me—it wasn’t chance. It wasn’t even the cult’s direct action. It was the natural consequence of working for an institution that was slowly poisoning everyone connected to it.
The crystal pulsed against his chest, warm and reassuring.
Sheemba knew, he thought. She knew everything. She sent me here to learn it.
The question was: why?
He was nearly finished copying the documents when he heard footsteps in the corridor outside the restricted section.
The Ratter doused his lamp and pressed himself into the shadows between shelves, making his body as small and still as possible. His hand found the knife at his belt—not his primary weapon, but adequate for close-quarters work if it came to that.
The footsteps paused outside the door. A moment of silence. Then a voice, familiar but wrong somehow, like a melody played in the wrong key:
“I know you’re in there, little thief.”
The Ratter didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
“You’ve learned things you weren’t meant to learn. Discovered secrets that were supposed to stay buried.” The voice was patient, almost amused. “It doesn’t matter. Knowledge won’t save you. Understanding won’t protect you. In three days, everything you’ve learned will be forgotten along with everything else.”
He recognized the voice now. Kresha—the Guild administrator who had helped Phaphhrd search the records days ago. But the inflection was wrong, the cadence unfamiliar. As if something else was speaking through her.
“The Unremembering sends its regards,” the voice continued. “And a message: you can still accept diminishment willingly. The sacrifice of a willing victim is worth more than a dozen forced offerings. Surrender your identity now, and your friends will be spared. Resist, and everyone you’ve ever cared about will be consumed alongside you.”
The Ratter remained silent.
The footsteps moved away. The corridor fell quiet.
He waited another ten minutes before allowing himself to breathe normally, to gather his copied documents, to begin the careful process of exfiltration.
The cult knew he was investigating. They had people—or things that had been people—inside the Guild. Every assumption he had made about operational security needed to be reconsidered.
But he had the information. He had the history. He knew what they were really fighting.
Now he just had to survive long enough to use it.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
They met at the tavern as planned, but neither felt like drinking.
The Grey Ratter spread his copied documents across the table while Phaphhrd described his encounter with the Master of Blank Pages. The information fit together like pieces of a puzzle that neither of them wanted to see completed.
“The Guild itself is compromised,” the Ratter said. “Has been for years, maybe decades. The binding that contains the Unremembering was originally the Guild’s responsibility, and someone turned that responsibility into a weapon.”
“The Master said the ritual is too far advanced to stop,” Phaphhrd replied. “Two of the three sacrifices are already prepared. Which means...”
“Korvallis and someone else. The priestess Amaranthine, probably.” The Ratter tapped one of the documents. “But I’m still the third. They need me willing, or at least weakened enough to not resist. That’s why they’ve been eroding my identity for weeks—not to kill me, but to prepare me.”
“Sheemba’s protection?”
“Holding. For now.” The Ratter touched the crystal beneath his shirt. “But I don’t trust her any more than I trust Ningaudrelle. Both of them have agendas that don’t necessarily include us surviving.”
Phaphhrd was quiet for a moment, studying the documents. “The binding requires seven wizards to maintain. Three lineages are dead, one merged with another. That leaves Ningaudrelle and Sheemba’s predecessors, plus the Guild’s magical responsibility.”
“Which means there should be three magical power sources available to reinforce the binding—if we can figure out how to use them.”
“Ningaudrelle won’t help. He wants the Unremembering to wake.”
“And Sheemba is playing her own game.” The Ratter’s expression was grim. “We need the third source. The Guild’s power. But the Guild is compromised, and I don’t know who we can trust.”
“Then we don’t trust anyone.” Phaphhrd’s voice was firm. “We find Korvallis and Amaranthine ourselves. We rebuild their identities enough to make them unsuitable as sacrifices. And we figure out how to tap the Guild’s magical infrastructure without alerting the cult.”
“That’s three impossible tasks in two days.”
“Then we’d better start now.”
They left the tavern separately, planning to meet at the Vermillion Theatre in two hours. Phaphhrd would search for Amaranthine in the Temple District while the Ratter tried to locate Korvallis in the Guild’s unofficial holding facilities.
Neither task was simple, but neither was the kind of problem that could be solved by two people working together. Sometimes partnership meant dividing resources, trusting your other half to handle their portion while you handled yours.
The Grey Ratter moved through the evening crowds toward the Marsh Gate district, where the Guild maintained a network of safe houses and secure locations. Korvallis, if he still existed in any meaningful sense, would most likely be kept somewhere within this network—close enough to monitor, hidden enough to avoid awkward questions.
He was halfway to his destination when he felt something wrong.
Not a specific threat—more like an absence, a gap in the world where something should have been. The sensation was familiar now, after weeks of experiencing his own identity erode. This was what forgetting felt like from the outside.
Someone nearby was being forgotten. Right now. In real time.
The Ratter changed direction, following the sensation through alleys and side streets until he reached a small courtyard tucked between buildings. The space was empty except for two grey-robed figures standing over a third person who lay on the ground, motionless.
Not dead. The Ratter could see the chest rising and falling. But the face was... fading. Features smoothing out, becoming generic, becoming blank.
A Faceless ritual, performed in the open.
The Ratter drew his sword and attacked before the cultists could react.
The fight was brief and brutal. The cultists were not fighters—they were vessels, partially emptied of the survival instincts that made people dangerous in close combat. The Ratter killed them both in under thirty seconds, then knelt beside the third figure.
A woman. Middle-aged. Wearing the clothes of a minor merchant or perhaps a household servant. Her face was still fading, still losing definition, even though the ritual had been interrupted.
“Can you hear me?” the Ratter asked.
No response. The woman’s eyes were open but unfocused, seeing nothing, registering nothing.
“What’s your name? Do you remember your name?”
Nothing. The face continued to smooth, features becoming suggestions of features, hints of humanity rather than the thing itself.
The Ratter felt helpless in a way he hadn’t experienced since childhood. He knew how to fight, how to steal, how to navigate the dangerous waters of Kasdim’s criminal underworld. But he didn’t know how to stop someone from being forgotten. Didn’t know how to rebuild an identity that was actively dissolving.
The crystal against his chest pulsed, and he felt... something. A warmth that wasn’t physical, a presence that wasn’t quite external. Sheemba’s voice, or something like it:
You cannot save everyone. This one is already gone. Save the ones who can still be saved.
Cold comfort. But accurate.
The Ratter stood, looked down at the woman who was becoming no one, and felt something harden in his chest.
Two days, he thought. Two days to stop this from happening to everyone.
He left the courtyard and continued toward the Marsh Gate district.
Phaphhrd found the Vermillion Theatre surrounded by city guards.
His heart dropped. The guards were questioning staff members, searching the building, moving with the organized purpose that suggested they were looking for something specific. Or someone.
He approached carefully, joining the crowd of curious onlookers that had gathered to watch the official activity.
“What happened?” he asked a man standing nearby.
“Actress went missing,” the man replied. “The pretty one, dark hair. Someone saw her being taken by people in grey robes.”
Ivlis.
The world seemed to tilt. Phaphhrd gripped a nearby railing to keep himself upright, forcing his breathing to stay steady despite the panic rising in his chest.
They took her. The cult took Ivlis.
“When?” he managed.
“Hour ago, maybe less. Guards showed up right after—someone must have reported it quick.”
An hour. The cult had Ivlis, had been taking her somewhere for an hour, and Phaphhrd had been sitting in a tavern comparing documents.
He pushed through the crowd, ignoring the guards’ attempts to maintain order, and found Markhas standing near the theatre’s back entrance. The bartender looked shaken—genuinely shaken, not the practiced composure he usually maintained.
“Phaphhrd.” Markhas’s voice was rough. “They took her. Right out of her dressing room. I tried to stop them, but they were... wrong. Empty. Like people who’d forgotten how to be afraid.”
“Did they say anything? Leave anything?”
