He did not remember the name he was born with. If he did, he would not have answered to it. Now, he walked as Sora, a name he took for himself, not one that was given. A word in an ancient tongue meaning "sky after the fire." No one called him by that word, and no one was left who had that name before.

  The forest he passed through whispered to him like a living thing, yet not a single bird sang among the trees. There was only the soft cry of ash falling from long-dead branches and the cracking of brittle earth no longer held by roots. Ruins of what were once magnificent buildings were scattered among the tree’s remnants of a world that once believed in light and hope. Altars to forgotten gods stood with statues eroded into shapeless lumps of stone, and pieces of long-rusted armor still clung to the bones of warriors who had long since died beneath the long-dead trees.

  Sora could not speak. He was mute from birth. He was as silent as a stone enduring the wind; no one could speak to him, and he himself had no voice to speak with anyone or even scream for help.

  Yet, a question arose about him.

  What did he carry?

  No one ever knew but it was certainly heavy, like a burden.

  Not in his hands, but in his stride. Every step he took on the broken ground was like an oath. Slow and deliberate, with every experience he had ever lived through.

  Sora walked through a Gate shaped like massive fangs, a gate of a colossal beast, sharp and arched, tightly closed, marking the end of the last road of his journey. Sora approached the gate before him, known only to a few who had seen and found it, none of whom ever returned to tell what they saw there.

  There, in under a sky where stars flickered like dying hearths, Sora saw a single figure waiting for someone. A figure that did not resemble as human. It was completely still, though Sora knew it was alive. Its armor was like cracked black glass that seemed to... breathe?

  It did not speak, but as Sora walked toward it, the figure seemed to watch him as he slowly approached. It was like a living statue in the armor of a long-rotted warrior in the middle of nowhere. It was as if the creature had been waiting for Sora's arrival from his journey of unknown origin.

  And Sora, who had no weapon and no name in this world other than what he carried within himself like someone who had experienced death but risen again from his grave, someone long dead who should be resting deep in the earth but still possessed a will to keep moving kept stepping forward, not knowing who the creature was. The wind blew past him. So too did the world, which always turned according to its will. The figure remained motionless as Sora slowly approached. Its armor was made of obsidian and decorated with something in the shape of cracks that pulsed faintly with a dim light from within. Not warmth and not life. But something older, something broken that refused to die through the civilizations and ages that had passed.

  Sora stopped walking and looked at the figure from a sufficient distance, now right in front of him. Dust swirled at their feet, spinning in a way no human had ever seen before. There was no sign of enmity, no challenge for a duel offered by the figure, and yet the figure raised its hand and pointed at Sora with a finger that had turned to bone.

  Its fingers were clad in jagged iron gauntlets, extended outward... not to attack Sora, but to signal to him that behind him, the air shimmered and the long-dead forest took on a faint shape that shifted between what once was and what now remained.

  A gate, and it was the Gate of Memory, forged from sorrow and the echoes of someone's past, its appearance flickering like a candle flame in a storm. Sora knew this, not from knowledge, but from feeling. Sora had seen a gate like this before in his blood-stitched dreams. A door that did not lead to a place, but to a truth buried in the deepest layer of the world.

  The voice of the armored figure sounded like glass on stone, though its mouth never moved, and it said to Sora, "You carry a burden yet unnamed."

  Sora was silent for a moment, and in his mind, he began to wonder.

  Was this a test for me?

  "Enter, if you wish to know what caused the first fire to ignite," the figure said again.

  Sora stepped forward as the figure told him to enter the Gate of Memory, and Sora began his journey by entering the gate before him. The air jolted as the gate began to widen, and the world momentarily felt tilted to him. For just a moment, perhaps nothing happened.

  But inside, it felt like... there was no gust of wind from within, no ground to step on into the gate, and only a bleeding memory from the echoes of his past.

  Then...

  Sora saw a ruined tower before him that felt as if it were built from blood-slicked marble, with stairs that shone like the color of blood leading toward Sora himself. The sky above felt cracked like an old bone, and the statues Sora saw as he walked around looking for clues inside the tower wept blood from their eyes. Sora stood inside alone, with no clues and no guide to direct him.

