The lantern cast a low, wavering light over the circle of chairs and cushions. The air was stale with old paper and damp stone, the quiet decay of a city that once bent the skies with its ambition. The weekly meetings weren't formal—just people gathering to breathe through the days that kept coming, buried somewhere deep in what was still, somehow, the City. The kind of place where no one asked questions anymore, only remembered how to sit still and listen.
An impossibly old woman in a sagging floral shawl sat with her hands cupped around a cold teacup she hadn't yet sipped from. Her hair hung in thin, uneven wisps of white, and her skin was creased like bark, every wrinkle a story worn down by centuries. Her eyes wandered, slow and unfocused, but still held the dim glow of someone who had seen far too much to be easily startled. She looked more fossil than person, as though she might crumble into dust if the silence cracked too sharply.
She spoke without being asked.
"He wore time like a robe. Pressed and perfect. Not a wrinkle out of place. Sharrzaman. That was his name. Always made you say the whole thing. Never Shar. Never Zaman. Sharrzaman. Like he expected the air itself to carry the full weight of him.
"He smiled with his teeth, but never with his eyes. You learned not to speak until he had—because whatever you said, he’d already heard it before. Or would, eventually. He walked around knowing your future, and still managed to pretend he cared."
A woman across the circle blinked. A man shifted slightly but said nothing. No one interrupted. The teapot hissed faintly.
"He didn't build things. He paused them. Froze them in amber. Said it was kindness. Said it was protection. Said... we’d thank him later.
But he stole time. Not hours, not days—he took moments. The kind that make you who you are. He’d take the best part of someone and lock it away behind his eyes, like a trophy. He said it was preservation. He said it was love.
He said he loved all of us."
Her voice cracked. Just once. Then she steadied herself, straightened in her seat like she’d forgotten she was tired. Her hands shook on the rim of her cup, but she didn’t seem to notice.
"One day he’ll come back, and you’ll all feel it. The air will stop moving. The birds will stop singing. You’ll think you’ve gone deaf or dead, but no, it’s just him. Arriving. And when he speaks, it’ll sound like something ending."
Silence.
She nodded, as if concluding a lecture, and offered a brittle smile to no one in particular.
"That is the kind of man he was. Thank you for listening."
Nobody clapped. The old shelves creaked with the weight of what wasn’t said.
Finally, a younger man with a buzzed head and nervous hands looked up from his tea.
"She tells that story every week."
A woman next to him gave a faint, confused frown. "What do you mean?"
"Same story. Same words. Always about this... Sharrzaman. The name, the smile, the bit about stealing moments. She doesn’t remember telling it. Doesn’t remember us. But she remembers him."
The woman looked over at the old figure across from her. The floral pattern on the shawl. The way her hands trembled even at rest.
"Is he real?"
The young man shrugged. "I don’t know. But when she says his name, I get cold."
The old woman sat still, eyes unfocused, as though she were waiting for the room to end. She didn’t seem to hear them. Or maybe she did, and was simply choosing not to answer.
Her lips moved again. A whisper. A name. But this time, she didn’t say it aloud.
When the meeting ended, she rose slowly, every motion deliberate, as though gravity had grown stronger with age. No one offered to help. They had learned not to. She always found her feet, no matter how long it took.
She stepped out into the night alone, through the cracked doorway and into the windless corridors of the crumbling library. Her cane tapped softly with each step. Beyond the threshold, the City yawned open around her—broken plazas, leaning towers, ghost-lit alleys where only memory dared linger. The buildings sagged under the weight of forgotten spells. Posters from decades ago still clung to walls, fluttering in non-existent breezes.
She did not speak to anyone on the way out. She never did. And none of them followed. To them, she was just a rambling elder with a gift for grim storytelling.
No one recognized her.
Utopianna, as she had once been known, was young and radiant in every record, every mural, every whispered myth. This hunched figure with shaking hands and clouded eyes bore no resemblance. Time had erased the link between legend and body. She had become someone else entirely.
And so she wandered, unnoticed, into the sleepless dark, continuing her pilgrimage through the wreckage of the City, searching not for glory, but for the quiet places where sorrow took root and something sacred might still grow.
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The City around her was quieter than it used to be. Not peaceful. Just subdued, like something holding its breath. Since the collapse of the Weave, the fountains had gone dry, the floating lights no longer hovered at dusk, and the skyrails stood frozen above the streets like snapped vines. Once, these walkways shimmered with glyphs and lifted the tired away from trudging staircases. Now, they hung still and heavy, casting long, useless shadows.
As she passed a former ward-station, the sigils on the stone arch above the door were half-erased, flickering dimly like the last thoughts of a dying mind. Children slept beneath it—no longer afraid of what might come through, because nothing came through anymore. The danger was gone. So was the protection.
A man knelt in the street beside a broken automaton, whispering to it like an old friend. Its limbs twitched sporadically, animated only by ghost currents of residual enchantment. Utopianna paused a moment to watch, then moved on. She did not interrupt grief.
She passed three more shrines to lost gods, none of them maintained. One had been turned into a shelter. Another was being used to grow root vegetables under a cracked skylight. The third was silent, still burning one faint blue flame that no one could explain.