Markhas handed him a folded paper. “One of them gave me this. Said to make sure you got it.”
The paper was cheap, the writing crude, but the message was clear:
COME TO THE SHRINE OF ACCEPTED DIMINISHMENT. COME ALONE. YOUR WOMAN’S IDENTITY WILL FADE UNLESS YOU OFFER A TRADE.
YOUR IDENTITY FOR HERS.
YOU HAVE UNTIL MIDNIGHT.
The Grey Ratter found Phaphhrd outside the Vermillion an hour later, staring at the note as if willing it to say something different.
“Ivlis,” Phaphhrd said, his voice flat.
“I saw the guards. What happened?”
“The cult took her. They want me to trade myself for her.” Phaphhrd handed over the note. “They want me to become a sacrifice.”
The Ratter read the message, his expression carefully blank. “This is a trap.”
“Of course it’s a trap.”
“You can’t go.”
“I have to go.”
“No.” The Ratter’s voice was sharp. “Listen to me. They need three sacrifices. They have Korvallis and Amaranthine. If you surrender yourself, they have their third. The ritual succeeds. Everyone in Kasdim is forgotten. Including Ivlis.”
“If I don’t go, they kill her anyway.”
“They won’t kill her. They’ll forget her. Turn her into what they’ve been trying to turn me into—an identity so weakened that she becomes suitable as a sacrifice.” The Ratter grabbed Phaphhrd’s arm. “Think, giant. They took her to get to you, but she’s also potentially useful to them. As long as she has value as leverage or as a backup sacrifice, they’ll keep her alive.”
“That’s supposed to comfort me?”
“It’s supposed to make you strategic.” The Ratter’s grip tightened. “We have two days. Two days to find Korvallis and Amaranthine, to reinforce the binding, to stop the ritual. If we succeed, Ivlis is saved along with everyone else. If you surrender yourself tonight, we’ve already lost.”
Phaphhrd looked at the note, at the Ratter, at the theatre where he had sung songs about loss while trying not to think about all the things he’d already lost.
“I can’t just leave her.”
“You’re not leaving her. You’re choosing to fight for her instead of surrendering for her.” The Ratter’s voice softened slightly. “I know it’s hard. I know what you’re feeling. But the romantic gesture—trading yourself, sacrificing yourself—that’s what they’re counting on. It’s what the barbarian hero does in every story. And it never works.”
“What if we can’t stop the ritual in time?”
“Then we die fighting instead of dying surrendering. At least that way we tried.”
Phaphhrd was silent for a long moment. The night pressed down around them, cold and indifferent, full of stars that would go on shining whether Kasdim remembered them or not.
“Two days,” he said finally.
“Two days.”
“And if we haven’t stopped them by the deadline...”
“Then we improvise.” The Ratter released Phaphhrd’s arm. “It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve always done.”
Phaphhrd nodded slowly, tucking the note into his pocket. His expression was still haunted, but there was something harder beneath it now—a determination that came from choosing the difficult path instead of the obvious one.
“Where do we start?”
“Korvallis. I know where the Guild keeps its sensitive assets, and I know how to access them without alerting the compromised members.” The Ratter began moving toward the Marsh Gate district. “If we can find him, if we can start rebuilding his identity, we buy time and resources both.”
They walked through the night together, the tall northern barbarian and the small grey thief, bound by partnership and necessity and the desperate hope that two days might be enough to save everything they cared about.
Behind them, the Vermillion Theatre stood dark and empty.
Somewhere in the city, a woman with dark hair and dark eyes felt her memories beginning to fade.
And above it all, the three moons of Nehwon looked down on a city that was slowly learning to forget itself.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
The Guild’s secure facilities occupied a converted warehouse near the Marsh Gate, hidden behind a legitimate importing business that dealt primarily in spices, secondarily in stolen goods, and tertiarily in things that were best not discussed in polite company.
The Grey Ratter led Phaphhrd through a sequence of back entrances and secret passages that the barbarian couldn’t have navigated alone, arriving finally at a reinforced door guarded by two men who looked bored in the particular way of professionals who expected violence but hadn’t experienced it recently.
“Maintenance inspection,” the Ratter said, producing a token from his coat that Phaphhrd didn’t recognize. “Structural concerns about the lower levels.”
The guards exchanged glances. “We didn’t get word about any inspection.”
“That’s because the structural concerns include potential security compromises. Would you like me to send a report to the Guildmaster explaining why you delayed an urgent safety assessment?” The Ratter’s voice was mild, reasonable, the voice of someone who had all the necessary authorization and was merely going through required formalities.
The guards let them through.
The lower levels of the secure facility were cold, damp, and smelled of old stone and older fear. Cells lined the corridors—most empty, a few containing prisoners who watched them pass with eyes that held either too much hope or none at all.
“Korvallis should be in the high-security wing,” the Ratter said quietly. “If he’s still here. If they haven’t moved him.”
“What was he like? Before the forgetting?”
“Guildmaster for twenty-three years. Careful, methodical, patient. The kind of thief who plans everything six months in advance and never makes a move without knowing exactly how it will end.” The Ratter’s expression was unreadable. “I met him twice, when I first joined the Guild. He seemed... tired. Like someone carrying a weight that no one else could see.”
The weight of the binding. The responsibility that had been passed down through centuries, that Korvallis had been supposed to maintain.
“What happened to him? How did he end up here?”
“I don’t know the details. One day he was Guildmaster, the next he wasn’t. People said he’d gone mad—started raving about old gods and ancient threats. The new leadership had him... contained. For his own protection, they said.” The Ratter’s voice was bitter. “Probably for their protection. They were already part of the cult by then, already working to weaken the binding. Korvallis might have been the only one who understood what they were doing.”
They found him in the deepest cell, behind a door that required three separate keys and a password that the Ratter produced from somewhere Phaphhrd didn’t want to know about.
The man inside was thin, grey-haired, and so diminished that Phaphhrd almost didn’t recognize him as human. He sat in the corner of the cell, rocking slightly, his eyes fixed on something only he could see.
“Korvallis?” the Ratter said gently.
The man looked up. His face was nearly smooth—not completely blank like the Master’s, but close. Features that might have been distinguished once now seemed generic, forgettable, the face of someone who was halfway to being no one at all.
“Who are you?” The voice was thin, cracked, the voice of someone who hadn’t spoken to another person in months. “Why are you here?”
“We’re here to help you,” Phaphhrd said. “To help you remember who you are.”
“Who I am?” Korvallis laughed, a sound like breaking glass. “I don’t remember who I am. I don’t remember anything. Just... fragments. Dreams of things that might have been real. Names that don’t mean anything. Faces that dissolve when I try to focus on them.”
“You were the Guildmaster,” the Ratter said. “For twenty-three years. You maintained the binding that keeps the Unremembering contained.”
Something flickered in Korvallis’s eyes. “The binding. Yes. I... I remember something about that. Something important. But every time I try to think about it, the thought slips away. Like trying to hold water.”
“That’s the cult’s work. They’ve been weakening your identity deliberately, preparing you for sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice.” Korvallis’s rocking intensified. “Yes. That’s the word. The binding requires sacrifice. Three times every generation, three souls offered willingly, three identities surrendered to feed the void that hungers.” He looked at them with sudden clarity. “But I never performed the sacrifice. I couldn’t find suitable candidates. Couldn’t bring myself to ask anyone to surrender what I wasn’t willing to surrender myself.”
“So the binding weakened,” Phaphhrd said.
“Year after year. I could feel it fraying, could sense the Unremembering pressing against its prison. But I was a fool. I thought I had time. I thought I could find another solution.” The clarity faded from Korvallis’s eyes, replaced by the blank confusion that had been there before. “Who are you again? Why are you in my cell?”
They worked with Korvallis for two hours, trying to rebuild his identity through conversation, through names and dates and specific memories that the Ratter had researched before coming here.
