I Loved You Then

The name felt like a door he could still find in the dark, until he tried to say it again and found it snagging in his throat. The syllables came out, but the air around them refused to hold the sound. It didn’t echo. It didn’t settle in any memory. It slid away as if the hall itself had been rewritten to forget.

Taul’s hands shook. He forced them to be steady, scanning the chamber. Rows of empty thrones ringed the interior like teeth. Each throne wore a crown of warped metal, each crown etched with a king’s name. Or it should have. The inscriptions looked scraped clean, letters eroded until they were only shallow grooves. Even the stone portraits—faded reliefs of sovereigns with eyes carved too deep—had blank faces where names ought to be.

He rose fully, wincing as bruises flared. His boots were wrong on his feet; the leather was newer, the stitching unfamiliar. The armor at his chest had been replaced with something that fit too well and was polished too recently, like a body had been dressed without asking permission.

“Jazim Gonzales Alos,” he said again, louder. The hall offered no response.

A guard’s shout snapped through the archways. Footsteps thundered in disciplined rhythm, the kind trained to sound like authority even when terror ran beneath it. Taul turned toward the sound, every nerve tightening. He wanted answers—proof that she existed in this realm, somewhere in the rewritten kingdom. If the name couldn’t reach the hall, maybe it could reach people.

Maybe.

The doors at the far end of the chamber burst open. Torches flared, throwing harsh gold over armor and spears and the faces of men and women wearing the crest of Eastern North—except the crest was altered, reworked to match a history that had moved on without them.

“By order of the Crown,” a woman in a captain’s coat barked, her breath steaming, her sword angled at Taul’s chest. “State your business in the Hall of Unremembered Kings.”

Taul’s gaze flicked past her to the guards behind—too many, too coordinated. He kept his hands visible. “I’m looking for someone.”

“You’re looking for trouble.” The captain’s eyes raked over him, catching on the faint shimmer still clinging to his fingers where he’d touched the broken runes. Her expression sharpened. “You’ve been near the unmaking circle.”

"It—" Taul started, then stopped. He could feel the hall’s refusal pressing against his words, flattening them. He tried again, choosing safer ground. “I need records. Names. Anything.”

“Records?” The captain’s laugh was humorless. “There are no records here. That’s the point.”

Taul swallowed. “Then tell me what this hall was built to protect.”

The captain’s sword dipped a fraction. “It protects the kingdom from those who tear at memory. You’re either ignorant or worse.”

“I’m not here to tear anything.” The thread around his fingers tightened again, burning faintly, as if the magic recognized his attempt to grasp at it. Taul jerked his hand back. Heat licked his skin through the glove. He didn’t have time to interrogate the pain.

He needed a place where his question could land.

“Jazim,” he said, and hated how small the word sounded even as he forced it out. “Does anyone know Jazim?”

The captain blinked once, and the guards behind her exchanged glances—confusion, then something sharper. Suspicion.

“Who?” the captain demanded. “Who did you say?”

Taul felt the shape of the moment shift. He’d asked for a name, and the kingdom had treated it like a curse.

“I told you,” he said, voice rough. “I’m looking for a person. Jazim Gonzales Alos.”

Silence stretched, thick and wrong. The torches hissed as if offended by the air.

Then a guard in the back stepped forward, lowering his spear and pointing at Taul’s wrist. “You’re bleeding.”

Taul hadn’t noticed. A thin line of red had opened where the magic thread had tightened. It wasn’t a wound from steel. It looked like ink dragged across skin, like the hall had marked him for asking.

“Stop him!” the captain shouted, and the torches roared brighter.

Steel came in a rush. Taul moved on instinct, rolling beneath the first thrust, catching a glimpse of his own reflection in a polished shield—his eyes wild, his hair damp with sweat, his face half-lit by fire. He drove his shoulder into a guard’s midsection and felt ribs give, the impact solid enough to anchor him in reality. The man grunted and stumbled, and Taul used the gap to surge toward the throne ring where the runes had been burned.

If the hall refused his words, maybe it would still offer shape. Maybe the magic scars would point him somewhere else—somewhere that remembered through the fracture.

