The Circle was quiet that night.
Not the silent kind of quiet.The charged kind.The kind that fills a room just before someone says something they can't take back.
Emir sat at the edge of the bookshelf ring, knees locked, fingers tight around a pen he hadn't used.
The woman from the café—the one who brought him in—was pacing slowly, reading from printed screenshots.
— "Seventeen thousand views.Dozens of comments.And now people are asking if you're writing fiction or revealing truth."
Emir shrugged.
— "Does it matter?"
She stopped pacing.
— "It does when people show up asking questions we aren't ready to answer."
"She's not wrong," the voice said."Revolutions don't fail because of doubt.They fail because someone forgets to prepare for success."
Another member, this one older, cleared his throat.
— "I've been reading his posts.There's weight in them.But... something else too."
Eyes turned to him.
— "Sometimes it doesn't feel like he's speaking alone."
That made the room colder.
Emir didn't flinch.
He was done pretending.
— "Maybe I'm not."
Murmurs.
Then a girl in her twenties, sharp voice and sharper eyes, leaned forward.
— "You hearing voices, Emir?"
He almost laughed.
Almost.
— "Something like that."
—
Later, in a corner of the shop, away from the others, the girl approached him again.
She held out her phone.
A poem.Old. Obscure.Something not taught in schools anymore.
"To remember the blade is to feel its shape.To forget the wound is to reopen it daily."
— "Where'd you find that?" he asked.
— "Didn't.It came to me in a dream.Wrote it down.Found out later it was something from 1937.Almost lost."
He blinked.
She smiled.
— "You're not the only one, Kara.Some of us don't carry one voice.We carry echoes.Fragments."
"Interesting," the voice inside him mused."So the memory is waking in more than one place.Good."
"Or bad," Emir thought. "Depends on what wakes up."
—
Back at home, he opened a new file on his laptop.
He didn't name it.Just typed one line:
"There are others.Not ghosts.Not gods.Just... memory trying to find a way back in."
He stared at the screen for a long time.
"You're not chosen," the voice said."You're part of a tide."
— "You think that's supposed to make me feel better?"
"No.It's supposed to make you hurry."
—