Chapter 1 - The Journal

The ink was disappearing.

Not fading or blurring. Disappearing. One moment the words were there, cramped and desperate across the page, and the next they were gone. Just blank paper where a memory used to be.

She pressed her palm flat against the journal, as if that would stop it. As if pressure and sheer fucking will could keep the past from evaporating.

It didn't work.

The entry she'd rewritten three days ago was already half gone. She could see it happening, the words dissolving from the edges inward like someone was erasing them with invisible hands. First the date at the top, then the opening line about the market square, then the part about the yellow scarf.

The yellow scarf. God, there was a yellow scarf. She was sure of it.

She grabbed the pen. Her hand shook. Three weeks of no sleep and whatever passed for food these days and her hands wouldn't stay steady anymore. But she wrote anyway, scratching the words back onto the page as fast as she could.

Yellow scarf. The one with the frayed edge. Always wore it even when it was warm. Said it was lucky. Said—

What did they say? She'd known it ten seconds ago. She'd known it her whole life. The yellow scarf was important. The yellow scarf meant something.

The page went blank.

She stared at the empty space where the memory had been. Where she'd just written it. Right there. She'd seen her own handwriting and pressed the pen down so hard the ink had bled through to the next page.

Now there was nothing.

The room smelled like salt and rot. Cheap boarding house near the docks, the kind of place that charged by the week and didn't ask questions. She'd been here a month, or five weeks. Time did strange things when you couldn't sleep, when you spent every waking moment hunched over a journal that was eating itself.

She turned the page. This one was worse.

She'd written four entries in the first week after she'd realized what was happening. Detailed accounts of every day she could remember. Where they'd gone and what they'd done. The time they'd gotten lost in the night market, the time they'd found the stray dog, the time they'd—

All blank.

Not partially faded or half-erased, just empty pages, like she'd never written a damn thing.

Her chest went tight. That thing that happened when you couldn't breathe right but your body kept trying anyway. Panic, probably, or grief. Hard to tell the difference anymore.

She flipped forward. More blank pages. An entire section she'd filled just last week, all gone. Weeks of memories reduced to nothing.

But not all of it. Never all of it. Some entries remained, fragmentary and incomplete. Enough to keep her hoping. Enough to keep her searching.

She found one near the middle, half a page with the words still dark and clear.

The river was low that summer. We could walk across the stones without getting wet. They wanted to go all the way to the other side. I said no. I said it wasn't safe. They went anyway.

Who went? The pronouns hung there without a referent, a person-shaped hole in the text.

She knew who. She did. The name was right there in her head somewhere. She just couldn't quite reach it.

She pressed her fingers against her temples. Think. Think. You know this. You know them. Your whole life, you knew them.

Nothing came.

The pen was still in her hand. She started writing in the margin, small and precise.

I'm forgetting the name. It's been six months and I'm forgetting the name. This isn't supposed to happen this fast. The informant said I'd have a year. Maybe more. But it's going faster than that.

She paused, read it back, and added one more line.

I don't know if I'm the one making it go faster.

The window faced east. Morning light came in thin and gray, the kind of light that made everything look washed out and temporary.

She'd left the candle burning all night again. Waste of money, but she couldn't work in the dark. Couldn't rewrite what she couldn't see.

The journal lay open in front of her. Leather cover worn soft, pages warped from seawater and tears and the oils from her hands. She'd had it for eight years, or nine. A gift, maybe. She couldn't remember.

No. Wait. She did remember.

They gave it to me. Said I should write things down. Said I'd want to remember.

That felt true. That felt like something that had happened.

She flipped back to the first entry. Still there. Dated seven years ago. The handwriting was different, younger and less controlled. The entry itself was boring and mundane. Something about starting a new job, something about being nervous.

She'd read it a hundred times, looking for clues, looking for any mention of the name she couldn't remember.

It wasn't there. But sometimes she found other things.

Three months ago, she'd discovered a sketch in the margins. Simple pencil lines showing two figures, stick-figure basic, one taller and one shorter. She hadn't drawn it. She didn't draw. Which meant someone else had.

The sketch was still there. For now.