He lunged for the brass circle.

A barrier snapped into place midair, invisible until it caught his momentum. Taul slammed into it and rebounded hard enough that his teeth clicked. Pain flared down his spine. He grunted, dizzy, and looked up at the captain, who advanced with controlled fury.

“You were warned,” she said. “You’re not the first to come here after the Great Fracture.”

“Great Fracture,” Taul echoed, and the words struck like flint. Darkar had called it a strategy. The kingdom called it something already happened and already named. Already complete.

The captain’s expression tightened. “The Crown doesn’t tolerate threats to memory. You’ll be taken for interrogation.”

Interrogation. He pictured iron chairs and truth wards that pulled words from the mind like thread from cloth. He pictured torture designed to break a person until they answered correctly.

He didn’t have the luxury of time. Not if Jazim existed at all in this realm. Not if the distance between them had stretched so far the hall itself forgot her.

Taul’s fingers found something on the flagstone near the broken circle. A small object lay half-buried in ash and residue—blackened metal with a notch cut into it, warm as a coal despite the cold air. He snatched it up, the heat biting his palm.

The captain saw it and hissed. “That’s not yours.”

“It’s a key,” Taul said, though he didn’t know how he knew. His thumb pressed into the notch. The metal flared once, and a line of light crawled across his skin, forming a symbol only half-formed. The air around him trembled, and for the first time since he woke, the hall’s refusal wavered.

A thin sound rose from the brass scars—like a page turning in another room.

Taul stared at the key. “Where does it go?”

The captain’s eyes widened. “Put it down.”

Taul didn’t. He tried the symbol again, twisting the key as if it belonged in his hand. The runes on the flagstones stirred—scraped grooves deepened, letters reappearing for a heartbeat before smearing into blankness again. A map shape flashed in the air: not a full picture, but a path of light splitting into branches, each branch ending in a place name that burned out before he could read it.

Still, he felt direction. He felt the pull like gravity.

The guard nearest him raised his spear to pin him.

Taul made a choice that tasted like blood. If he stayed in this chamber, they would cage him. If he ran, he might lose the only trace he had of a way forward.

He sprinted.

The captain barked orders, and the guards surged after him. As Taul bolted across the throne ring, the empty crowns seemed to tilt, though the stone didn’t move. The air thickened, becoming harder to breathe. The hall was becoming hostile to his momentum—punishing him for trying to use what it had tried to erase.

He ducked under a spear and slid between two guards, and the key burned hotter in his fist. It wasn’t just heat anymore. It vibrated faintly, like it was responding to a frequency only his blood could tune.

“Stop!” the captain called. Her voice carried authority sharpened by fear. “You can’t leave with that!”

Taul didn’t slow. He aimed for the side corridor that led out of the chamber—a narrow passage with walls carved in spirals, each spiral filled with shallow grooves that looked like writing without letters. The grooves looked fresh, too. Someone had been here recently, cleaning away what didn’t fit.

He shoved through the corridor’s arch and burst into dim torchlight.

A smell hit him—oil and damp stone, the underside of the kingdom where history didn’t get polished. His boots thudded on steps descending into a cooler darkness. Water dripped from somewhere overhead with steady patience. The sound seemed to measure his breath.

Behind him, the guards’ footsteps splashed and echoed, growing louder with every second.

Taul’s mind raced with the urgency of the simple question: Does Jazim exist here?

The key in his hand flared again, and the air ahead shimmered. Not a door. A seam. A place where reality had been stitched and could be unstitched if pulled hard enough.

He reached out, not with his hand but with his will, pushing against the seam as if it were a curtain.

The seam resisted—then gave with a snap.

Light tore open, crimson threading through gray stone, painting the corridor edges in unstable color. The torch flames behind him guttered, their gold turning sickly. Taul stepped closer, feeling heat rise from the opening like a breath exhaled from a furnace.

A sound came from within: distant chanting, too low to understand, like a choir singing through walls. The key in his fist pulsed in time with it.

He heard the guards spill into the corridor behind him. Metal clanged. A curse burst out—someone tripped, then recovered.

