Utopia Lost at the End

Elvi was twenty-one, with seventeen copper coins in his pocket.

He took a job to earn a meal. His only skill was shooting, and his only dream was to open a dessert shop.

The church came looking for him. They said there was a door beneath the city, and inside it were ten thousand names. The day the door opened, everyone in the city would forget their own names.

They said only the blood of the Lozpe family could shut the door.

And Lozpe was Elvi's surname.

He didn't know his great-grandfather had stolen a book, that his grandfather had escaped from the door, or that his father had carried him through it when he was three, then walked back inside alone.

All he knew was that each time he shut the door, he had to give something up.

First his name, then his face, and finally the reason he remembered.

The door kept accounts, not lives. Each name could be recorded only once. To shut the door, the books had to be balanced.

But in that ledger, he had long since become someone else's entry.