"To be shown the truth of another person is not a gift. It is a responsibility you did not ask for.'
An original concept by Salaar Irfan
***
He called the number on a Tuesday morning.
Not because Tuesday had any particular significance — not because he'd planned it for Tuesday, or because anything had happened to make Tuesday the right day. He'd simply woken up at six forty-five, gone through the routine, stood in the bathroom looking at himself in the mirror for his thirty seconds, and thought: today.
Not tomorrow. Not when he felt more ready, which was a feeling he was beginning to suspect would never fully arrive. Today.
He sat on the edge of his bed with his phone in his hand and the number from his notes app on the screen. Outside the window, the December morning was doing its usual thing — dark still, the orange glow of streetlights, the particular quality of pre-dawn cold pressing against the glass. His mother was still asleep. The flat was completely quiet.
He pressed call.
It rang.
Once. Twice. Three times.
Four times, and then the automated voicemail — not a personal recording, just the default network message, the generic voice telling him the person he was calling was unavailable, and he could leave a message after the tone.
He hadn't prepared a message.
He sat with the phone to his ear and listened to the tone and then said, carefully: "Hi. My name is Silas Crane. I'm — I live at the address where Elias Voss used to live. Flat 4B. I found some mail for him, and I wanted to make sure it got to the right people." He paused. "I can also — if you want to talk, I'm happy to. About the flat. About anything." Another pause. "My number is—" He recited it. "Sorry for calling early. Thank you."
He ended the call.
He sat on the edge of his bed for a moment, phone in his lap, the December morning continuing outside.
Then his phone buzzed.
Not a call back — a text, from the number he'd just called. Three words:
Who are you?
Not a question mark. Not a thank you for calling or a how did you get this number. Just three words, flat and immediate, sent within thirty seconds of his voicemail ending.
Someone had been awake. Someone had seen the call come in and chosen not to answer, and had been waiting with their phone in their hand.
He looked at the three words for a long moment. Then he typed back:
I told you — I live at his old address. I found mail for him. I also think I know what happened to him. Not all of it. But some.
He sent it.
He waited.
The typing indicator appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. Disappeared. A full two minutes passed — he watched the screen, not moving — and then:
Are you real?
He stared at the message.
Are you real? Are you not telling the truth, or how do you know or prove it? Just: Are you real?
As if whoever was on the other end had been contacted by enough people who weren't enough false leads, enough well-meaning strangers who thought they knew something and didn't, enough cruelty disguised as information — that the first question wasn't about what he knew but about whether he existed at all in any meaningful sense.
He typed: Yes. I'm real. I'm seventeen. I live in the flat. I found the book.
He sent it.
This time the wait was longer. Five minutes. Then ten. He got up, got dressed, made himself breakfast, and checked his phone every thirty seconds. At the fifteen-minute mark, just as he was about to give up and go to school:
I'll call you tonight. After eight.
He looked at the message. Then he typed: Okay.
He put his phone in his pocket and went to school.
He carried the three words all day like something fragile — are you real — turning them over in the spaces between lessons, in the service corridor at lunch, on the walk to afternoon classes. The particular quality of a question that had been asked before, many times, and had been disappointed many times, but was being asked again anyway because the asking was all that was left.
He thought about MarieV — whoever they were, sister or cousin or mother or friend — sitting somewhere with their phone, having seen a number they didn't recognise, having listened to a voicemail from a seventeen-year-old boy who lived in Elias's old flat and said he knew something, having decided to text rather than call because calling felt too much like hoping.
Are you real?
He would make sure, tonight, to be as real as he knew how to be.
The last week of term had the particular energy of a school approaching its own ending — lessons that were technically still happening but had the quality of things going through motions, teachers who had one eye on Friday, students who were already mentally somewhere else. The corridors were louder than usual. People were exchanging cards and small gifts in the manner of people who were aware they might not see each other for two weeks and wanted to mark it somehow.
