Chapter 16 - Threads of the Forgotten

The strange weight in my chest refused to leave me, even as I wandered through the streets of Buenos Aires with no memories. I only had the notebook—the one with my name, the one that insisted I remember. Each day, I read the pages, hoping to find something that would unlock the cage in my mind. But it was as if the memories were sealed behind an unbreakable wall. People passed me by. Their faces triggered nothing. Their voices echoed like static. But the feeling—the pull toward something unfinished—kept me moving. In the weeks that followed, I kept running into the same woman. I didn't know her name, but she always seemed to appear when I needed direction. She would point out a place, a person, a detail I would have missed. "Why are you helping me?" I asked her one day. She smiled softly. "Because you helped me once." "How do you know that?" "Because I remember." Her answer only deepened the ache inside me. She disappeared before I could ask more. The notebook led me to an old safehouse beneath the city—a place I somehow knew how to access. There, I found encrypted files, weapons, and a single photograph of three people: me, Selene, and Leonard. My fingers traced their faces. I couldn't recall their voices, but I knew I had loved them. Trusted them. Fought beside them. I activated the terminal, which sprang to life, revealing hidden messages. One of them was from Selene. "If you're seeing this, it means you survived—but the pulse took your memories. You might not know who you are, but trust the notebook. Trust your instincts. And whatever happens, Gabriel, find the Echoes." The message ended abruptly. The Echoes. I had no idea what they were, but the notebook pointed me to a location: Marseille, France. I packed my gear and boarded the next freighter ship across the Atlantic. In Marseille, whispers of the Echoes filled the underground markets. They were fragments—pieces of corrupted timelines that had bled into reality. People who weren't supposed to exist. Buildings that appeared and vanished overnight. The Echoes were the scars left by the collapsed loops, and they were dangerously unstable. I found one—a boy named Milo who flickered between ages as he spoke to me. One moment, he was ten. The next, he was seventeen. His memories were tangled, looping endlessly. "You fought the ones who made me," Milo said, his voice trembling. "You promised to fix this." "Do you remember me?" I asked desperately. He nodded. "You're the Heir. You're the one who could move through broken timelines without being consumed." I didn't understand. But Milo pressed a device into my hand—a fragment stabilizer. "You built this. You said it could fix us. But you forgot." I used the stabilizer on Milo, anchoring him to a single timeline. His body steadied. His eyes cleared. "You came back for us," he whispered. His words reignited something in me—a purpose hadn't been lost, just temporarily misplaced. I spent the following weeks locating other Echoes, stabilizing them one by one. Each rescue returned small flickers of memory—a laugh, a battle, a promise. I began to piece together who I had been, and the burden I had chosen to carry. Selene's voice returned to me in fragments, guiding me, warning me. Leonard's smirk haunted me in flashes. They are gone now. But I would carry them forward. One night, the woman found me again. This time, she told me her name. "Selene." I stared at her, a whirlwind of emotion surging through me. "You—how is this possible?" "I survived. And I remembered. I've been watching you, waiting for you to find your way back." I stepped forward, trembling. "Leonard?" Her expression faltered. "Gone. But he would've wanted you to keep going." We sat beneath the cracked sky, and she filled in the missing pieces, telling me about our fight, our choices, our sacrifices. "You were always the one who believed," she said. "Even when the rest of us wanted to give up." I wiped a tear from my cheek. "And now?" "Now you fight for those who can't remember how." I stood, the weight of forgotten stories pressing against my spine, but I no longer felt lost. I remembered who I was. I remembered what I had promised. And as long as there were fractured timelines, as long as the Echoes cried out for rescue, I would keep moving forward. Because some stories demand to be remembered.Even if you have to find them all over again.