Progress was slow. For every memory they managed to restore, two others seemed to fade. Korvallis’s sense of self was like a cup with holes in the bottom—you could pour identity in, but it drained away almost as fast as it arrived.
“We need something stronger,” Phaphhrd said finally. “Something that connects him to who he was in a way that can’t be forgotten.”
“His successor?” the Ratter suggested. “The person he chose to continue the binding responsibility?”
“He never chose anyone. That’s part of how we got into this mess.” Phaphhrd studied the old man, trying to see past the diminishment to the person who had been there before. “What about enemies? People who hated him, who would remember him precisely because of that hatred?”
“Enemies fade too. Hatred requires a target, and if the target becomes no one...”
“Then what? What’s strong enough to anchor someone’s identity when everything else has been stripped away?”
The answer came from Korvallis himself.
“Thalesquin,” the old man muttered, his eyes suddenly focused. “He told me. Before he disappeared. He said the Master would come, would try to break the binding from within. He said I had to stop him, had to remember who the Master really was, because if I forgot...”
“Who is the Master, Korvallis?” the Ratter asked sharply. “Who leads the cult?”
“The Master is...” Korvallis’s face contorted with effort, fighting against the forgetting that pressed down on him like a physical weight. “The Master is... was... he was my predecessor. The Guildmaster before me. Drellis the Quiet, they called him. He discovered the binding, discovered what it contained, and instead of maintaining it, he decided to set it free.”
Phaphhrd felt cold understanding settle over him. “The Master of Blank Pages was a Guildmaster.”
“He surrendered his identity willingly. Offered himself to the Unremembering as proof of devotion. What came back... wasn’t Drellis anymore. Wasn’t anyone. Just a vessel, a mouthpiece, a thing wearing human shape while something inhuman looked out through its eyes.” Korvallis shuddered. “I remember now. I remember his face, the night before he changed. He looked at me and said: ‘The void is not our enemy, Korvallis. The void is our liberation. When everyone is forgotten, when identity itself dissolves, we will finally be free of the terrible burden of being ourselves.’“
“That’s insane,” Phaphhrd said.
“It’s consistent,” the Ratter replied grimly. “The cult doesn’t want power in the conventional sense. They want release. Freedom from the pain of existing as distinct individuals. The Unremembering isn’t their master—it’s their salvation.”
“Which makes them harder to stop. You can’t negotiate with people who want to end existence itself.”
“No. But you can understand them well enough to predict them.” The Ratter was already moving toward the cell door. “Korvallis—we need to get you out of here. The cult will try to take you before the ritual, and this facility isn’t secure anymore.”
“Out?” Korvallis looked confused again. “Out where? I don’t have anywhere to go. I don’t even remember where I lived before they brought me here.”
“You’ll stay with us. We’ll protect you.”
“Protect me from what?”
The Ratter and Phaphhrd exchanged glances. The old man’s identity was already fading again, the brief clarity slipping away like water through fingers.
“From the people who want to hurt you,” Phaphhrd said gently. “From the ones who made you forget. We’re going to help you remember, Korvallis. All of it. Everything they took from you.”
“Everything,” Korvallis repeated, the word hollow. “I’m not sure there’s anything left to remember.”
But he let them lead him out of the cell, out of the facility, out into the night air where the three moons looked down on a city that was running out of time.
And in the back of his mind, beneath the layers of forgetting, something stirred. A memory of responsibility. A memory of power. A memory of what it meant to be the one who stood between the void and the world.
Korvallis didn’t remember who he was yet.
But something in him was starting to try.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
They installed Korvallis in a rented room near the Vermillion Theatre—close enough to reach quickly, anonymous enough to avoid immediate detection. The old man slept fitfully, muttering names and dates that no longer connected to anything he could consciously recall.
“I’ll watch him,” Phaphhrd said. “You should rest.”
“I’ll rest when this is over.” The Grey Ratter was already moving toward the door. “There’s someone I need to see. Someone who might have information about Amaranthine.”
“Who?”
The Ratter hesitated. “Sheelris.”
Phaphhrd’s expression shifted—concern, warning, something that might have been disapproval. “Your fence? The one you’ve been avoiding for weeks?”
“She has contacts in the Temple District. Knows people who know things about the priests and priestesses who serve the various gods. If anyone can tell me where to find a temple servant whose identity has been systematically erased, it’s her.”
“And you trust her?”
The question hung in the air between them. The Ratter thought about Sheelris—about her smile that never quite reached her eyes, her touch that always seemed to be calculating something, her voice that could make lies sound like poetry.
“No,” he admitted. “But I don’t have time to find someone I do trust. We have two days, and we’re still missing one of the three sacrifices.”
“Be careful.”
“I’m always careful.”
“No, you’re not. You’re clever, which isn’t the same thing.” Phaphhrd’s voice softened. “Just... come back. Whatever happens with her, come back.”
The Ratter nodded and slipped out into the night.
Sheelris maintained her business in the Pleasure Quarter, which was exactly the kind of place you would expect someone named Sheelris to conduct business. The building itself was nondescript—a converted townhouse that might have belonged to a moderately successful merchant—but the clientele who entered and left at all hours were decidedly not purchasing legitimate goods.
The Ratter approached through the back entrance, following a route he had used dozens of times before. The familiarity felt strange now, after weeks of absence. Like returning to a childhood home and finding that the rooms had been rearranged.
Sheelris was waiting for him in her private office, lounging on a divan with the careful casualness of someone who had expected his arrival.
“Ratter.” Her voice was warm, welcoming, with an undercurrent of something sharper. “I was wondering when you’d stop avoiding me.”
“I wasn’t avoiding you. I was busy.”
“Busy with that giant northerner, yes. The Guild has been buzzing with rumors about your adventures.” She gestured to a chair opposite her divan. “Sit. Tell me what brings you crawling back.”
The Ratter remained standing. “I need information about a temple priestess. Amaranthine. She served in one of the smaller shrines, and she’s been missing for approximately three weeks.”
“Amaranthine.” Sheelris’s expression didn’t change, but something flickered in her eyes. “That’s a specific request.”
“I have specific needs.”
“You always did.” She stood up, moving toward a cabinet on the far wall. “Wine? You look like you could use it.”
“Just the information.”
“So cold, Ratter. After everything we’ve shared.” She poured two glasses anyway, setting one on the table near where he stood. “Amaranthine of the Weeping Mother’s shrine, yes? Small woman, dark skin, voice like a bell? She disappeared three weeks ago, and no one filed a missing person report because no one could remember why they would.”
The Ratter felt his muscles tense. “You know about the forgetting.”
“I know about many things.” Sheelris returned to her divan, wine glass in hand. “The cult has been operating in Kasdim for longer than you realize. They’ve cultivated contacts in every district, every guild, every temple. They’ve been preparing for this ritual for years.”
“And you?”
“Me?” She smiled, and the smile was like a knife. “I’ve been doing what I always do, Ratter. Serving my own interests. Positioning myself for whatever comes next.”
“Even if what comes next is the end of everything?”
“Especially then.” She took a sip of wine. “The Unremembering doesn’t destroy—it transforms. The world that exists after the ritual won’t be the same as the world that existed before, but it will still be. And those of us who have prepared, who have made arrangements with the right entities, will be well-positioned in the new order.”
The cold in the Ratter’s stomach spread outward. “You’re working with the cult.”
“Working with is a strong term. I prefer to think of it as... strategic alliance. They have information I want. I have resources they need. We’ve reached a mutually beneficial arrangement.”
“What resources?”
Sheelris’s smile widened. “You, Ratter. You’re what they need. The third sacrifice—the identity that’s been carefully weakened over months of proximity to someone who was always just a little too convenient, a little too available, a little too willing to be exactly what you wanted.”
The Ratter reached for his sword, but his hand was slow—too slow. The wine glass Sheelris had set near him wasn’t just wine; the fumes alone were enough to dull his reflexes, to make his thoughts sluggish and his movements imprecise.
