Forgotten Tide, Kindling Flame

A thousand years ago, the Tide of Forgetting swallowed the light, and it swallowed people's names too.

People today survive by feeding the little flame in their chests with memories and obsessions. As long as the flame burns, they live. When it goes out, they become nameless Darkborn.

Seventeen-year-old Shen Yan is the youngest son of a family of furnace smiths in Gray Alley. The day the last fire well in the neighborhood went cold, he dug a cracked antique mirror out of an old incense kiln that had been collapsed for over a decade.

A voice in the mirror taught him to burn memories and condense them into kindling. Happy memories won't catch fire. They have to hurt. They have to be full of hate.

He burned the afternoon his father had bent over, smiling apologetically, and gained a bean-sized flame in his chest. He also saw two words quietly rise from the bottom of the mirror.

They were his own name.

The Night Patrol said that with the well dead, the neighborhood would be struck from the register, and every name would be entered into a ledger no one dared ask about.

Shen Yan crouched at the foot of a wall, clutching the broken mirror, and wrote the names of everyone in the neighborhood who could barely keep their fires lit, one by one, onto its surface.

For every name, he gave them one stick of incense.