The fog had returned, thicker this time—dense enough to swallow the lamps in the library atrium, coiling around the spines of old memory-bound books like something alive.
知辞 stood at the edge of the filing hall, fingertips grazing the varnish of a cabinet that hadn't been touched in years. The silence wasn't just external. Something within her had gone quiet. A system-level hush, like the moments before thunder, when the air itself pauses to listen.
The names weren't sticking.
She had whispered one—her own, maybe—and felt it slide off her tongue without anchoring in the world. Like trying to pin a ghost to a wall with a sewing needle.
Her reflection in the library's obsidian glass didn't echo the sound.
"Try it again," said a voice—not from behind her, but from above, between the wooden beams, embedded in the silence itself.
She did. But this time, not a whisper. A thought.
And the silence… replied.
The filing system flickered. Not visibly. More like the idea of it lost a frame, staggered in its continuity. Cabinets that had once belonged to the quarter of language studies blinked, just for a moment, into blanks.
知辞 felt it: not fear, not yet. But an old unease, like stepping on a stair that isn't there.
She had read about this. Once, years ago, in a fragment of someone else's memory. A theory from the age before the re-layering: *naming collapse*. A phase where the world begins rejecting the syntax of its own referents. Where "John" no longer means John, and the word "home" loses all paths back to the door.
The memory was flagged red, incomplete. Red memories were dangerous. But she had kept it.
A scratching sound. Soft. Not on the walls, but in her head.
> "He's remembering you."
The sentence wasn't spoken. It just *arrived*, like rain that didn't fall but still made the ground wet.
知辞 turned. No one.
But she knew.
He had crossed the barrier. Or was being pulled across. Either way, the resonance was starting.
And once resonance begins, names stop being optional.
They become… dangerous.
She looked down. Her hand was glowing—not with light, but with **overwritten syntax**. Glyphs she hadn't learned, wrapping her wrist like vines, whispering an old title:
> 她的记忆已被回响唤醒.
Her breath caught.
It had started.
The dream didn't start where it should have. It came in sideways—like a film reel playing backwards, color leeching off each frame.
He was standing in a city that no longer had a name. Not because it had been forgotten, but because the letters refused to hold. Street signs bled into gibberish, storefronts displayed shifting symbols, and even his own memory of the place sloshed like water in a cracked jar.
And yet... something was calling him.
Not a voice. A pull. A rhythm at the base of the world's code.
When he tried to think of his name, it stuttered. Not in sound—but in meaning. The memory of "self" wavered, like static over something once broadcasted clearly.
He looked down.
His fingers were trembling. Not with fear. With resonance.
There, written along the side of his palm, were words—glyphs—that pulsed faintly.
Not carved, not inked, but **embedded** into his skin like light born from bone. And they weren't in a language he knew. But he understood them anyway:
> "You are being remembered."
The wind wasn't wind. It carried syllables. Stray vowels scraped across the air like broken birdcalls. Names. Unclaimed names.
He turned, and behind him the dream shifted again. A door appeared, partially submerged in a wall of static books. It opened without a handle.
There she was.
Or rather—there **wasn't**. A space in the shape of a girl, the absence of light molded into a figure. It hurt to look at her. But he couldn't look away.
"知辞," he said.
Or thought.
Or remembered her name for him.
The space-girl turned her head. No features. But he knew she was looking through him.
> "You are not ready to remember," she said, though no sound passed.
The ground cracked. Not from beneath, but from the concept of ground itself.
He reached out. Not to her—but to the glyphs on his hand. As if touching them might re-align him.
But the moment he did—
—He woke.
Gasping, back in his room. Or what he thought was his room. The light was wrong. His name was wrong. He whispered it aloud, and for a moment it sounded like something else.
Something *hers*.
He looked at his palm.
The words were gone.
But the skin tingled. Not just with memory—but with something worse.
Expectation.
The world was waiting for him to speak.
And this time, it might not let him forget again.
The moment his breath found rhythm again, the world pushed back.
It didn't come with thunder or light. Just...a name. One not his own. Carved across the back of his eyes like an afterimage. Spoken without voice. **Known** without language.
知辞.
But it wasn't just a memory. It had weight now. It pressed against his chest like a stone sewn into his ribs.
Across the city—though they no longer remembered it as such—知辞 staggered.
The resonance wasn't subtle anymore.
She gripped the cabinet, which flickered. Not its shape, but its *intent*. For a sliver of time, it forgot what it was. Then remembered—incorrectly. It tried to become a cradle. Then a grave.
The glyphs on her hand tightened, their light pulsing in synchrony with a heartbeat she hadn't heard since the layer war.
In the air between them—between two lives not yet bridged—a third voice began to hum.
Not a person.
A system.
**The Echo Layer.**
> "Nameless Entity Detected."
> "Attempting Resolution Through Residual Syntax."
Back in his dim room, he saw the wall ripple.
Letters. Not written. Projected.
They coiled across wallpaper like snakes of living grammar. From them, one sentence bled through the membrane of reality:
> "You were remembered in error."
He tried to speak. To deny it. But what escaped his throat was not protest.
It was her name.
And the system heard.
It surged. Across streets, across air, across time. The Echo Layer opened its first active gate in three centuries.
A tear, just wide enough for meaning to pass.
知辞 felt it.
Felt *him*.
Not his thoughts, but his absence. A hole in the syntax of the world that begged to be filled.
Her lips moved—but did not speak.
Instead, a second glyph bloomed on her palm. Inverse of the first. Black flame where the other was white.
Together, they formed an ancient root:
> 詞不由人.
Words do not belong to people.
She reeled.
Across the rift, he fell to his knees. Not in pain. In overload.
The world was trying to **name him**.
And he knew: if it succeeded, he might never remember his *true* one again.
At that moment, the space between them wasn't distance—it was definition.
---
And then, a whisper. Female. Not hers.
> "If you want to keep your name... you'll have to *steal* it back."
He looked up.
A silhouette stood at the edge of the rift. Unreadable. Unlabeled.
But smiling.