“You’ve been drugging me,” he realized.
“Not drugging. Just... preparing. The substance in the wine doesn’t harm you. It just makes the forgetting easier. Smooths the edges of your identity, makes you more susceptible to the Unremembering’s influence.” She stood, setting down her own glass—which, he noticed, she hadn’t actually drunk from. “You were always going to be one of the sacrifices, Ratter. From the moment you walked into my establishment two years ago, I knew you were perfect. Small. Clever. Unmemorable in all the ways that matter. You practically offered yourself to me.”
“And the cult approached you.”
“The cult didn’t need to approach me. I approached them.” Sheelris moved toward him, close enough to touch. “I’ve always been pragmatic, Ratter. You know that about me. When I learned what the Unremembering could offer—freedom from the endless competition, from the constant struggle to be noticed, to be remembered, to matter—I made my choice. The same choice you would have made, if you were honest with yourself.”
“I would never—”
“Never surrender your identity? Never accept the peace of nonexistence?” Her hand was on his face now, cool and steady. “You’ve been running from yourself for as long as I’ve known you. From whatever you were before you became the Grey Ratter. From the wizard you apprenticed to and betrayed. From the magic you turned to darkness and the darkness that turned inside you.”
The words hit him like blows. She knew. She knew about Dolesquin, about the revenge, about all the things he had never told anyone except—
“Phaphhrd,” he whispered. “You’ve been listening to Phaphhrd.”
“Your giant friend has a weakness for attractive women who seem interested in his stories. A few drinks, a few well-placed questions, and he told me everything I needed to know about you. Your vulnerabilities. Your fears. Your attachment to him, which makes you predictable in all the ways that matter.”
The Ratter tried to move, to fight, to do something other than stand there being slowly unmade. But the drug was in his system now, spreading through his blood, making everything soft and distant.
“The ritual is tomorrow night,” Sheelris said. “You’ll be there, willing or not. The cult prefers willing—it’s more powerful that way—but they’ll take what they can get. And afterward, when the Unremembering wakes fully, I’ll be among those who are rewarded for our service.”
“Rewarded with what? Oblivion?”
“Rewarded with purpose. With meaning. With a place in an order that doesn’t change, doesn’t compete, doesn’t struggle endlessly to be something we’re not.” She leaned close, her lips near his ear. “You could have that too, Ratter. If you just stopped fighting. If you just... let go.”
“Never.”
“We’ll see.” She stepped back, gestured to someone outside the office. Grey-robed figures entered—three of them, moving with the empty coordination of the Faceless. “Take him to the shrine. Gently. We need his identity intact until the ritual.”
The figures seized him. The Ratter struggled, but the drug had stolen his speed, his precision, his ability to be the weapon he had trained himself to become.
Phaphhrd, he thought as they dragged him toward the door. I should have listened. I should have been more careful.
I’m sorry.
And then there was darkness, and motion, and the slow dissolution of everything he had been.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Dawn came without the Ratter’s return.
Phaphhrd had spent the night watching over Korvallis, fighting the urge to pace, to search, to do something other than wait in a rented room while his partner walked into whatever trap Sheelris had set for him.
He’s clever, Phaphhrd told himself. He’s careful. He knows not to trust her.
But the hours passed, and the Ratter didn’t return, and the cold certainty settled deeper into Phaphhrd’s bones.
When the sun was fully risen, he left Korvallis under the watch of a hired guard—one of the few people in Kasdim he trusted enough to pay for loyalty—and went to find out what had happened.
Sheelris’s establishment was closed, shuttered, looking for all the world like a building that had been abandoned for years rather than hours. Phaphhrd circled it twice, looking for signs of life, finding nothing but silence and dust.
He broke in through a second-floor window.
The interior was wrong. Not ransacked, not damaged, but... diminished. Furniture remained in place, but it seemed faded, colorless, as if the essence of the objects had been drained away along with the people who had used them. The air smelled of old stone and older emptiness.
Sheelris’s office was the worst. The divan where she had lounged was still there, but it looked like a memory of a divan—the idea of furniture rather than the thing itself. And on the floor, near where a visitor might have stood, was a small grey object that Phaphhrd recognized immediately.
The Ratter’s knife. The one he kept hidden in his boot, that he never drew unless he was planning to kill someone.
He had drawn it here. Had tried to fight. Had failed.
Phaphhrd picked up the knife and felt something break inside him.
The streets of Kasdim were different today.
Phaphhrd noticed it as he walked back toward the room where Korvallis waited—a quality of wrongness that went beyond the usual corruption and desperation of the city. People moved through the morning crowds with the mechanical purpose of those who had forgotten why they were going wherever they were going. Conversations stopped mid-sentence, participants staring at each other as if trying to remember what they had been discussing.
The forgetting was accelerating.
He stopped a merchant who was standing in the middle of the street, staring at a wagon full of goods with an expression of complete confusion.
“Are you all right?” Phaphhrd asked.
“I don’t know,” the merchant replied. “I came here for... something. But I can’t remember what. I can’t remember why I’m standing here at all.”
“Do you remember your name?”
The merchant’s face went pale. “I... I think I should remember that. Shouldn’t I? A person should remember their own name.”
Phaphhrd left him there, still staring at the wagon, and increased his pace.
Korvallis was awake when Phaphhrd returned, sitting up in bed with an expression of unusual clarity.
“Something’s changed,” the old man said. “The binding. I can feel it. What I couldn’t feel before—it’s like a noise I’d stopped hearing because it was always there. But now it’s getting louder. More urgent.”
“The ritual is accelerating.” Phaphhrd relayed what he had seen in the streets, what he had found at Sheelris’s establishment. “They have the Ratter. They have all three sacrifices now.”
“Three sacrifices to shatter the remaining bonds. To let the Unremembering wake fully.” Korvallis’s hands trembled. “I remember more now. Fragments of what Thalesquin taught me. The binding isn’t just a barrier—it’s a filter. It lets small amounts of the Unremembering’s power into the world, but keeps the full force contained. If it breaks...”
“Everyone forgets everything.”
“Worse. Everyone becomes nothing. Not just forgetting, but dissolution. The end of identity itself, not just for individuals but for... everything. Places, concepts, the very idea that things can be distinct from one another.” Korvallis’s voice rose, approaching hysteria. “The Unremembering doesn’t just consume memory. It consumes the capacity for memory. It makes a world where no one can remember anything because there’s nothing separate enough to remember.”
Phaphhrd sat down heavily, trying to absorb the implications. “Then we have to stop the ritual. Find where they’re holding the sacrifices and free them before the cult can complete the ceremony.”
“It’s not that simple. The binding is already weakening—you said you could see it in the streets. Even if we stop the ritual, even if we free the sacrifices, the damage that’s already been done won’t reverse itself. The bonds will continue to fray, slower perhaps, but inevitably.”
“Then what? We give up? Accept that everyone is going to be forgotten?”
“No.” Korvallis stood up, moving with a steadiness that hadn’t been there before. “We repair the binding. The original ceremony required seven wizards, but the maintenance rituals only needed one—someone with the knowledge and the willingness to make the necessary sacrifices.”
“What kind of sacrifices?”
“Willing surrender. Not of the entire identity, but of the parts that anchor us most strongly to the world. Memories of love. Memories of achievement. The moments that make us who we are.” The old man’s eyes met Phaphhrd’s. “I can’t do it. My identity is too weakened already—I’d dissolve entirely if I tried. But someone with a strong sense of self, someone whose identity is powerful enough to survive partial diminishment...”
“Me.”
“Or your partner, if we can rescue him in time.” Korvallis’s expression was grave. “But someone has to make the sacrifice, or everything is lost.”
Phaphhrd thought about Vlana, the woman he had loved and lost in the Cold Waste. About Ivlis, the woman he was only beginning to love. About the Ratter, who had become family in all the ways that mattered.