The further she walked, the more silence she found. It was not the silence of night—it was the silence of after. The kind that settles when no one's sure whether rebuilding is possible, or worth it.
She walked on, not as a guide, not as a healer, but as a witness. And in a world where memory faltered and magic had gone mute, even that was holy.
But even sacred things can be in danger.
In a narrow alley of broken sigils and sagging balconies, three figures emerged from behind a collapsed statue. Street toughs—thin and hungry-looking, faces wrapped in makeshift scarves, eyes sharp from growing up in the dark. One held a rusted knife, another a metal pipe, the third only cracked his knuckles as he approached.
"Coin," one said flatly.
Utopianna did not stop walking.
"Hey. You deaf, old crawl? We said coin. You walking around like you don’t know what this place is?"
She looked at them with fogged-over eyes. For a moment, something passed between them—confusion? Pity? Annoyance?
The one with the pipe stepped forward, raising it.
And then the ground beneath them groaned.
A heavy, deliberate thud echoed through the alley. The street toughs turned just in time to see an enormous silhouette step into view—hulking, cloaked in moss-stained rags and draped with old vines. The figure raised one tree-like arm and brought down a staff that struck the cracked stones with such force the entire alley shook.
“Is this what bravery looks like now?” the voice rumbled. Deep, tired, unmistakably ancient. “Three against one? And she does not even lift her cane?”
The toughs froze.
B’doom stood tall—his form gnarled and slow-moving, but vast and immovable. His trunklike legs planted, his breath like the sigh of a dying forest.
One of the street toughs ran. The others hesitated only a heartbeat longer before following.
When the alley was quiet again, B’doom turned his gaze on Utopianna. She had not looked up.
“Still walking?” he asked, more gently.
She nodded. "Still watching."
B’doom made a sound that might have once been laughter.
“Then I will walk behind you a while. The weeds are thick, and some do not know what they trample.”
They walked together in silence for some time, two relics of a vanished world, their footsteps the only sound in the sleeping district. At last, they came upon a wide plaza, long abandoned, tucked behind broken civic halls and swallowed by ivy. The fountain at its center was dry and crooked, but around it, someone—many someones—had been placing objects with care.
Cracked mirrors. Clay vessels. Bones inscribed with symbols no longer recognized. Iron keys. Shattered amulets. All arranged in spirals and constellations across the broken stones.
B’doom stopped at the edge of the plaza. “We’ve been working here. Quietly. A ritual. Not of the Weave, but something older. Something buried deeper.”
Utopianna looked at the strange geometry laid out before them, her gaze slow, reverent.
“It’s beautiful,” she murmured.
“Unfinished,” B’doom said. “But nearly ready. We think it listens. Not the magic we once knew—but something else. Something that does not ask permission from the Weave to exist.”
Utopianna nodded slowly. “It makes sense. The Weave was never the source of magic—only its method. It’s how magic worked here. In the City. But the planes beyond? The far realms? They must have had their own laws. Their own languages of power.”
B’doom touched the edge of a broken sigil with his staff. “We used to say the further you got from the City, the weaker your spells became. But maybe it wasn’t weakness. Maybe it was just... dissonance. The Weave fading, yes—but not magic itself.”
“Exactly,” she said. “We built our world like it was the center of all things. But what if we were just a single dialect in a vast, unspoken grammar?”
B’doom chuckled. “Then it’s time we learned a new language.”
B’doom stepped forward, raising both arms above the array of objects as Utopianna moved slowly into the spiral’s outer ring. Their movements were unhurried, reverent. They did not chant—not yet. There was no spell to cast in the traditional sense. Only position. Only intention.
B’doom took a cracked mirror and angled it so the moonlight touched its face. The light refracted into the center of the plaza, casting a warped silver thread across the ritual’s heart. Utopianna followed, her cane dragging faint trails through the dust as she placed three iron keys in a triangle around a sun-bleached skull.
“I’ll call the stillness,” she said. Her voice shook, but the will behind it did not. “You call the seed.”
He nodded. “We begin.”
They circled. They waited. They breathed with the rhythm of the city’s bones.
The first sound was soft: a creak, like a door opening that had not existed a moment before. The moonlight within the mirror shimmered unnaturally, hovering midair in a trembling spiral.
Then the bones began to hum. Just slightly. As though remembering a song.
B’doom raised his staff. Utopianna extended one hand.
And then—
Nothing.
A silence fell so absolute it felt deliberate. The humming stopped. The spiral collapsed. The mirror cracked with a sharp ping. The skull rolled sideways, striking one of the clay vessels and shattering it into dust.
Utopianna staggered, breath caught in her chest. B’doom exhaled, lowering his arms.
“It rejected us,” he said after a long moment.
“No,” she whispered. “It heard us. But it does not know our names.”
She sat down heavily on the stones. “We are strangers here, B’doom. Even to magic.”
He sat beside her, and they both stared at the broken center. The silence returned, but this time it was sadder than before. A kind of waiting.
For a long time, neither of them spoke.
And then, softly, Utopianna said, “Next time, we try a different dialect.”