Silas moved through it with the slightly detached quality that had become familiar — present, functional, aware of the texture of things but not entirely inside them. The truth-vision was closed. The archive was quiet. He was just a boy with white hair and a gold eye in the last week of term, which was a sentence that would have seemed impossible four months ago and was now simply how things were.
He was at his locker on Wednesday morning when it happened.
The locker was at the end of a row near the main staircase — a high-traffic area, which meant the corridor was busy at change-of-class time in a way that required navigating. He'd gotten good at navigating, at the small adjustments of trajectory and pace that moved you through a crowd efficiently without contact. He stepped around someone without looking, reached his locker, and began to work the combination.
And behind him, a voice said: "Silas Crane."
He turned around.
He didn't know the boy. Approximately his age, broad-shouldered, with the particular confidence of someone who was used to taking up space in rooms without thinking about it. Not aggressive — the tone had been curious rather than confrontational, as if the name itself was the point.
"Yeah," Silas said.
"You live on Aldgate Street. The red-brick building, fourth floor."
It wasn't a question. Silas looked at him. "How do you know that?"
The boy reached into his bag — slowly, deliberately, making sure Silas could see it was just his bag — and produced a small envelope. Not white. Cream-coloured, thick paper, the kind that costs more than ordinary envelopes. On the front, in handwriting he didn't recognise: For whoever lives in Flat 4B now.
Silas looked at the envelope.
"Someone asked me to give this to you," the boy said. "Last week. Said they couldn't deliver it themselves." He paused. "I don't know what it is. I was just asked to pass it on."
"Who asked you?"
The boy looked at him for a moment. Something in his expression was difficult to read — not evasive, more like someone who has been asked to do something and completed the task, and is now uncertain about the territory beyond the task.
"He said you'd understand when you read it," the boy said. "That's all I know." He held out the envelope.
Silas took it.
The boy nodded once — not unfriendly, just final — and walked away, disappearing into the end-of-class corridor traffic.
Silas stood at his locker and looked at the envelope.
For whoever lives in Flat 4B now.
The handwriting was careful and slightly cramped, like someone who had learned to write neatly but found it effortful. He had seen this handwriting before. He had seen it on two envelopes in a kitchen drawer, and on a community forum post from nine months ago, and in the particular shape of letters scratched into a wardrobe door.
He put the envelope in his inside coat pocket, against his chest, closed his locker, and went to class.
He didn't open it at school.
He sat through two lessons and a free period and lunch and two more lessons with the envelope in his inside pocket and the awareness of it constant — not heavy exactly, more like a frequency, a persistent low note at the edge of his attention that he couldn't and didn't try to tune out.
He texted Nora at lunch: something happened. tell you later.
She texted back within a minute: okay. library after school?
Yes, he sent.
The afternoon proceeded. He sat through Physics and tried to care about the things Physics wanted him to care about, and managed a reasonable approximation of engagement. The archive, as always, had no patience for partial understanding — it knew everything about every phenomenon Harlow's Physics curriculum touched, and was prepared to supply complete comprehension on demand — but he kept it closed and worked through things at the pace the lesson required, which was its own small discipline.
At the end of Physics, Priya appeared at his shoulder.
"Nora texted me," she said, without preamble. "She said something happened."
"I'm going to tell her after school. You can—"
"Come along?" Priya looked at him with the expression that suggested she had already decided. "Unless it's private."
He thought about it. Priya, who had been watching them both with the patient attention of someone who cared about both without making a performance of it. Who had said goodbye last week with everything it contained. Who had, quietly and without announcement, become someone he trusted.
"You can come," he said.
She nodded once. "Good."
The library after school. Their table is by the window. The December darkness was already full outside, the library's warm light making the window a mirror.
He put the envelope on the table.
Nora looked at it. Then at him. Priya, beside her, leaned forward slightly.
"It was delivered to me today," he said. "At school. By someone I don't know. The handwriting—" He paused. "It's the same as the handwriting on his letters. The ones in the drawer."
Nora looked at him. "Elias Voss wrote this."
"I think so."