Memories of love. The moments that make us who we are.
“How do we find them?” he asked. “The cult, the sacrifices, wherever they’re preparing the ritual?”
“The shrine you visited before—the Shrine of Accepted Diminishment—that’s just a surface location. The real ritual site will be deeper. Older. A place where the boundary between the world and the void is thin enough for the ceremony to work.”
“The Grandivere. The old theatre.” Phaphhrd remembered Kasdim’s theatrical district, the ruins of grand playhouses built on top of older structures that went down into darkness. “There are catacombs beneath it. Ancient spaces that predate the city itself.”
“If the cult has been preparing for years, they’ll have established themselves in exactly such a place. Deep enough to avoid detection, close enough to population centers to draw power from the forgetting that surrounds them.” Korvallis moved toward the door. “We need to go now. Before the ritual can proceed. Before your partner loses too much of himself to be saved.”
“You’re coming with me?”
“I’m the only one who knows the maintenance ritual. If we manage to stop the ceremony, someone still needs to repair the binding—and that knowledge dies with me if I die before passing it on.” The old man smiled grimly. “Besides, I’ve spent months in a cell forgetting everything I ever was. It’s time to remember what it felt like to be someone who mattered.”
They left together, the barbarian and the diminished wizard, moving through streets that grew emptier and more confused with each passing hour.
Behind them, the city of Kasdim continued to forget itself.
And somewhere in the darkness beneath, the Unremembering stirred and stretched and prepared to wake.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
The catacombs beneath Kasdim’s theatrical district were older than the city above them—a labyrinth of passages carved by hands that history had forgotten, for purposes that no longer mattered to anyone living.
Phaphhrd and Korvallis descended through a collapsed section of an abandoned playhouse, following a route the old man remembered from decades past. The air grew cold as they went deeper, and a peculiar quality of silence pressed against them—not just absence of sound, but absence of the expectation of sound, as if the world itself had forgotten how to resonate.
“We’re getting close,” Korvallis whispered. “I can feel the binding straining. The ritual site is nearby.”
They emerged into a vast underground chamber that might once have been a temple, an amphitheatre, or something that combined elements of both. Columns rose toward a vaulted ceiling lost in shadow. The floor was covered in symbols that glowed with a pale, hungry light.
And at the center of the chamber, three figures hung suspended in circles of that same pale radiance.
The Ratter, unconscious or worse, his face slack and his grey eyes closed.
An old woman Phaphhrd didn’t recognize—Amaranthine, presumably, the forgotten priestess.
And Ivlis.
Her eyes were open. She saw him. Her lips moved, forming words he couldn’t hear across the distance, but the meaning was clear: Run. Go. Don’t stay here.
“They’re already in position,” Korvallis said, his voice tight. “The ritual has begun. Another hour, perhaps two, and it will be complete.”
“Then we have to get them out.”
“It’s not that simple.” The old man pointed to the symbols on the floor. “See those patterns? They’re interlocked with the sacrifices. Move one person without proper countermeasures, and the backlash will kill them instantly. We need time to unwind the bindings carefully.”
“How much time?”
“For all three? Hours. More time than we have.”
The mathematics were terrible. Three sacrifices, two rescuers, not enough time.
“What if we free one of them?” Phaphhrd asked. “Would that stop the ritual?”
“It would delay it. Force them to start over, find a replacement sacrifice. But...” Korvallis hesitated. “The person we free would need to be the strongest. The one whose identity is most intact. The others are too far gone—if we pulled them out now, there wouldn’t be enough left of them to survive.”
The Ratter, weakened by weeks of the cult’s attention.
Amaranthine, forgotten even by herself.
Ivlis, taken only hours ago, her identity still mostly whole.
“You’re telling me I have to choose,” Phaphhrd said.
“I’m telling you the reality of what we face.” Korvallis’s voice was gentle but firm. “Rescue the woman you love, and your partner dies. Rescue your partner, and the woman dies. Try to rescue both, and the ritual completes while we’re still untangling the bindings.”
Phaphhrd stared at the three suspended figures—the thief who had become his brother in everything but blood, the actress who had become a possibility he was afraid to name, and the stranger who had done nothing to deserve her fate except be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
“There has to be another way.”
“There always seems like there should be. There usually isn’t.” Korvallis began moving along the chamber’s edge, staying in the shadows. “I’m going to start working on the binding’s foundation. It won’t stop the ritual, but it might slow it down, buy you time to make your choice and act on it.”
“And if I can’t choose?”
“Then they all die, and so does everyone else in Kasdim. So does the very idea of anyone ever remembering anything.” The old man’s voice hardened. “Choose, northerner. That’s what heroes do. They make the impossible choices so others don’t have to.”
He disappeared into the shadows, leaving Phaphhrd alone with his decision.
The cult’s guards found him before he could act.
There were six of them—grey-robed figures moving with the coordinated emptiness of the Faceless. They surrounded him without speaking, without threatening, simply blocking every avenue of escape.
And behind them, gliding rather than walking, came the Master of Blank Pages.
“The northerner returns,” the smooth-faced figure said. “I wondered if you would. Sentiment is powerful, even in those who claim to have outgrown it.”
“Let them go.”
“Why would I do that? The ritual requires three sacrifices, and I have three sacrifices. Your arrival doesn’t change the mathematics.”
“Then take me instead. One of them for me.”
“Ah.” The Master tilted his featureless head. “The romantic gesture. The hero offering himself in place of his beloved. It’s almost touching.” He moved closer, close enough that Phaphhrd could see the absolute absence where eyes should have been. “But you misunderstand the nature of sacrifice. What we take isn’t life—it’s identity. And your identity is too strong. Too firmly anchored. The Unremembering would take years to consume you fully, and we don’t have years. We have hours.”
“My identity can’t be that strong. I’ve lost things. Made mistakes. I’m no hero.”
“You’re more hero than you know. That’s the problem.” The Master gestured, and the symbols on the floor flared brighter. “The woman who holds your heart is ideal—her identity weak enough to consume, strong enough to satisfy the ritual’s requirements. Your small grey friend is similarly suitable. But you? You would be like a boulder in a stream. An obstacle, not an offering.”
“Then let me fight for them. Single combat. Champion against champion.”
“We are not champions. We are vessels.” The Master’s voice was patient, almost kind. “There is nothing to fight, northerner. Nothing to defeat. The Unremembering is not an enemy—it is a truth. The truth that all identity is temporary, all distinction illusory, all separation merely the prelude to eventual reunion with the void.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“You don’t have to. Truth doesn’t require belief.” The Master began to turn away. “The ritual will complete within the hour. You may watch if you wish. See your loved ones surrender to something greater than individual existence. Or you may leave, spend your remaining time however you choose, and know that the forgetting will find you eventually regardless.”
Phaphhrd drew his sword.
The Master paused. “Violence?”
“The only answer I have left.”
“Then give your answer.” The featureless face turned back toward him, and for a moment, something that might have been anticipation flickered in the void where eyes should be. “But know that every cultist you kill feeds the Unremembering. Every death adds to its strength. In fighting us, you serve us.”
The grey-robed figures attacked.
Phaphhrd fought. Not to win—he knew he couldn’t win, not against six opponents in a space where every death made his enemy stronger—but to delay. To buy time. To give Korvallis whatever moments he needed to undermine the binding.
He killed two of the cultists and wounded three others before they brought him down. They didn’t kill him—the Master had been telling the truth about his identity being too strong for sacrifice—but they beat him until fighting was impossible, until his sword fell from nerveless fingers and his legs refused to support his weight.
“Impressive,” the Master said, standing over him. “Futile, but impressive. The Unremembering will remember your struggle, even when you no longer remember yourself.”
Phaphhrd looked past the Master, toward the three suspended figures at the center of the chamber. The Ratter still hung motionless. Amaranthine was barely visible, her form already beginning to fade. And Ivlis...
