The boy had no name—not anymore.
In Hollow's Reach, where the fog didn't just choke the air but sank into your skin, names were fleeting. They were spent, not earned. Whispers passed along the alleys as easily as coins. Ash was one of them. Just another vagabond in the shadows, a ghost of a name in a city that long stopped believing in ghosts.
Ash had never fought to hold onto it. Not when it was first whispered by the traders who passed through the slums. Not when the locals called him that—a joke at his expense. And now, when even his own reflection grew faint in the water and the windows, he wore it as a shroud.
People forgot him. No, not in the casual way people forgot faces. Ash was erased. It was as though the universe itself looked away when he entered a room.
A shopkeeper could stare straight at him, hand hovering over an empty counter, and then blink—only to realize he had been standing there, the whole time, unnoticed.
"Do you need something, kid?" they'd ask. The blank stare would flash before their eyes. Then they'd forget the question, forget him altogether.
It was the silence that terrified him. Not the fact that he wasn't seen, but that he wasn't remembered.
Once, he had hoped it was a passing curse—some childhood malady. But the longer it persisted, the more he understood: This was his world. The world didn't know he existed. But no matter what, he had to survive in it.
The ruins of Hollow's Reach were a haunting reminder of what was lost. The towering spires of the city once gleamed like gods' teeth in the sun. Now, it was a crumbled heap, fractured by forgotten wars, storms that killed in silence, and the forgotten promises of power.
Ash had no time to wonder what it had been. He didn't dare.
Today, he had a job to do. A relic to find.
It was a dangerous task. Not just because the Ruins were cursed, but because the dangerous knowledge inside them was even worse.
Relics were more than simple artifacts. They were living memories—shards of lost time, beings sealed away in places only the desperate dared to reach. The last of the old world's power lay in these forgotten corners of the city. The higher-ups in the ruling families traded in relics, stored them away, hoping to unlock their secrets before the next war.
Ash wasn't doing this for them. He didn't care about the relics, not really. He was just trying to find something—anything—to make him whole again.
He'd heard rumors about a particular relic in the depths of the Forgotten Tower, a crumbling edifice near the city's edge. People said it was dangerous. People always said that. But when people began whispering about it in the underworld, he had no choice but to investigate.
If there was a chance to change his curse, to stop being the one thing everyone forgot, this might be it.