Chapter 8 - The Journal Degrades

She knew before she opened it.

Something in the weight felt different. Lighter. Like the bag had lost substance overnight, which was impossible because paper didn't just evaporate. Except it did. She'd watched it happen a hundred times. She just hadn't expected it to happen this fast.

Linn was still asleep, curled near the dead fire with her pack under her head. The sun was barely up, gray light filtering through clouds that promised rain later. Normal morning. Normal world going about its normal business.

She pulled out the journal and opened it.

For a long moment she just stared.

The first third of the book was blank. Not faded, not smudged. Blank. Pages she'd filled with years of memories, observations, fragments of a life she was trying to hold together. All of it gone. White paper where words used to be, smooth and unmarked, as if she'd never written a single thing.

Her hands were shaking. She flipped through the empty pages one by one, hoping she'd missed something, hoping there was at least a word or a sentence that had survived. But there was nothing. The ink hadn't just disappeared. It had been erased so completely that she couldn't even see the indentations where her pen had pressed.

Gone.

She kept turning pages. More blank. More nothing. Finally, maybe a third of the way through, she found writing. Her own cramped handwriting, the letters pressed hard into the paper like she'd been angry when she wrote them.

The informant forgot everything. Watched it happen. His name was Morrow. Or Morris. Something with an M.

Was it? She tried to picture the man in the tavern and got nothing but a vague shape. Thin, maybe. Older. Had he had a beard? She couldn't remember. The memory was there, she could feel its outline, but the details had gone soft around the edges.

She kept reading.

The Cartographer's Daughter showed me maps. Places that used to exist. The Vethren Reach. The Sorrow Chain. She said someone came to see her before me. Someone who looked like me.

That was still true. She could still remember the lighthouse, the maps covering every wall, the old woman's face as she struggled to hold onto things that kept slipping away. But even that memory felt thin now. Fragile. Like tissue paper held up to light.

She turned more pages. Found entries she didn't remember writing. Descriptions of places she didn't recognize, names that meant nothing to her. Had she actually been to these places? Had these names actually mattered?

Or was she reading the journal of a stranger?

"You're up early."

Linn's voice made her flinch. The girl was sitting up, rubbing sleep from her eyes, looking at her with that open curious expression that hadn't learned yet to expect bad news.

"Go back to sleep."

"Can't. Once I'm awake, I'm awake." Linn stretched, yawned, noticed the journal in her hands. "What are you reading?"

"Nothing." She closed the book. Held it against her chest the way she always did, like pressure could keep the words from disappearing. "We should get moving."

But Linn was watching her now with sharper eyes. The girl was young but she wasn't stupid.

"Something happened. You look like someone died."

The words hit harder than they should have. Someone had died. Or something worse than died. And the only proof of their existence was dissolving in her hands.

She didn't answer. Started packing up her things, movements mechanical, trying not to think about the blank pages. Trying not to calculate how long she had before there was nothing left.

Linn didn't let it go. "You can tell me. Whatever it is. I'm not going to forget."

"That's the problem." The words came out rougher than she intended. "Everyone forgets. Everyone I talk to, everyone who helps me, everyone who learns what I'm looking for. They all end up with holes in their heads."

"I know. You told me."

"I'm telling you again because you don't seem to understand." She turned to face the girl, and something in her expression must have been frightening because Linn actually leaned back. "The journal is almost empty. A third of it went blank overnight. And I can't remember what was on those pages. I can't remember things I knew yesterday. Things I've known my whole life."

Linn was quiet for a moment. Then, carefully, she asked, "The person you're looking for?"

"I can't remember their face. Couldn't for a while now. But I used to be able to remember moments. Specific things we did together. Times we laughed or fought or just sat in silence." She pressed her palm against the journal's leather cover. "Those are going too. I know I loved them. I can feel it, like a bruise that won't heal. But I can't remember why."

She heard how crazy it sounded. Loving someone you couldn't remember. Chasing a ghost that was disappearing even as you ran.

But Linn just nodded slowly, like it made perfect sense. "My grandmother said something like that once. She said there were people she missed so much it hurt, even though she couldn't remember their names. She called them her phantom family."

