"What happened on that roof?"
Damian’s voice was hoarse, broken in a way it had never been before.
Elizabeth wiped the tears from her face, her expression filled with sothing like pity and sorrow mixed together.
"You were sitting there alone, finishing your al, staring out at the city you’d controlled from the shadows for years. The call had co and the police were minutes away. But you weren’t moving. You were just... waiting."
Her voice took on that distant quality again, as if she was seeing it all play out in front of her.
"And then the air in front of you shimred and distorted. A figure materialized from nothing.
A man wearing a hooded cloak that obscured his face completely. You reached for your gun imdiately, but before you could even draw it, he moved."
Damian stood frozen, his breathing shallow.
"His hand ca up and pressed a single finger to your forehead. And I watched as your eyes went blank. Completely empty. Like soone had just erased everything that made you who you were."
Elizabeth’s voice was shaking now.
"He was removing your mories, Damian. Systematically deleting years of experiences, knowledge, understanding. I could see them being pulled from your mind like threads being ripped from fabric."
"That’s not possible. mory manipulation at that level doesn’t exist. Even the strongest ntal abilities can’t–"
"This wasn’t an Aura ability. This was sothing else entirely. Sothing beyond what we understand."
She stepped closer, her violet eyes boring into his.
"I watched him erase almost everything the old beggar had taught you. All those years of preparation, all that knowledge about this world, all the careful orchestration of your life. Gone...
Reduced to a single childhood mory of a kind stranger reading you a story."
Damian’s mind was reeling.
Fragnts of mories that didn’t quite fit were surfacing. Monts where he’d known things he shouldn’t know. Places where his understanding of this world seed too detailed for soone who’d only heard a story once.
"Even your mories of that world were altered. Your parents’ deaths beca hazy. The journey through the underworld lost its detail. Everything was smoothed over, made distant and dreamlike."
"Why?"
The word ca out as barely more than a breath.
"Why would anyone do that?"
"I don’t know. But I heard what he said after he finished. After you were standing there with your mind in tatters, your mories stolen, your identity erased."
Elizabeth’s voice dropped to a whisper.
"He told you to jump. And that you wouldn’t try to survive. You just nodded, your face completely blank, and he stepped back to watch."
Damian felt sothing cold spreading through his chest.
"Before he disappeared, I heard him muttering to himself. Complaining, really, like soone frustrated they couldn’t finish a job properly."
"What did he say?"
Elizabeth closed her eyes, reciting the words exactly as she’d heard them in her vision.
"’I wanted to remove even the mories he had left, but I couldn’t do it completely. That old bastard engraved them with so kind of seal I can’t break. But at least I managed to erase the mories of the human world and most of the important roles everyone played in that world.’"
Her eyes opened, tears streaming down her face again.
"’Now whoever this old man’s chosen one becos in this world, he’ll never amount to much. He’s not even part of this world anymore. Just a stranger, an outsider, soone who doesn’t belong here.
He can’t change the future. He can’t go against us. Without his mories, without understanding who he really is or what he was ant to do, he’ll just stumble through life never knowing what was stolen from him.’"
Silence fell over the garden like a physical weight.
The wind had stopped. The clouds overhead hung motionless.
Even the world itself seed to be holding its breath.
Damian stood there, his hands trembling, his mind fracturing under the weight of what he was hearing.
’So... I was really just an extra all along.’
The thought hit him like a physical blow.
’Not the protagonist of my own story. Not soone who clawed their way to power through their own strength and will.
Just a tool. A weapon being forged by that old beggar for so purpose I can’t even rember.
And when soone decided I was too dangerous, when they realized what I might beco, they just... erased .
Took everything that made who I was and threw it away like garbage.’
"My entire first life was a lie."
Damian’s voice was hollow, emotionless.
"That old man killed my parents. Arranged for my brother to be tortured and murdered. Orchestrated every major event in my life to shape into whatever he needed.
And I never knew. I thought I was in control. I thought my choices mattered. But I was just a puppet dancing on strings I couldn’t see."
He laughed, but the sound was broken, wrong.
"And then so other person decided I was a problem and just deleted most of my mories, made kill myself, and sent here as what? A broken remnant? A failed experint? Soone who doesn’t even belong in this world?"
"Damian–"
"Don’t."
His voice was sharp, cutting.
"Don’t try to comfort or tell it’s okay. Nothing about this is okay. Everything I thought I knew about myself is wrong. My mories are fabricated or stolen. My death wasn’t even my own choice.
And apparently I’m supposed to be doing sothing important here but I can’t because soone ripped out the parts of my brain that would tell what that is."
He ran his hands through his long hair, gripping it tightly.
"I’ve been walking around this world thinking I was adapting well, using my experience from my past life to navigate this new reality. But it was all bullshit. I wasn’t using experience. I was using scraps of stolen knowledge that I don’t even rember learning. Following instincts programd into by soone else for reasons I can’t understand."
’Everything I am is soone else’s design.
My personality. My skills. My knowledge. My goals.
How much of Damian Valcor is actually , and how much is leftover programming from that old beggar’s manipulation?
How much of Alessio D’Rossi was ever real at all?’
"Do you understand what this ans?"
Damian’s voice had gone quiet again, dangerously so.
"I don’t even know who I am. Not really. I can’t trust my own mories. I can’t trust my own thoughts.
For all I know, every decision I’ve made since arriving in this world is just following patterns that were beaten into during a life I can’t even properly rember."
Elizabeth reached out tentatively, her hand stopping just short of touching his shoulder.
"You’re still you. Whatever they took, whatever they tried to erase, you’re still standing here. Still fighting. Still protecting the people who matter to you.
That’s real. That’s not programming or manipulation. That’s who you chose to be."
"Did I choose it?"
He looked at her with eyes that had gone cold and empty.
"Or am I just doing what I was designed to do? How would I even know the difference?"
She had no answer to that.
How could she?
Damian turned away from her, looking up at the dark clouds overhead.
’A stranger in my own story.
That’s what that hooded figure called .
And he was right.
I don’t belong here. This world, these people, this Academy, the Mafia I built, Ariana I protected, Edrin and the others who follow .
None of it was supposed to involve . I’m just a broken piece of soone else’s plan, stumbling around in the dark, pretending I know what I’m doing.’
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