The first thing the devils took was a name.
It happened in a border village that had already been rebuilt twice. A woman stood in the square screaming—not in pain, not in fear, but in confusion so sharp it cut through everyone who heard it.
"My son," she cried. "I had a son. I know I did. I can feel the shape of him—but I can't remember his face. I can't remember his name."
No wounds marked her.
No magic lingered in the air.
The devils had learned subtlety.
By the time Aldir arrived, three more people were afflicted—not amnesiac, not possessed, but hollowed. Pieces of their identity had been removed with surgical precision: relationships, convictions, moments of moral weight.
Not random.
Targeted.
"They're not erasing memory," Isabella whispered as she knelt beside the woman, taking her trembling hands. "They're erasing meaning."
Aldir felt it too—the necromantic field was thinning in places it had never thinned before. Death still occurred. Souls still passed. But the thread that tied experience to consequence was being eaten away.
The devils were no longer stealing souls.
They were stealing continuity.
And Aldir realized with cold certainty:
They were attacking the one thing his new necromancy depended on.
Accountability required memory.
Cycle required identity.
Without those, death became empty again.
The cost came quickly.
Aldir began to forget small things at first. Not names, not places—those remained intact—but sensations. The taste of food. The warmth of fire. The feeling of rest.
Then memories began to blur at the edges.
He would wake and take a moment too long to recognize the ceiling above him. He would reach for necromancy and feel resistance—not external, but internal, as if part of him no longer remembered why he was reaching.
Isabella noticed.
"You hesitated," she said one morning after he failed to close a minor rift cleanly.
"I recalibrated," he replied.
"You forgot."
He did not deny it.
The devils came to him in fragments now—not as unified presence, but as echoes stitched into gaps in his mind.
Every denial costs you, they murmured. Every soul you return weakens the anchor you stand on.
Aldir clenched his jaw. "Then I'll pay."
You already are.
The truth revealed itself slowly and cruelly: Aldir's new necromancy did not draw from domination or pact.
It drew from self.
From memory. From identity. From the story he told himself about who he was and why he chose restraint.
Each time he restored cycle, he spent a fragment of that story.
He began writing things down.
Not spells.
Memories.
Facts about himself. About Isabella. About choices he had made and why.
Some nights he would read pages he did not remember writing.
Isabella confronted her own cost differently.
Her magic faded as her body strengthened.
She tired like a human now. Bled like one. A wound that would once have closed under alignment lingered, aching.
One evening, after nearly collapsing during a healing effort, she sat by the fire staring at her hands.
"I'm becoming mortal," she said quietly.
Aldir looked up from his notes. "You always were."
She laughed weakly. "No. I was adjacent to it. I stood between. Now…" She flexed her fingers. "Now if I make a mistake, it stays."
He watched her carefully. "Does that frighten you?"
"Yes," she admitted. "And it makes everything sharper."
She met his gaze. "Is this how you've always lived?"
He hesitated.
"Yes," he said at last. "And no."
She moved closer, sitting beside him. "If you lose yourself doing this—if your memory erodes until you don't know why you're fighting—what happens to us?"
The question cut deeper than any devil's whisper.
"I've prepared contingencies," Aldir said.
"That's not an answer."
He closed the journal slowly. "Then here is the answer I didn't want to give."
He turned to her fully.
"If I forget you," he said, voice steady but eyes dark, "you must leave me."
Her breath caught. "No."
"If I become empty power again—if restraint vanishes because meaning does—you must stop me."
Tears welled, furious and helpless. "You're asking me to kill you."
"I'm asking you to remember me," he corrected softly. "When I can't."
Silence fell between them, heavy with everything unsaid.
The devils struck again before she could respond.
This time, they targeted Aldir's past.
Memories of the gallows fractured. Faces blurred. The clarity of injustice dulled.
Aldir screamed—not in pain, but in terror—as the foundation of his restraint began to erode.
Isabella acted without thinking.
She placed her hands on his temples and did something she had never attempted before.
She aligned—not with land, not with people—but with him.
With his grief. His rage. His choices.
She anchored his identity externally.
The backlash nearly killed her.
When it ended, Aldir collapsed into her arms, gasping—not for breath, but for self.
"I'm here," she whispered fiercely. "You are Aldir Frost. You chose restraint. You chose me. You chose the world."
He clung to those words like lifelines.
When the devils withdrew, wounded but triumphant in intent, Aldir understood the final shape of the war.
They would not destroy the world.
They would make it forget why it mattered.
And the cost of stopping them would not be blood.
It would be selfhood.
Isabella rested her forehead against his.
"I won't be immortal enough to do this forever," she said quietly.
He nodded. "And I won't remember enough to do it alone."
They sat there as dawn crept over a world struggling to hold onto itself.
And for the first time, neither feared death.
They feared erasure.
Which meant the war was no longer about survival—
—but about remembrance.