“Don’t,” the captain said, his voice suddenly strained. “That’s a gate.”

Taul didn’t turn to look. He couldn’t afford to let the captain’s tone become a leash. He stared into the opening.

Beyond it lay darkness threaded with pale lines, like maps drawn on the underside of the world. The crimson light wasn’t decoration. It was a warning.

The key burned so hot it turned his grip into pain. It was trying to force itself into his palm, anchoring.

A new sensation crawled up his arm—something like a message pressed into his bones. He saw words then, not in any language he knew but in the way his mind recognized meaning without sound.

The key flared and formed a symbol in the air, then a sentence that refused to be read by sight. It had to be felt.

His vision blurred. The corridor wavered. His ears rang with a pressure that made his skull ache.

He staggered, clutching the key tighter.

The message burned into him anyway, a warning that didn’t care if he understood. It carried one clear idea, sharp as a blade’s edge:

He was being tracked.

Taul’s breath came short. “By who?” he whispered, though no one could hear him over the chaos behind.

The captain reached the archway and stopped short as if the gate’s threshold had a boundary even steel couldn’t cross. Her sword trembled in her hand. “Put the key away,” she demanded, quieter now. “If you step through, you’ll be claimed.”

“Claimed by Darkar?” Taul asked, and the name tasted different here—less like an enemy and more like a weather system. Even in this rewritten kingdom, Darkar the Great’s victory had seeped into the language of fear.

The captain swallowed. “Darkar has already won in ways we don’t understand. The Crown doesn’t speak of the rest.”

“So it’s true,” Taul said, and he hated the relief in his voice. It meant there were rules here, even if they were cruelly altered. “Then the fracture rewrote more than history.”

The captain’s eyes flicked to the key. “It rewrote everything.”

Taul’s mouth went dry. If memories and records had been rewritten, then Jazim’s existence might have been excised from the world itself—until the map key dragged the truth back into reach. Or until it punished him for trying.

He shifted his weight toward the seam. The key pulsed in his fist, and the gate responded, crimson threads tightening into a shape like a path being chosen.

His heart hammered once, hard enough to hurt.

“Where does it lead?” he asked the captain, because answers were rare and he refused to rely on luck.

The captain’s gaze didn’t soften. “It leads to the places the kingdom forgot. Places where your kind doesn’t belong.”

“My kind,” Taul echoed. He glanced at his bleeding wrist, then at the key, then back at the captain. “Then why did the hall mark me?”

The captain’s face tightened at the question, as if something in her wanted to deny it. “Because you asked for what no longer exists.”

Taul understood, suddenly, with a clarity that felt like ice: the kingdom wasn’t only ignorant. It was actively protecting the rewritten world from recognition. They weren’t just hunting him because he looked dangerous. They were hunting him because the act of searching could tear something else loose.

Behind the captain, one of the guards raised a hand, fingers glowing faintly with ward light. A binding spell. The kind meant to catch a man before he could cross a threshold.

Taul didn’t wait. He pushed the key into the seam.

The gate shuddered like a living thing, and the corridor’s torchlight exploded into a spray of red-gold sparks. Taul felt the world fold around the key, felt pressure in his teeth and eyes, and felt the floor vanish beneath his boots.

He shoved forward anyway.

For one heartbeat, the gate showed him something—crimson skies over broken towers, a skyline like a wound. He saw a figure moving through that light, her posture familiar in the way his body remembered even when his mind struggled to name her. Her hair—dark and braided—moved like a banner in wind that didn’t belong to this world.

Then the vision tore away.

The gate swallowed him with a sound like paper ripping.

The last thing he heard before darkness took him was the captain’s shout, raw with panic: “It warned him—don't let him go!”

The key burned in his hand even as the corridor vanished. He clung to it through the collapse, through the fold of distance, through the sensation of being pulled across fractured lines.

And as the gate carried him away, the warning pressed itself deeper into his thoughts, burning hotter than the metal: his name—whatever it had been in this rewritten realm—would not protect him.

The kingdom forgot Jazim.

But the multiverse remembered how to hunt the ones who tried to find her.

End of chapter one. 7 more chapters and about 21,142 words in the full book.