At first, it was just his name that slipped away. He noticed it when he tried to hum a song from his childhood and couldn’t remember the lyrics, then couldn’t remember the tune, then couldn’t remember why it had mattered.

The trees had long since thinned behind him, the strange garden swallowed by fog. Ahead, there was only the Plain—flat, endless, silver with mist. The road dissolved under his feet until he walked on a directionless haze.

He reached for memories and found only shapes without sound. A woman’s face, maybe his sister’s or a stranger’s. A field of wheat that might’ve been a dream. His hands were still his, but he couldn’t recall what they had built or broken.

Something moved in the fog.

It swirled in slow spirals, and from it emerged a cloaked figure—the Merchant of Echoes. Robes stitched with feathers and bone. No face, just a void behind a porcelain mask.

Shelves hovered around him, impossible shelves, each bearing jars that throbbed faintly like sleeping hearts. Some glowed gold. Others were sickly green. A few were so dark that they swallowed light entirely.

“You’ve lost something,” the Merchant said. His voice was layered, like many mouths speaking in staggered unison.

“I’ve lost everything,” he answered.

The Merchant lifted a jar. Inside it swirled a childhood of dusty summers, sour candy, the scent of rain on concrete. “This could be yours. Or it could be someone better.”

“What’s the cost?”

“Something of equal weight. A future. A possibility. Or perhaps your reflection.”

He stepped back. “No.”

The Merchant tilted his head. “Then keep forgetting. It’s the only path forward.”

He turned and vanished into the fog, taking the shelves with him. Silence returned, heavy as sleep. He wandered.

Later—maybe hours, maybe years, it was impossible to tell—he saw movement again. Not the Merchant. A figure, standing in the fog. Closer, closer. The figure was him.

Older. Hollow-eyed. Wrapped in rags made of paper and wire. His lips twitched with words he couldn’t hear until he almost touched the glass between them.

A mirror.

His reflection whispered, “Only when you become the question will you find the answer.”

“What does that mean?” he asked, but the reflection only pressed its forehead to the glass, trembling.

He looked into his own eyes and saw a maze, spiraling inward. Every step forward erased a piece of the path behind. There was no returning. He no longer remembered why he’d come this way, what he’d been seeking. 

He only knew the fog wanted silence, and the plain wanted stillness. And somewhere, deep in the unmarked center of the world, was something waiting with his final forgetting.

He pressed his hand to the mirror. The glass dissolved. The reflection stepped back, beckoned.

And he walked through, toward the answer, the question, the thing that would unmake him.

To Be Continued …