"He knew you'd be here," Priya said carefully, not as a statement but as a thing she was working out. "He knew someone would be in that flat."
"The King put the book there," Silas said. "For me. Specifically. Elias was—" He stopped. "Elias was before me. Maybe he knew someone would come after him. Maybe he needed to—" He stopped again.
"Leave something," Nora said.
"Yeah."
The library was quiet around them. Someone at another table was packing up to leave. The librarian at the front desk was doing something at her computer, not paying attention to them.
"Open it," Nora said. Not a command — just permission, if he needed permission, which he found he did.
He opened it.
The paper inside was the same cream stock as the envelope, folded once. The handwriting continued — the same careful, slightly cramped script, covering both sides of a single page.
He read it.
He read it again.
Then he put it flat on the table so they could both see, and looked at the window, and breathed.
If you're reading this, then you found the book, and you read it, and you're still here, which means you're different from me in the most important way.
I'm writing this because I want to leave something more useful than a word scratched on a mirror. DON'T was all I had energy for at the end, and I know it's not enough.
My name is Elias Voss. I was twenty-six. I studied philosophy. I found the book on the shelf when I moved in, and I left it alone for three weeks, and then I read it, which I suspect you also did, because the book is not the kind of thing you leave alone.
The difference between us, I think, is that I didn't have anyone. I went through the whole thing — the archive, the vision, the depths — completely alone. I didn't tell my family. I didn't tell anyone. I thought I was protecting them. What I was actually doing was removing the only thing that could have held me.
The anchor matters more than anything else. More than the archive, more than the vision, more than understanding what the King is or what it wants. The anchor is the whole point. Find yours. Hold it. Don't be clever about it, the way I was clever — don't decide you can manage without it because you understand too much to need something as ordinary as another person.
I went to the third depth. I won't describe what's there. You shouldn't go. Not because it will kill you — I don't think it kills you — but because it will cost you something you can't get back. I came back from it, but I came back different. Less. Like a book with pages missing.
I'm not going to tell you everything is going to be fine because I don't know if it is. What I can tell you is this: you survived the reading, which means you have what I didn't. Use it. Not as a tool — as the thing itself. Whatever it is, whoever it is, let it be what it is.
The King is watching you. It has been since before you moved in. Everything about how you came to be in that flat was deliberate, including the timing, including you specifically. I don't know why you and not someone else. I spent seven months trying to work that out, and I didn't find the answer.
Maybe you will.
Don't be alone with it.
— E.V.
The library was very quiet.
Priya was the first to speak. "He's alive," she said.
"He wrote this after," Nora said. "After everything. He wrote this knowing someone would read it."
"He had someone deliver it to school," Silas said. "He knew I was here. He knew my name." He looked at the letter. "He's been watching. From somewhere."
"Or the King told him," Nora said. "The way it tells you things."
He looked at her. She was right. Of course, she was right. The King who had arranged the flat, arranged the timing, arranged everything with the patient precision of something that operated across a much larger timescale than anyone involved — the King had probably told Elias Voss exactly who was coming and when and what to write and who to ask to deliver it.
Everything about how you came to be in that flat was deliberate, including the timing, including you specifically.
He'd known this was coming. He'd felt the shape of it for weeks, the sense of a truth he was approaching. But reading it plainly, in Elias Voss's careful, cramped handwriting, on cream paper on a library table — it landed differently than knowing.
Including you specifically.
"Are you okay?" Nora said.
He thought about the question properly. He thought about what okay meant in the context of finding out that his entire path to this city and this school and this flat had been arranged by something ancient and enormous and fundamentally wrong, for reasons it hadn't fully disclosed, for a purpose it had called interesting.
"I think so," he said. "I think — yes. I think I am."
Priya looked at him with the assessing look she rarely deployed, but that, when she did, was as accurate as Nora's. "Because of the last line," she said.
He looked at her.
"Don't be alone with it," Priya said. "He wrote it because he was. You're not." She gestured between herself and Nora. "So."