  But after wandering around inside the tower, he found something. There was only one stele, half-burnt, beneath his feet, and it was still warm, suggesting it had been burned not long ago. And the inscription on the stele read:

  ‘The first truth is not spoken. It is remembered.’

  Sora closed his eyes to remember a truth within himself and followed the directions written on the stele he found. When he opened his eyes again, he was not alone. Unknown shadows watched him in his vision, and one of them... moved toward Sora.

  Sora's Memory Fragment: The Years After the Silence:

  He was not born into someone's love, not even a mother's cradle; he was simply abandoned in a world that had just been shattered by his parents. Not under the beautiful shining stars, but under the Cleft Tree. A withered and rotting tree on the outskirts of Mireholt Village, a village forgotten even on maps, where the land grew only weeds, and every birth was considered a curse unless it brought a harvest.

  The child had no name. Only the cold of abandonment, and his cries were not cries lamenting his own fate, but the cries of a soul unwanted by anyone. He would have died there. He should have, for a newborn baby cast out in the middle of nowhere. But the gods who saw the baby were cruel, and his fate, even crueler.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  In the end, someone found him. Eyla Varn, a midwife cast out from her school. Twice exiled by people for her actions. First, for assisting in the birth of a woman who delivered a stillborn child right before the eyes of the villagers. And second, for refusing to let the woman's baby be buried under the village temple, a place of proper burial for the villagers. But Eyla knew it was not a burial but an offering something like ritual to the broken world, and the baby's corpse would later be eaten by wild beasts that would come for it.

  Eyla's hands were burned as punishment for her defiance, but she still had hope to carry, and that's what she did. She brought the still-crying child to her uninhabitable hut, crossing muddy fields to her hovel where moss grew on the walls and the roof leaked when it rained.

  There, Eyla did not give him a name at first, only silence, and the baby was raised with little more than that. Silence and eyes that learned to observe rather than ask. The baby did not cry after being taken by Eyla.

  However, the villagers responded with tones of disgust, some with fear of the bad luck from the baby Eyla brought, and they never spoke openly about the child. The villagers called him Mireborn. The rotten child who was never wanted in this world, whose birth was considered a bringer of calamity and bad luck for Mireholt village, unless a child born in the village could bring profit or an abundant harvest for the village.

  However, the child considered Mireborn continued to grow in the village, and when he reached the age of seven, a pack of wolves came to his village. Oh, of course, this was not a pack of wolves or other wild beasts, but a group with such a nature like those beasts. With their iron armor and sharp weapons in their hands. The group's name was the Black Maw, mercenaries from the Eastern Gulch, a mercenary group that took gold, harvests, and people lives.

  When all the residents were dragged out of their homes, that was when Eyla hid him in a hiding place under the rickety wooden floor of her hut. The child could only watch as Eyla was dragged away by them with force and violence after successfully hiding him from danger before the group of mercenaries entered their hut. Eyla's screams were very clear in the child ears, and her screams began slowly far away from the hut until they were heard in the village hall.

  The child watched from under the floorboards of his hut to see the entire event that would set his village on fire. The villagers screamed and begged for mercy to escape the massacre as they were forcibly removed, and their screams fell silent in an instant when the mercenaries held their swords and swung them, already stained with the blood of the villagers.

  The severed heads of the villagers were now impaled on each of the mercenaries' spears that killed them. The headless bodies of the villagers were now piled up and burned like a bonfire. A silent hymn hummed with a tone full of silence, death, soul, and their laughter after getting what they wanted.

  The child saw entire all of event from his hiding place through a small crack that revealed the incident from beginning to end, as the mercenaries' laughter echoed. The child was like a mute living witness to the slaughter they committed on the villagers.

  When dawn came, the hut was ashes. The village's soil was now filled with fresh blood, and the villagers' houses had turned to ash. The child walked out of his hiding place after realizing he was the only survivor of the incident. He walked, observing everything, because he knew he could not stay or settle in this village when he saw its condition. The child looked up at the blue sky with clouds of black smoke from the aftermath of the fire.