Ivlis was looking at him. Her lips moved again: It’s okay. I understand. You tried.
He tried to respond, to tell her that trying wasn’t enough, that he should have been better, faster, stronger—
But the darkness took him before the words could form.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
Consciousness returned in fragments.
First, the sensation of hanging—his weight suspended by forces that had nothing to do with rope or chain. Then the cold, absolute and penetrating, reaching into places that physical temperature couldn’t touch. Finally, the awareness of fading—his identity unraveling at the edges like cloth too thin to hold its weave.
The Grey Ratter opened his eyes.
The chamber was vast and dark and wrong in ways that went beyond architecture. He could see Phaphhrd on the floor, beaten but breathing. Could see Korvallis moving at the edge of his vision, doing something complicated with the symbols on the floor. Could see, on either side of him, the suspended forms of two women he recognized without knowing—Ivlis, the actress Phaphhrd loved, and someone older whose name escaped him even as he looked at her.
The ritual, he thought. I’m part of the ritual.
And beneath that thought, deeper and older: This is how it ends. Not with a fight, but with a fading.
But something was resisting. Something in his chest, warm against the absolute cold—Sheemba’s crystal, still somehow in his possession, pulsing with a light that the cult apparently couldn’t see.
You have power, Sheemba’s voice whispered in his memory. Power you never learned to use. Power that was stolen from you before you could claim it.
The magic. The black magic he had turned to in the days after Dolesquin’s betrayal, before he had abandoned that path for the simpler honesty of thievery. It was still there, buried beneath years of denial, waiting for the moment when he had no other choice.
The Ratter closed his eyes and reached for it.
The power felt like fire and ice simultaneously, like falling and flying, like everything he had feared about himself given form and purpose.
He had been Dolesquin’s apprentice. Had learned the foundations of wizardry before tragedy had sent him down darker paths. Had turned that knowledge toward vengeance, toward destruction, toward the kind of magic that consumed rather than created.
He had abandoned it because it frightened him. Because every time he used it, something inside him shifted—became harder, colder, less recognizably human.
But now, suspended in a ritual designed to consume his identity entirely, the fear seemed almost quaint.
If I’m going to be unmade, he thought, I might as well choose the manner of my unmaking.
The crystal pulsed brighter, responding to his intention. The magic in his blood—dormant for years, suppressed for decades—began to wake.
Phaphhrd’s eyes opened to chaos.
The chamber was no longer dark. Light blazed from the center—not the pale, hungry light of the ritual’s symbols, but something fiercer, more desperate, shot through with threads of grey and black that seemed to consume the illumination even as it was created.
The Ratter was still suspended at the center of the chamber. But he wasn’t passive anymore. His eyes were open, blazing with a light that matched the chaos around him, and from his hands—from his entire body—power poured forth in waves that made the air crackle and the stone floor crack.
“What—” Phaphhrd tried to stand, failed, tried again.
“He’s fighting them.” Korvallis appeared at his side, helping him upright. “Using magic he shouldn’t have, power he shouldn’t possess. He’s burning through his own identity to fuel the attack.”
“He’s killing himself?”
“He’s buying time.” The old man’s voice was tight. “The ritual can’t complete while he’s generating that much interference. But it’s not sustainable. He’ll burn out in minutes, and then they’ll have three empty husks instead of three resisters.”
Phaphhrd looked at the Grey Ratter—his partner, his friend, the other half of whatever strange unity they had formed over five years of shared dangers. The small grey man was screaming now, a sound of pain and fury and defiance, pouring everything he was into a battle he couldn’t win.
“What can I do?”
“The binding.” Korvallis pointed to the symbols on the floor, where his earlier work had created visible cracks in the pattern. “I’ve weakened the structure, but I can’t finish it alone. The maintenance ritual requires a sacrifice—someone willing to surrender part of their identity to reinforce what remains. I’m too weakened to survive it. But you...”
“I can make the sacrifice.”
“You can complete the sacrifice. Give the binding what it needs to hold, at least for another generation. The cult’s power is focused on the Ratter right now. If we can seal the Unremembering before they can recover—”
“Tell me what to do.”
The power was consuming him.
The Grey Ratter could feel it—his memories dissolving into fuel, his personality fragmenting into components that the magic could use. Every spell he cast cost him something essential. Every moment of resistance burned away another piece of who he was.
But he kept fighting. Kept pouring himself into the flames. Kept holding the ritual at bay while something else—Korvallis? Phaphhrd? Both?—worked at the edges of his awareness.
The Master of Blank Pages moved through the chaos untouched, gliding toward him with the serene patience of something that had already won.
“Impressive,” the smooth-faced figure said. “I didn’t know you had this in you. The capacity for self-destruction, certainly—all cynics have that—but the willingness to use it in service of others? That’s almost... heroic.”
“I’m not a hero.” The Ratter’s voice was rough, barely recognizable. “I’m just a man who doesn’t want to die without a fight.”
“You’re more than that. You were always more than that.” The Master stopped just outside the range of the Ratter’s chaotic outpouring. “Do you know why I chose you? Not just because your identity was weak, not just because you were convenient. I chose you because I saw myself in you.”
“You’re nothing like me.”
“I was everything like you. Once.” The featureless face turned, and for a moment, the absolute blankness seemed to thin, revealing something underneath—a ghost of features, a memory of the person the Master had been before surrendering to the void. “A thief. A cynic. A man who believed he had outgrown sentiment, who thought cleverness was a substitute for connection. I lived in Kasdim’s shadows for forty years, and I was good at it. The best, perhaps. Until I realized that being good at surviving wasn’t the same as being alive.”
“So you gave up.”
“I evolved. I stopped clinging to an identity that was nothing but accumulated pain and started letting go. And what I found on the other side...” The Master’s voice softened, became almost gentle. “Peace, little thief. Peace such as you have never known. No more struggle. No more striving. No more endless need to be someone when being no one is so much simpler.”
The Ratter felt the words land, felt them find purchase in the parts of himself that were already dissolving. It would be easier, wouldn’t it? To stop fighting. To let go. To accept the peace the Master offered.
But then he thought of Phaphhrd. Of the ridiculous, romantic, impossibly stubborn giant who had believed in him when no one else would. Of five years of partnership that had been, against all odds, the closest thing to family he had ever known.
I’m not alone, he realized. That’s the difference. The Master was alone when he surrendered. I’m not.
“Your peace is a lie,” the Ratter said. “It’s not transcendence—it’s suicide dressed up in philosophy. And I’d rather die fighting than live forgetting.”
“Then die.” The Master’s voice hardened. “The ritual will complete with or without your cooperation. Your defiance changes nothing.”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” The Ratter smiled, and the smile was bloody and feral and absolutely genuine. “But at least I’ll die as myself. At least I’ll die knowing who I was. Can you say the same?”
The Master didn’t answer.
But somewhere behind the smooth blankness, something flinched.
◊ᴹᴱᴹᴼᴿʸ⁻ᶜᴼᴹᴾᴸᴱᵀᴱ
The binding ritual was simpler than Phaphhrd had expected.
Korvallis had guided him through the preparations—standing at a specific point in the chamber, placing his hands on specific symbols, speaking words in a language that predated human memory. The power that flowed through him felt like standing in a river of ice, currents pulling at pieces of himself that he hadn’t known could be moved.
“Now,” Korvallis said. “You have to choose what to give. The binding needs memories—strong memories, the kind that anchor identity. It needs enough to seal the breach without taking so much that you dissolve entirely.”
“How much is enough?”
“That depends on the memories. Something precious. Something you’ve been carrying because it defines who you are.”
Phaphhrd thought of Vlana.
Of the Cold Waste and the woman he had loved there. Of snow-bright mornings and fur-wrapped nights. Of the way she laughed, the way she moved, the sound of her voice singing the old songs of his people. He had carried those memories for years, had held them close even as they faded, had refused to let them go because letting go felt like betrayal.
