Chapter 118: They All Forgot

Astrid Vale

I didn’t trust myself anymore. Every time I replayed the feral incident in my head, some small part of me whispered that maybe I’d misunderstood something, maybe grief or exhaustion had twisted the memory into something worse than it actually was. I decided the only way to know for certain was to test it properly.

I found a woman near the market stalls I’d spoken with once before and asked her something completely unrelated, something harmless.

"What was served at the celebration last week?" I asked. "I heard there was some kind of gathering."

She brightened immediately. "Oh, the harvest meal. There was roasted root vegetable stew, fresh bread, and someone brought preserved fruit from the eastern stores. My daughter danced with half the younger children, it went on for hours."

She rattled off details easily, names of who’d attended, a small argument between two men over seating that had made everyone laugh afterward. Her memory was sharp, specific, entirely intact. Whatever was happening here, it wasn’t a general failure of memory. These people remembered plenty.

I let a beat pass before shifting the conversation. "I saw someone being taken to the medical ward yesterday. Was he sick?"

Her expression went blank. "I don’t know what you mean."

"A man," I said carefully. "There was some kind of incident, near the eastern corridor. A child was hurt."

She frowned, genuinely puzzled rather than evasive. "I don’t recall anything like that happening. You must be mistaken about someone else." She laughed, a little awkward, clearly trying to be polite about my apparent confusion, and excused herself a moment later.

I stood there feeling more certain than ever that I hadn’t imagined any of it, and more unsettled than I wanted to admit.

I tried again with someone else that afternoon, a younger man working near the storage buildings, phrasing my question more broadly this time.

"What happens when someone becomes feral here?" I asked.

His face shifted immediately, discomfort settling into his shoulders. "The doctors handle it."

"Has anyone ever died from it?"

"No," he said quickly.

"Are people removed from the community permanently, when it happens?"

He hesitated. "They’re taken care of."

That phrase again. The same vague, weightless answer I kept running into every time I asked something uncomfortable, delivered with the same careful blankness, like a script everyone here had memorized without ever discussing why.

I needed one more test before I trusted the pattern forming in my head. I found an older woman sitting near her doorway and asked her, casually, about something small.

"Did you hear about the vase that broke at dinner the other night? One of the children knocked it over, I think."

"Oh, that was little Fen," she said, smiling. "His mother was so embarrassed, she offered to replace it three times before anyone convinced her it wasn’t necessary."

Perfect recall. No hesitation, no confusion, no vague deflection.

That confirmed it in my mind. This wasn’t some general fog settling over their memories, some collective exhaustion or trauma dulling everything equally. They remembered ordinary things with total clarity. Meals, names, arguments, celebrations, the smallest domestic details of daily life. But anything touching the feral incident, the man, his son’s injury, the soldiers, simply didn’t exist in their minds at all.

That was so much worse than losing time. This wasn’t forgetting. This was selective, deliberate, and precise, like someone had gone in and cut a single thread out of the fabric of what they were allowed to know, leaving everything around it untouched.

I sought out an older man I’d spoken with a few times before, someone who seemed to carry more weight behind his eyes than most residents here, like he understood more of this place than he let on.

"What are the cursed ones?" I asked quietly, watching his reaction closely.

His face changed instantly. Not confusion this time. Fear, sharp and immediate, and his eyes flicked around us before he leaned closer.

"Don’t ask about them," he said, his voice low.

"Why not?"

He didn’t answer, glancing again toward the corridor behind us like he expected someone to be listening.

"Who are they?" I pressed.

He stepped back from me, putting distance between us like proximity itself was dangerous. "You are from the surface," he said. "You don’t understand what you’re asking."

Then he walked away, faster than his usual pace, leaving me standing there with more questions than I’d started with and a cold, creeping certainty settling into my chest.

I stood alone for a long moment, letting everything click into place. The cursed ones. The feral man. The medical ward with its guarded door and howling occupants. The blood containers marked with symbols I’d seen before, on my own examination tray. The doctor’s careful, almost gentle warning to leave certain questions alone. And now this old man’s fear, immediate and instinctive, at the mere mention of a phrase.

I didn’t know yet whether the curse itself caused people to forget, some side effect of whatever transformation the father had gone through, or whether something else entirely was reaching into their minds and removing specific memories on purpose. But I understood now that there was an entire category of people here that nobody was permitted to remember. An entire group, erased not from existence but from memory, still walking somewhere beneath these same tunnels while everyone around them carried on as though they’d never been born at all.

I made myself think through it once more, deliberately, forcing the memory to stay solid this time instead of letting it slip. The father kneeling in front of his son, teasing him about running ahead. His breathing changing, wrong and ragged. His teeth lengthening, his bones twisting beneath his skin into something that wasn’t fully anything. The boy’s scream. The bite. The soldiers moving with practiced efficiency, restraining him like they’d done this a hundred times before.

Then the mother’s blank, offended face. I don’t have a husband. The boy’s arm, unmarked, unbroken, healed as though nothing had ever touched it. An entire crowd of people who’d stood there and watched, now insisting none of it had happened at all.

They weren’t forgetting everything. That was the part that finally settled into my chest with real weight, cold and undeniable.

They were forgetting him.

And I was starting to believe, standing there in that corridor with the old man’s warning still ringing in my ears, that they were forgetting everyone like him too.

Someone wasn’t simply letting these people’s memories fade on their own.

Someone was deciding, carefully and deliberately, exactly which memories they were allowed to keep.