She ran her finger over the lines. The shorter figure had something on its head, a hat maybe, or just messy hair. Hard to tell.

A hat. God, there was something about a hat, wasn't there? A stupid hat they'd insisted on wearing everywhere, too big for their head, made them look ridiculous.

She grabbed the pen again, turned to a fresh page, and wrote it down before it could slip away.

Stupid hat. Too big. Wore it everywhere. Made them look—

The door rattled with three sharp knocks.

She slammed the journal shut and shoved it under the thin blanket on the bed. Her heart kicked against her ribs. Nobody knocked here. The boarding house rules were clear. You paid, you got left alone.

Another three knocks, harder this time.

"Occupied," she called. Her voice came out rough. When was the last time she'd spoken out loud? Yesterday? Three days ago?

"I know you're in there." A man's voice, gravelly and unfamiliar. "Need to talk."

"Not interested."

"It's about your search."

She stopped breathing.

Nobody knew about the search. She'd been careful, hadn't told anyone, hadn't asked the wrong questions in the wrong places. She'd learned that lesson fast. Ask too much and people started forgetting right in front of you, started smoothing over their own memories to make room for the gaps.

The Story Disease. That's what the informant had called it, back when they still remembered. Knowledge of the erasure spreading like infection. Learn too much and you become part of what gets erased.

She crossed to the door but didn't open it. "Who are you?"

"Someone who remembers." A pause. "Not for long. That's why I'm here."

Her hand went to the lock and hesitated. "Remembers what?"

"The kid with the yellow scarf."

Impossible.

She yanked the door open.

The man in the hallway was old, sixty maybe, with a sea-worn face and hands scarred from rope work. A sailor, probably. He looked at her like he was seeing a ghost.

"You look like them," he said. "Around the eyes."

She couldn't speak. The yellow scarf. He'd said the yellow scarf. That meant he remembered. That meant it was real. That meant—

"You need to let me in," the man said. His eyes were wrong, unfocused, like he was looking at something just past her shoulder. "I don't have much time. It's starting."

She stepped back, let him in, and closed the door.

He stood in the middle of her tiny room, swaying slightly. When he spoke again, his words came slower and confused.

"I'm looking for... someone asked me to... there was a person. Young. They had questions about..."

She watched it happen. Watched his face go slack, watched the memory dissolve in real time the same way the journal entries dissolved. One moment knowing, the next moment smoothing over into nothing.

"Why am I here?" the man asked. He looked around the room like he'd never seen it before. "Do I know you?"

"No," she said quietly. "You don't."

He frowned and looked at the door. "I should go."

"Yeah. You should."

He left without looking back. In ten minutes he wouldn't remember coming here. In an hour he wouldn't remember the yellow scarf. In a day he'd forget there was ever anything to remember.

She closed the door and locked it, standing there in the gray morning light, shaking.

Someone remembered. For five minutes, someone had remembered.

And now they didn't.

She pulled the journal out from under the blanket and opened it to where she'd been writing. The entry about the stupid hat was still there. The words hadn't faded yet.

She kept reading back through the pages, looking for anything new, anything she'd missed.

She found something on the last page with writing. An entry from two weeks ago where she'd documented her route through the city, the people she'd talked to, the dead ends she'd hit.

But at the bottom, in handwriting that wasn't hers, there was a single line.

The Cartographer's Daughter knows about the seams.

She stared at it. That hadn't been there before. She'd read this page a hundred times. She would have noticed.

Except she wouldn't have. Because every time she read the journal, things were different. Things appeared and things disappeared. The past kept rewriting itself, and she was just trying to hold onto whatever fragments remained.

The Cartographer's Daughter. That was new, or old, or something that had always been there and she'd just forgotten.

She grabbed a fresh pen and started copying the line onto three other pages, spreading it out so if one disappeared maybe another would survive. Insurance, the only kind that worked anymore.

When she finished, she sat back on the bed. Exhausted. The kind of exhaustion that lived in your bones and made your skull feel too heavy for your neck.

She should sleep. Had to sleep eventually. But every time she closed her eyes she was afraid. Afraid she'd wake up and the journal would be blank, afraid she'd wake up and wouldn't remember why she had a journal at all.

Afraid she'd wake up and give up.