  From that moment on, he took the name Sora, which he now knew. He carved it on a fragment of Eyla's charred table and carried the carving with his name on it until the fragment burned his hand. The pain became his name, like the sky that was a silent witness besides himself.

  A vow never spoken by him but always felt in his heart and his memories.

  Back in the Tower of Memories:

  Sora stood still... and his hand felt like it was clenching something, as if he were holding a piece of burnt glass. And from the corner of the place, where there were only shadows, a voice whispered not to his ears, but to his soul:

  "You remember... but have you forgiven your past?"

  And Sora looked behind him and found the moving shadow beginning to form into an unknown figure. The figure wore a deer skull mask. The deer skull mask had a crack in its jaw. The figure also wore a robe that looked like it was sewn from the skin of people screaming for help. Its hands had long fingers like a human, but the color of its fingers was deathly pale, and its hands pulsed with the memory of the violence of Sora's past echoes.

  Sora stepped closer to the figure without fear, and the tower began to shake. Sora stopped when the tower of memory trembled. There was no sword in his grip, no shield, and moreover, Sora had no voice to ask for help from anyone in this tower. He only had the echo of his former self.

  "You walk under her name, the woman who was burned for you at the end of her life." The masked creature spoke again and was about to reach for Sora.

  Sora did not flinch at the threat of the shadow that had transformed into a masked figure of darkness wanting to ambush him. The figure walked slowly around him, as if trying to evoke fear from within Sora. However, Sora clearly had no fear of the figure that began to provoke him. Only a memory... and the determination Sora had for his echo.

  "Why do you not hold your Vengeance? Why do you not scream? Why do you not fight?" The Figure asked as it circled Sora with a hoarse and threatening tone.

  Still, Sora remained silent as usual and paid no heed to the Figure's words. But in his hand, his right hand that had been clenching the glass shard, his grip slowly opened, and a sword made of embers transformed from the glass shard he had been holding. Sora did not feel his hand burn when he held the sword that was like a glowing ember. Sora felt that it was not fire and not light either, but a burden from his memory that had now turned into a weapon for him. The fragment of Eyla's burnt table. The only last remnant of the hut Sora had once lived in had turned into a sword formed from long-extinguished embers.

  Seeing this, the Figure began to falter and worry about what it saw in Sora.

  "That name... is still warm," it whispered.

  Then the Figure began to charge at Sora with uncontrolled emotion. A silent attack, its sharp nails like blades drawn from its own shadow, curved towards Sora like a memory turned to anger. Sora moved without haste as he saw the Figure launch its attack, and Sora did not panic when their confrontation began. With full concentration, Sora fought the Figure.

  Sora ducked to avoid the Figure's first attack towards him and slid to the enemy's blind side, and by the time the masked creature turned towards Sora, it was too late for the Figure. Sora stabbed his burning sword, like an ember, into the Figure's chest.

  No words came from the Figure as the sword was plunged into its chest with full pressure from Sora, and no scream escaped its mouth either. Only a fire was seen from Sora's sword as it pierced its chest. The sword ignited not outward, but inward into its blade. A silent roar erupted from behind the bone mask, and the Figure staggered, clutching its chest as the sword's fire burned away the remnants of its stolen will, and the sword vanished into the Figure's chest in a still-burning fire.

  Sora watched it fall as his sword was stuck and could not be removed from the Figure's chest. The figure did not die, did not disappear, it was just released like flying ash and completely vanished.

  The tower shook as Sora's confrontation ended, and then a light came from an unspecifiable direction. The light was not bright, not warm either, but a total silence after everything had happened. The chunks of rock around Sora rearranged themselves without a sound, as if a memory was slowly being pieced together to make room for his understanding of the truth from the echoes of his past.

  ‘Those who are silent, remember more deeply than those who speak loudly.’

  And a path opened in the light, and there was a spiral staircase carved from obsidian and bone. The stairs pointed not down into ruins but to the truth that had been buried all along.

  Sora looked once more at the place where the Figure faded like ash now still, only its ashes seen flying as a gust of wind blew from the direction of the light.

  Then, without a sound, Sora stepped forward and descended into what awaited him, into the burden he had never spoken of, now manifest.