The city had a memory.
Not the institutional memory of guild records and academy classifications and Council monitoring arrays — those were storage, not memory. Memory was something different. Memory was what persisted in the bodies of people who had lived through something. In the specific way they held themselves when they passed certain streets. In the quiet conversations they had in places they trusted, with people they were certain weren't listening for anything useful.
The city remembered the compression recalibration.
It remembered the ruptures and the clinic queues and the hunters who had gone into mandatory threshold tests and come out different in ways that didn't appear on any classification document. It remembered the specific, grinding anxiety of ambient mana running too high for too long — the low-grade tension that had become so normalized that people had stopped identifying it as tension and had started calling it just the way things were.