She’s dead, he thought. She’s been dead for years. Holding onto the memory doesn’t bring her back. It just keeps me from living.
“Vlana,” he said aloud. “I give the memory of Vlana.”
The binding pulled.
The sensation was unlike anything Phaphhrd had experienced.
He felt the memories separating from him—not being erased, exactly, but being... relocated. Transferred from his mind into the structure of the binding, woven into the pattern that held the Unremembering at bay.
Vlana’s face faded first. He tried to hold it, tried to remember the specific arrangement of her features, but it slipped away like water through fingers. Then her voice, her laugh, the particular way she had of tilting her head when she was thinking.
Gone. Gone. Gone.
By the time the pulling stopped, Phaphhrd could barely remember that he had lost something. There was an absence where the memories had been—a space in his heart that he knew had once been filled—but the content of that space was beyond recall.
“It’s done,” Korvallis said. “The binding is reinforced. Not fully repaired, but strong enough to hold for decades, perhaps longer.”
“I can’t remember her,” Phaphhrd said. His voice sounded strange to his own ears—flatter, somehow. Less layered. “I know there was someone, but I can’t remember who.”
“That’s the price. That’s always the price.” Korvallis touched his shoulder gently. “But look.”
Phaphhrd looked.
The chamber was changing. The symbols on the floor were dimming, their hungry light fading to something almost ordinary. The suspended figures at the center—the Ratter, Ivlis, the priestess—were settling slowly to the ground as the forces holding them dissolved.
And the cold, the absolute cold that had pressed against them since they entered this place, was warming. Becoming merely underground cold rather than the chill of the void.
“The ritual failed,” Phaphhrd said.
“The ritual was interrupted. The binding sealed before they could complete it.” Korvallis smiled grimly. “We won.”
The aftermath was chaos.
The cult scattered when their ritual failed—grey-robed figures fleeing into the catacombs, pursued by the sounds of their own confusion. Without the Unremembering’s power to sustain them, they were just people again, and people could be hunted.
Phaphhrd found the Ratter where he had fallen, crumpled on the cold stone floor, barely conscious but alive.
“You did it,” the Ratter said, his voice a thread. “I felt it. The binding closing.”
“You bought us time.” Phaphhrd helped him sit up, supporting the small man’s weight with an ease that felt practiced, familiar, even though part of him couldn’t quite remember why. “Your magic, your resistance—you held them off long enough for us to complete the ritual.”
“Almost burned myself out doing it.” The Ratter’s grey eyes met his. “Lost things. Pieces of myself I’m not sure I can get back.”
“I lost things too.”
“I know. I could feel it.” The Ratter’s hand found Phaphhrd’s arm, gripping with surprising strength. “The woman from the north. The one you’ve been carrying since before I met you. She’s gone now, isn’t she?”
“I can’t remember her.” The words hurt, but less than Phaphhrd had expected. “I know I loved someone, once. I know she mattered. But the specifics... they’re just not there anymore.”
“That’s the worst kind of forgetting. When you know you’ve lost something but can’t remember what.”
They sat together in the darkness, the barbarian and the thief, both of them diminished, both of them still somehow whole.
“Ivlis,” Phaphhrd said suddenly. “Is she—”
“Alive. Weak, but alive. The ritual didn’t get far enough to damage her permanently.” The Ratter gestured toward where Korvallis was helping the actress to her feet. “She’ll recover. They both will. The priestess, too, though I suspect she’ll need years to rebuild what was taken from her.”
“And the Master?”
“Gone. Fled, or dissolved, or something worse—I couldn’t tell. But the cult is broken. Their plan failed. Whatever remains of them will be decades rebuilding, if they rebuild at all.”
Phaphhrd looked around the chamber—at the faded symbols, the scattered cultists, the survivors picking themselves up from the ruins of a catastrophe avoided.
“We won,” he said.
“We survived,” the Ratter corrected. “Winning implies we got what we wanted. I’m not sure either of us wanted this.”
“No. But it’s better than the alternative.”
“Most things are.” The Ratter’s smile was thin but genuine. “Help me up, giant. We should find out what’s left of our lives.”
The journey back to the surface was slow and painful.
The Ratter’s legs barely worked, and his magic was exhausted—not just depleted, but burned out at the source, leaving him ordinary in a way he hadn’t been since childhood. The power that had saved them had also cost him the ability to ever use such power again.
He wasn’t sure how to feel about that. The magic had been a burden as much as a gift, a reminder of paths not taken and prices not paid. Its absence left him lighter, somehow. Emptier, but also freer.
They emerged from the catacombs into late afternoon sunlight, blinking against brightness that seemed almost aggressive after so long in the dark.
Kasdim spread before them—still standing, still chaotic, still the corrupt and dangerous city they had chosen to call home. But something was different. The quality of wrongness that had been spreading through the streets, the forgetting that had been accelerating with each passing hour, had stopped.
People moved through their business with purpose. Conversations completed themselves. The world remembered how to remember.
“It’s over,” Korvallis said. The old man looked younger somehow, or perhaps just more present—his identity sharpening as the binding’s power stabilized. “The Unremembering is contained again. The forgetting will fade.”
“Will people remember what they lost?” Phaphhrd asked.
“Some will. Most won’t. Memory doesn’t work that cleanly—what’s gone is usually gone, even when the force that took it is no longer active.” Korvallis looked at the Ratter. “You, though. You might recover more than most. The crystal you carry—Sheemba’s gift—it protected pieces of yourself that would otherwise have been consumed.”
The Ratter touched the crystal at his chest, still warm despite everything that had happened. “Sheemba knew. She knew this would happen. Gave me exactly what I needed to survive it.”
“She’s been playing the long game. Both of them have—Ningaudrelle and Sheemba both. They’ve been maneuvering for this moment for decades.” Korvallis’s voice was thoughtful. “I wonder which of them is more satisfied with how it ended.”
“Probably neither. That’s how wizards work.” The Ratter straightened, testing his legs. “Where does this leave us? The Guild is compromised, the cult is scattered, and we’ve both lost pieces of ourselves we’re not getting back.”
“It leaves us alive,” Phaphhrd said. “Alive and free in a city that no longer forgets its children. I’ve had worse starting positions.”
“You’ve had worse everything, giant. That’s not saying much.”
But the Ratter was smiling as he said it, and Phaphhrd smiled back, and for a moment the partnership that had nearly been severed felt stronger than it had in years.
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Three weeks after the ritual’s failure, Phaphhrd sat in the Vermillion Theatre’s back room and watched Ivlis perform.
She had recovered faster than anyone expected—her identity resilient in ways the cult hadn’t anticipated, her memories intact except for the hours of captivity that she claimed to be grateful she couldn’t recall. The experience had changed her, though. Made her fiercer. More present. More determined to live fully rather than cautiously.
The audience loved her. They always had, but there was something different now—a depth to her performance that hadn’t been there before. She played tragedy with the weight of someone who had touched real darkness and chosen to return to the light.
Phaphhrd watched and felt something that might have been love, or might have been the beginning of something that could become love if he gave it room to grow.
“You’re staring,” Markhas said, sliding a cup of wine toward him.
“Is that a problem?”
“Not for you. Maybe for her, if you don’t actually say anything.” The bartender leaned against the counter. “I heard about what happened. Not the details—nobody knows those—but enough. You saved the city.”
“We helped. That’s not the same as saving.”
“Close enough for drinking.” Markhas raised his own cup. “To the people who do things while the rest of us forget there was anything to be done.”
Phaphhrd drank. The wine was better than usual—Markhas’s way of showing appreciation without having to say it directly.
When the performance ended, Ivlis found him in the back room. She was still in costume, still wearing the stage makeup that made her look like someone else, but her smile was entirely her own.
“You came.”
“I come every night.”
