I Inherited the Last Words of History

A rift split open above the city, and an ancient battlefield fell from the sky.

Everyone else could see only flickering shadows. I alone could hear them: the cries of babies in a mass grave, the last song of a princess whose kingdom had fallen, the blade a dying general had spent three years sharpening.

The authorities asked me how to seal the rifts.

I said, “First, we have to let them finish what they have to say.”

They called me crazy.

But after I helped the seventeenth ghost finish what they had left undone, a voice came from inside a rift: “Young man, you smell… like me.”

In that moment, I knew I wasn’t just containing history.