The city of Oakhaven breathed in shades of charcoal and damp cobblestone, a place where the fog didn't just sit; it lingered like an uninvited guest. In the heart of the Narrow District stood a shop with no sign, only a window displaying a single, empty birdcage made of bone. This was the sanctum of Elias, the only man in the world who Knew the geometry of a human soul. Elias was a Memory Tailor, a title that sounded poetic but felt, in the quiet hours of the night, like a
slow-motion execution.
Elias sat at his workbench, illuminated by a lamp fueled by pressurized glow-worm oil. In his right hand, he held a needle crafted from a splinter of a fallen star, cooled in the tears of a widow-or so the legends said. In reality, it was a tool of surgical precision, capable of piercing the ethereal veil between the physical brain and the metaphysical mind. Before him sat an old mannamed Silas, whose eyes were milky with the fog of onset dementia. Silas was losing the memory of his daughters face, and he had come to Elias to have it stitched back into place.
To work on others, Elias had to maintain a mind
of absolute, sterile clarity. A Tailors mind was like a hard drive with limited storage; to make room for the complex, jagged memories of his clients, Elias had to systematically "unspool" his own life. He had started small, years ago, discarding the names of childhood bullies and the taste of sour apples. But as his reputation grew, so did the necessity of his emptiness. By the age of thirty, Elias had discarded the memory of his mothers voice, the location of his family home, and the name of the girl he had Kissed behind the clock tower when he was sixteen.
He reached into the air above Silass head, his fingers moving with a grace that bordered on the supernatural. He caught a loose thread of graylight-a fading neural pathway-and began to loop it through the silver needle. He worked with a frantic, quiet intensity, tucking the frayed ends of the old man's consciousness back into the sturdy fabric of his long-term recall. Each stitch cost Elias a piece of himself. To stabilize Silass memory, Elias had to offer a "counter-weight" from his own mind. Today, to save the image of a daughter for a stranger, Elias reached into his own psyche and pulled out the memory of his first dog. He felt the phantom warmth of fur and the echo of a bark vanish into the silver needle,
replaced by a cold, clinical void.
By the time the clock struck midnight, Silas was weeping with joy, clutching a photograph of a woman he now recognized. Elias, however, felt a bit more hollow, a bit more like a ghost inhabiting a suit of clothes. He ushered the old man out and sat in the silence, staring at the heaps of gray thread on his floor-the discarded remnants of a thousand lives he had touched butcould never Keep. He was the wealthiest man in Oakhaven in terms of experiences, yet he was the poorest in terms of a soul.