I once believed that memory was a gift. Now I know it is also a burden.
Most return to this world clean. I return caked in layers of my former selves. I remember every mistake, every hesitation. I carry not only progress, but pain.
This life has been quiet. I live in the forest edge, where mana pulses slow and steady, like the breathing of a beast in hibernation. I do not cast often. I observe. I think.
But even silence cannot stop the pressure of memory. My Codex grows heavier. The halls echo louder. The past whispers more insistently.
There is a shelf within the Codex where I place what I call 'fragments of self' — feelings, regrets, choices I don't want to forget but cannot carry every day.
I visited that shelf last night. It was fuller than I remembered.
How long before the Codex becomes a prison of my own design? How long before I record to forget, not to preserve?
I do not have an answer. But I continue anyway. Because to forget, truly, would be worse.