"Phantom family."

"People who got erased. She knew they'd existed because she could feel the spaces they left behind. Even when she couldn't remember anything about them."

She thought about that. The spaces people left behind. Not memories but absences. Holes in your life where someone used to fit.

That's what she had now. A hole shaped like a person, slowly getting smaller as the edges closed in on themselves.

"I need to try to remember." She sat back down, opened the journal to a blank page near the middle. "I need to write down everything I can before it's gone."

"I'll help. Tell me what you remember and I'll write it with you."

"You can't touch the journal."

"I can write in my own." Linn pulled a small notebook from her pack, battered and water-stained but intact. "Two copies. In case one disappears."

It was such a simple idea. So obvious that she should have thought of it months ago. But she'd been alone for so long, hoarding the journal like a miser hoarding gold, convinced that sharing the burden would somehow make it worse.

Maybe she'd been wrong.

"Fine." She uncapped her pen. "We start with what I know for certain and work backward."

They sat across from each other in the gray morning light, writing in their separate books, comparing notes. She spoke and Linn listened, scratching down every word like it was precious. And maybe it was. Maybe every word was the last time it would exist anywhere.

"Yellow scarf. They always wore a yellow scarf, even when it was warm. Said it was lucky."

"What kind of yellow? Bright or faded?"

"Faded. A soft yellow, like old butter. The edges were frayed."

She watched Linn write it down and felt something loosen in her chest. Two copies now. Even if her pages went blank, Linn's might survive.

"What else?"

"They collected things. Smooth rocks, mostly. Would fill their pockets with them until their clothes sagged. I used to yell at them about it."

"Why rocks?"

"I don't know. I never asked." The admission hurt. She'd had years to ask and she'd never bothered. Had thought there would always be time for questions like that.

"What about their voice?"

She closed her eyes and tried to hear it. There had been a voice. Someone had spoken to her, laughed with her, told her secrets in the dark. But when she reached for the sound of it, all she found was silence.

"I can't remember."

"Try. High or low? Fast or slow?"

"I don't know. It's just gone."

Linn didn't push. Just made a note in her book and waited for the next thing.

They worked through the morning like that, extracting fragments from the wreckage of her memory. Some things came easily. The yellow scarf. The smooth rocks. A vague impression of someone who asked too many questions and never accepted easy answers.

Other things wouldn't come at all.

Their name. Still gone, a black hole where a word should be.

Their face. Blur and shadow, features that dissolved when she tried to focus on them.

The last time she saw them. Something important had happened, she was sure of that. A conversation, a choice, a moment that changed everything. But the details had been scraped clean.

"Tell me about the day they disappeared," Linn said. Her voice was gentle but there was steel underneath. She wasn't going to let this go.

"I don't remember."

"Anything. Even a feeling."

She closed her eyes again. Reached for that day, the one she'd replayed in her head a thousand times, the one she'd written about in the journal pages that were now blank.

"Guilt." The word came out hoarse. "I remember feeling guilty. Like I'd done something wrong or failed to do something right."

"What did you do?"

"I don't know." Her eyes were burning. "I've been carrying this guilt for months and I can't remember what I did. I just know it was my fault. Whatever happened to them, I let it happen. Or I caused it. Or I could have stopped it and didn't."

The guilt was still there, solid and certain, even though the memory that created it was gone. A scar with no wound. Evidence of damage she couldn't explain.

"Maybe you didn't do anything wrong," Linn said quietly. "Maybe you just feel guilty because you survived and they didn't."

"That's not it."

"How do you know?"

She didn't have an answer for that. How do you know something is your fault when you can't remember what happened? How do you carry blame for a crime you can't recall committing?

You just did. You carried it because putting it down felt like betrayal.

"Keep writing," she said. "I want to get everything down before I lose more."

They worked through midday and into the afternoon. She talked until her voice went rough, dredging up every scrap and fragment she could find. The city with wrong angles. The road that looped. The Cartographer's Daughter burning her maps by firelight.

But as she talked, she realized something that made her stomach drop.

She was second-guessing everything.

The market where she'd seen the old woman with the blue flowers. Had that been in the morning or the afternoon? She'd written it down once, she was sure, but the page was blank now and she couldn't quite remember.

