They did not speak the na she had given.
Not once.
Silence wrapped around it like a burial shroud as they moved away from the valley. The road thinned into a scar through ash and stone, and the oath pulsed unevenly now—no longer a steady pull, but a wound that throbbed with each step.
The woman’s hands shook.
The man noticed, said nothing.
Behind them, the wind carried whispers—but fewer now. The nas still drifted, but they slid past her without catching, as if sothing essential had been carved away.
“What did you lose?” the man asked at last.
She considered the question carefully. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I know where it used to be.”
They reached a ridge overlooking a vast plain littered with the remains of a city. Towers leaned like broken teeth. Roads had collapsed into trenches filled with bodies—old, new, and in-between. Fires burned without fuel.
At the city’s heart stood a monunt—a massive stone arch carved with nas layered atop one another until the original aning was erased.
A registry.
The oath scread.
“This is where they count,” the man said.
Below, the dead moved differently.
They weren’t wandering.
They were lining up.
Zombies shuffled toward the arch in slow, patient columns. When one reached the stone, its na—spoken by no mouth—etched itself briefly into the surface before fading.
Then the body collapsed.
Gone.
“They’re being processed,” the woman whispered.
“Sorted,” the man corrected.
A figure stood beneath the arch, tall and robed in torn banners stitched with nas. Its face was smooth, blank, like erased parchnt.
It turned toward them.
“You were expected,” it said.
The woman’s vision blurred. The na she had traded tugged at her mind, trying to resurface—and failing.
The figure raised a hand. The air thickened.
“You are misfiled,” it continued. “Visible. Invisible. Alive. Dead.”
The man stepped in front of her. “We’re leaving.”
“No,” the figure said calmly. “You’re being corrected.”
The dead around the plaza began to turn—not with hunger, but recognition. Their eyes locked onto the woman.
“She’s marked,” one whispered.
The arch flared.
Nas began to burn across its surface—hers among them, incomplete, jagged.
Pain tore through her chest. She fell to her knees.
The man grabbed her, dragging her behind the ridge’s broken wall. He hurled a blade at a nearby support pillar. Stone cracked. The arch shuddered.
“Run,” he said.
They fled as the monunt fractured, collapsing inward in a thunder of stone and screams. The figure beneath the arch howled—not in rage, but in error.
The city shook.
The dead panicked—so fleeing, others dissolving into ash as their nas were lost mid-entry.
They didn’t stop until the land fell away into ravines and the registry city burned behind them.
When they finally rested, the woman stared at her hands.
“I think,” she said slowly, “that na I gave—it was how I rembered myself.”
The man looked at her. “And now?”
She t his gaze, eyes steady but hollow. “Now they rember better than I do.”
Far away, the horn sounded again—closer, clearer, deliberate.
The system that guided the dead was adapting.
And it had learned the value of nas.
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