“I know. I’ve noticed.” She sat down across from him, close enough to touch but not quite touching. “The tall barbarian who used to sing sad songs about lost love. You don’t sing anymore.”
“I can’t remember the songs. The words are gone.”
“Write new ones.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
Ivlis reached across the table and took his hand. Her fingers were warm, her grip firm, her eyes fixed on his with an intensity that made his heart accelerate.
“Start here,” she said. “Start with now. Start with who you are instead of who you were.”
“I’m not sure who that is anymore.”
“Then find out. That’s what living is—figuring out who you are when all the old definitions stop working.” She smiled, and the smile was fierce and gentle at the same time. “I can help, if you let me. I’ve been told I’m good at beginnings.”
Phaphhrd looked at her—at this woman who had nearly been consumed by the void, who had been used as leverage against him, who had every reason to run as far from danger as possible and had instead chosen to stay.
“New songs,” he said.
“New everything.” Her hand tightened on his. “What do you say?”
He said yes.
The Ratter was still recovering when the wizards came.
He had taken a small room above a tavern in the Marsh Gate district—anonymous, cheap, close enough to the action to keep tabs on developments without actually being involved in them. His legs were mostly functional again, but the magic that had burned through him had left deeper damage. He tired easily. Slept badly. Dreamed of dissolving into nothing and woke sweating, clutching the crystal that still hung at his chest.
Ningaudrelle arrived first.
The wizard simply appeared in the room’s only chair, all eleven eyes focused on the Ratter with an intensity that would have been uncomfortable even without the circumstances that surrounded their last interaction.
“You survived,” Ningaudrelle observed. “I had calculated a thirty percent probability of that outcome.”
“I’m touched by your confidence.”
“Confidence has nothing to do with probability. I am neither pleased nor disappointed that you lived—merely informed.” The wizard’s robes seemed to absorb the light around them. “You acted contrary to my expectations. I had anticipated that you would attempt to escape once captured. Instead, you fought from within, using power you had deliberately suppressed for years.”
“I was motivated.”
“Yes. Your attachment to the northerner. It proved stronger than I had modeled.” A pause. “That information has been incorporated into my calculations going forward.”
“Is that supposed to be threatening?”
“It is supposed to be true. I do not threaten, little thief. I inform.” Ningaudrelle rose, and the room seemed to darken around him. “You have shown yourself capable of greater things than simple thievery. When you have recovered, I may have uses for such capability.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then you refuse. I do not compel. I simply make offers that intelligent beings find difficult to reject.” The wizard moved toward the door—the actual door, rather than simply vanishing as the Ratter had expected. “Consider yourself noticed, Grey Ratter. That is both a warning and an opportunity.”
He was gone before the Ratter could respond.
Sheemba came that night, emerging from shadows that should not have been deep enough to contain her.
She looked different outside the swamp—smaller, somehow, though her eyeless face still held the terrible emptiness that made it impossible to look away.
“My crystal served you well,” she said.
“Your crystal saved my life. Possibly my sanity.”
“Both were investments worth protecting.” She moved through the room without apparent difficulty, navigating by senses the Ratter couldn’t imagine. “The binding is reinforced. The Unremembering sleeps again. The balance is maintained for another generation, perhaps two.”
“Is that all you wanted? Maintenance of the status quo?”
“The status quo is all that separates existence from oblivion. Ningaudrelle dreams of using the Unremembering’s power for his own purposes. I dream of ensuring it never wakes at all.” She stopped near the window, her eyeless face turned toward the city beyond. “We are both manipulators, he and I. But our goals are not the same.”
“Why tell me this?”
“Because you have become part of the structure that maintains the balance. The sacrifice your partner made, the power you expended—these things have woven you into the binding’s fabric. What happens to you now affects what happens to everything.” She turned back toward him. “I will call on you again. When the binding next weakens, when the maintenance rituals must be performed, you will be needed.”
“And if I refuse?”
“Then you refuse, and the binding fails, and everything your partner sacrificed was for nothing.” Her voice was gentle but implacable. “You are not a pawn, Grey Ratter. You are a piece with agency. But you are still part of the game, whether you choose to play or not.”
She dissolved into the shadows before he could respond, leaving him alone with his thoughts and his crystal and the growing certainty that his life would never be simple again.
One month later
The Grey Ratter found Phaphhrd at the Vermillion Theatre, sitting in the same back-room booth where they had spent so many evenings before everything changed.
The barbarian looked different now—lighter, somehow, despite everything he had lost. Or perhaps because of it. The weight of old grief had been lifted, replaced by something newer, more present, still growing.
“You look well,” the Ratter said, sliding into the seat across from him.
“You look terrible.”
“I’m recovering. It’s a process.” The Ratter accepted the wine that Markhas brought without asking. “The wizards have both been to see me. Separately, of course. They’re still pretending to be rivals while playing their games against each other.”
“What did they want?”
“Future services. The binding I’m apparently part of now. The usual wizard nonsense.” The Ratter drank deeply. “I’ve been thinking about what to do next. Whether to stay in Kasdim or move on to somewhere less complicated.”
“And?”
“And I’m staying.” He set down his cup and met Phaphhrd’s eyes. “This city is corrupt, dangerous, and actively trying to kill us most of the time. But it’s also where you are. Where the life we’ve built together is. I’m not ready to give that up.”
Phaphhrd smiled—a genuine smile, warm and open in a way that the Ratter had rarely seen. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
“Don’t get sentimental. It’s still a practical decision. We work better together than apart. That’s tactical reality, not emotion.”
“Of course. Purely tactical.”
“Exactly.” But the Ratter was smiling too, despite himself. “So. What’s the plan? We’re both damaged, both compromised, both carrying obligations to forces we barely understand. We can’t go back to simple thievery, and I’m not sure we can survive another encounter with apocalyptic cults.”
“I have some ideas.” Phaphhrd leaned forward. “The Guild is rebuilding. New leadership, new structures, trying to clean out the corruption the cult left behind. They need people who understand what happened. Who can help ensure it doesn’t happen again.”
“You want us to work for the Thieves’ Guild? Officially?”
“I want us to be useful. To do something that matters, instead of just surviving from job to job.” Phaphhrd’s expression was serious. “We’ve seen things most people can’t imagine. Survived things that should have destroyed us. That has to mean something.”
The Ratter considered this. Thought about the binding he was part of, the obligations the wizards had claimed, the fragments of memory that were slowly returning to him.
“One condition,” he said finally.
“Name it.”
“No more romantic gestures. No more offering yourself in exchange for me, or charging into impossible situations because you think it’s the heroic thing to do. We plan. We prepare. We act intelligently instead of dramatically.”
“I can’t promise that.”
“Then promise to try. That’s all I’m asking.”
Phaphhrd extended his hand across the table. “I promise to try.”
The Ratter took it, and the partnership that had nearly been severed was renewed—scarred but stronger, tempered by loss, ready for whatever came next.
Outside the Vermillion Theatre, Kasdim sprawled in all its corrupt glory. The binding held. The Unremembering slept. And somewhere in the night, wizards plotted and cults regrouped and the eternal machinery of the city’s intrigues continued to turn.
But here, in this small pool of warmth and light, two men who had faced oblivion and chosen existence shared wine and silence and the particular comfort of knowing that whatever happened, they would face it together.
That was enough.
That had always been enough.
THE END
AFTERWORD
“The best partnerships aren’t the ones where nothing goes wrong. They’re the ones where everything goes wrong and you face it anyway. Where you lose pieces of yourselves and discover that what remains is sufficient. Where you’re broken and scarred and somehow still standing, still together, still choosing each other despite every reason not to.
“That’s not romance. That’s not sentiment. That’s just the truth about what it means to really know someone—to know them when they’re at their worst and stay anyway.
“Phaphhrd and the Grey Ratter are not heroes. They’re survivors. But sometimes surviving is heroic enough.”
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Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.