The informant in the tavern. Morrow. Morris. Something with an M. Or was it an N? Had his name even started with M?

The more she tried to pin down the details, the more they slipped away. She was filling in blanks with guesses now, inventing plausible details to replace the ones she'd lost. And the worst part was she couldn't tell the difference anymore between what she actually remembered and what she was making up.

"Stop." Linn's voice cut through the spiral. "You're going in circles."

"I need to get it right."

"You can't get it right if you don't know what right is." The girl set down her pen and looked at her with those too-old eyes. "You're trying to remember things you've forgotten. But every time you reach for them, you're just grabbing at shadows. And sometimes you catch something, but you can't tell if it's real or if you just made it up."

She wanted to argue. Wanted to insist that her memories were real, that she could trust herself, that she knew the difference between truth and invention.

But she couldn't. Because Linn was right.

"So what do I do?"

"You stop trying so hard." Linn picked up her own notebook, flipped through the pages she'd filled. "We have what we have. Two copies. Maybe some of it's wrong, but some of it's right too. We keep moving forward and hope the next piece of evidence is something we can actually verify."

"And the things I've already lost?"

Linn didn't answer. She didn't have to.

They made camp early that night. She was exhausted in a way that had nothing to do with physical effort, the kind of tired that came from fighting a battle you couldn't win.

Linn started a fire while she sat with the journal in her lap, flipping through the remaining pages. Counting what was left.

Forty-two pages with writing. Down from sixty-three a week ago. Down from who knew how many before that.

At this rate, she had maybe four months. Maybe less. The erasure was accelerating, feeding on itself, consuming faster and faster the closer it got to the end.

"I need to write more." She said it out loud, though she wasn't sure if she was talking to Linn or to herself. "I need to capture everything I can remember before it's gone."

"You've been writing all day."

"It's not enough. It's never enough."

She found a blank page and started filling it. Not memories this time but observations. Things she could verify, things that existed outside her own head.

We're three days south of the lighthouse. Traveling toward the Sutured Lands. Linn is with me. Young, dark hair, her grandmother remembered things that got erased.

I have a compass that points at my fear. I have a map of the seams. I have a name: the Editors. The ones who cut things out of the world.

I don't know what I'll find in the Sutured Lands. But the person I'm searching for went there. They found something. And then they were erased.

She paused. Tried to think of what else she knew for certain.

I loved them. I failed them. I'm going to find them and bring them back.

I have maybe four months.

I'm not going to give up.

She wrote that last line three times, on three different pages, like a spell or a prayer. Words to keep her moving when everything else fell apart.

The fire crackled and popped. Linn was cooking something that smelled like it might actually be edible, humming a tune under her breath. Normal sounds. Normal night.

But she kept writing anyway, filling page after page with everything she could think of. Details that might not matter. Observations that might not be true. Anything, everything, just to feel like she was fighting back.

Her hand was cramping by the time she stopped. The candle had burned down to a stub and the ink bottle was nearly empty and she'd used up a dozen pages that might be blank by morning.

Worth it. Every word was worth it.

"You should sleep," Linn said. "Tomorrow's going to be hard."

"They're all hard."

"Yeah." The girl handed her a bowl of something stew-like. "But tomorrow we follow the coordinates. Tomorrow we get closer to the Sutured Lands."

She took the bowl. Ate without tasting. Her mind was still on the journal, on the blank pages, on the memories she'd lost and the ones she was losing.

But Linn was right. Tomorrow would come whether she was ready or not.

She finished eating and lay down near the fire, the journal tucked against her chest. The leather was warm from her body heat, familiar and solid. The most important thing she owned. Maybe the only thing that mattered anymore.

Sleep came slowly, in fits and starts. Every time she closed her eyes she saw blank pages, felt words dissolving between her fingers. She dreamed of reaching for something she couldn't quite touch, calling a name she couldn't quite hear.

But somewhere in the darkness, just before dawn, she found the yellow scarf again. Wrapped around a wrist, bright against gray stone, pointing toward something she needed to see.

She held onto that image as long as she could.

And when she woke up, she wrote it down before she could forget.