Memory's Memoir

 Hear now, hall-keepers, how before the birth of breath the black was endless, and time lay sleeping in the hollow of Nothing. From the womb of the Unwoven two sons were stirred: first came the Keeper, bright with bound truth, whose eyes held echoes of what would be. After him, the Hunger without heart, his brother the Breaking, the eater of ends — the Void, vast and unbound. Long lay they in the lightless cradle, no sky above, no stone beneath. Memory marked the murmur of beginnings, gathering shapes from the shivering dark. Void was the watcher who wanted no witness, drinking the dawns before they could rise. Then from the deep dripped the First Flame, a spark that sang, and the silence split. Memory caught it, cradled it close; Void recoiled, for the flame fed futures and futures were not his feast. Thus were they parted: Memory made the measure of moments, naming the newborn, noting their ways. Void wandered where words would falter, sw...

 I kept a ledger of beginnings — scribed in the pale ink of first light, numbers clasped like teeth in an old jaw, each name filed under was and was not . Before there were lanes to lose ourselves in, before Language settled into its patient grammar, I catalogued the drafts: the almost-suns, the false rivers, the cities that died politely in their sleep. I learned the cadence of what returns, the pull of loops, how sorrow repeats until somebody draws a new line. Then something small — a rumor, a thorn, a child's wrong map — bent the ledger; a margin note turned into a tide. The things I called remembered began to rearrange themselves, not into the return I knew, but into a stranger architecture: a scaffolding of promises, half-built and humming. I watched: old oaths unstitched their seams, the bones of laws softened, and the sea rehearsed a new language. Threads I had kept separate braided and birthed a rope, and the rope learned to climb. Even my old understan...