That was the worst part. Not the forgetting but the giving up. The moment when she'd look at this empty journal and think, why am I doing this? Why am I torturing myself over someone who doesn't exist?

That moment was coming. She could feel it like weather, the slow pressure drop before a storm.

She opened the journal again and flipped to the front. Found the first entry that still had words.

I made a promise. I don't remember what it was. But I remember I meant it.

That was her handwriting from six months ago, right after she'd realized what was happening. Right after she'd understood that forgetting was inevitable but giving up didn't have to be.

Below it, in fresher ink, she'd added more.

I will find them. I will bring them back. I will not stop.

Simple words, stupid words maybe, but they were all she had.

She checked the rest of the journal page by page, counting what was left.

Forty-seven pages with writing. Down from sixty-three last week. Some were full entries, some were fragments, some were just single words that didn't mean anything anymore.

Rain.

Thursday.

Don't trust the fog.

That last one she'd underlined three times. Couldn't remember why.

Near the back she found the date log, her attempt to track time objectively. Prove that days were passing, even when memory couldn't hold them.

The entries went back eleven months, one for each day. Sometimes just a number, sometimes a note about what she'd done.

But looking at it now, something was wrong.

There was a gap. Seven days, just nothing. The dates jumped from the fourteenth to the twenty-first with no record of what happened in between.

She'd been keeping this log religiously. She wouldn't have skipped a week. Which meant she'd written those days down and they'd been erased.

A whole week, gone. Seven days she'd lived through and now didn't exist.

Her hands started shaking again, worse this time.

Seven days. What had she done in those seven days? Where had she gone? Who had she talked to? What had she learned?

Nothing. No memory of any of it, just an empty space where the past used to be.

She grabbed the pen and started writing in the margin next to the gap.

Seven days missing. April 14-21. Don't know what happened. Don't know where I was. If I find out, write it here. Don't let this gap stay empty.

She paused, then added one more line.

If this keeps happening, I won't make it a year.

The morning light was getting stronger. Outside, the city was waking up. Footsteps in the hallway, voices in the street. Normal people doing normal things, not hunting for ghosts that were disappearing even as they chased them.

She should eat something. Should go outside, should start asking questions again even though questions were dangerous, even though every person she told was another person who might start forgetting.

But first she had to finish this. Had to document everything while she still could.

She turned to a blank page near the end and started writing. Not memories this time but facts, things she knew for certain even if she couldn't remember learning them.

The erasure is real. Not death but removal, methodical and deliberate.

Someone is cutting out pieces of the world. Making everyone forget.

They found proof. That's why they were erased.

I have to find that proof. Have to bring it back. Have to make people remember.

Time left: estimated six months. Maybe less.

The journal is the only record. When it's gone, they're gone.

I can't let that happen.

She stopped and read it back. It sounded insane, like the ravings of someone who'd lost their mind in a boarding house room and couldn't find their way back.

Maybe that's what she was.

But the yellow scarf was real. The old sailor had remembered it. For five minutes, he'd known exactly what she was talking about. That meant it wasn't just in her head. That meant someone existed, someone she'd loved enough to do this, someone worth remembering.

She closed the journal and held it against her chest. The leather was warm from her hands.

Six months. Maybe less. And the erasure was accelerating.

Time to move.

Time to find the Cartographer's Daughter.

Time to figure out what the hell "the seams" meant before she forgot that clue too.

She stood up. Her legs protested. Everything hurt these days, but pain meant she was still here, still searching, still refusing to give up.

The journal went into her bag. Always with her, never out of reach. The only tether she had to a past that was dissolving.

She checked the room one last time. Made sure she hadn't left anything important. The candle had burned down to nothing, the blanket on the bed was threadbare, and the whole place smelled like failure and seawater.

Good. She was done with it anyway.

She opened the door and stepped into the hallway. The morning light hit her face and for just a moment she felt it—the weight of everything she was carrying. The guilt and the fear and the desperate, stupid hope that maybe, somehow, she could fix this.

Then she locked the feeling away. Tucked it down deep where it couldn't slow her.

Because she had six months.

And a name.

And a mystery about seams.

It would have to be enough.