He looked at them both — Nora with her direct, steady gaze and Priya with her compressed but genuine care — and felt something that he didn't have a name for but that was warm and specific and real.
"Yeah," he said. "So."
He walked home alone that evening, Nora and Priya having gone their own directions, the letter folded in his inside pocket next to the original envelope. The December streets were doing their end-of-term-week thing — school groups in clusters, the chicken shop doing brisk business, Christmas lights strung between the lamp posts, the world settling into its pre-holiday mode.
He walked through it and thought about Elias Voss.
Not with fear or grief exactly — with something more complicated, more textured. A kind of recognition. The sense of seeing yourself in someone else's experience, not because the experiences were identical but because the shape of them was the same, the essential situation — alone with something too large, trying to be clever about it, discovering that cleverness was no substitute for connection.
Don't be clever about it the way I was clever.
He thought about the archive's wall where both their futures sat locked. He thought about what Elias had said — I don't think it kills you, but it will cost you something you can't get back. He thought about what less meant when applied to a person, what pages missing from a book felt like from the inside.
He thought, but he's alive. He wrote this. He's somewhere, watching, having come back from it.
He thought: less is nothing.
He turned onto his street. The building was there — red brick, six floors, the kind of place that had been built in the seventies with no particular ambition beyond being structurally sound. Fourth floor. Flat 4B.
He stood outside it for a moment and looked up at the window of his room — the one that faced the building next door, the close brickwork visible in the lamplight.
Someone had stood in that room before him. Had looked out that window. Had sat at that desk and reached for that book and held on as long as he could and lost the grip eventually, and come back from it changed, and had enough of himself left to write a letter and ask someone to deliver it and trust that whoever came after him would be worth the trust.
Including you specifically.
He went inside.
He climbed the stairs.
He let himself into the flat, and his mother called from the kitchen — dinner was almost ready — and the flat smelled of something good, and the plant on the windowsill was healthy, and December was outside doing its patient winter work.
He hung up his coat. The letter was still in the inside pocket. He left it there for now.
His phone said 7:58 PM. In two minutes, if MarieV kept their word, it would ring.
He went to the kitchen.
"Two minutes," he told his mother. "I have a phone call."
She looked at him. "The Voss family?"
"I think so."
She nodded, with the particular nod that meant I'm not going to ask everything I want to ask right now, but I want you to know that I'm here. "I'll keep dinner warm," she said.
He went to his room.
At 8:01, his phone rang.
The voice was a woman's — mid-thirties, maybe, with the particular quality of someone who had been braced for something and was now experiencing the strange vertigo of it actually arriving.
"Silas Crane," she said. Not quite a question.
"Yes," he said.
A pause. "My name is Marie Voss. Elias is my brother."
He sat on the edge of his bed and held the phone carefully, the way you hold something that might break.
"Is he—" he started.
"He's alive," she said. "He's — he's not well. He hasn't been well since. But he's alive." Another pause. "He told me someone would call. He told me about three weeks ago. He said a boy named Silas Crane would call from the flat and I should talk to him." Her voice was controlled in the way of someone who had been practising control for a long time. "I didn't believe him. He says things sometimes that I don't — that are hard to verify. But then you called."
"I'm sorry," Silas said. "For what happened to him."
Marie Voss was quiet for a moment. "He said you'd understand," she said. "What it was like. The flat. The book." A pause. "He said you were stronger than him. That you found something he didn't."
"I got lucky," Silas said.
"He said that too." Something in her voice shifted — not quite a smile, but the shape of one. "He said to tell you: the letters in the drawer are from me. I didn't know what else to do. I just kept writing."
He looked at the kitchen drawer, visible through the open bedroom door.
"I'll send them to you," he said. "If you want them back."
"No," she said quietly. "No. He said — Leave them. He said you'd need to read them eventually." A pause. "I don't know what that means. I've stopped trying to understand everything he says."
He thought about the letters in the drawer. He thought about it eventually and what it meant in the vocabulary of a situation that seemed to operate on a longer timeline than anyone inside it.
"How is he?" he said.
Marie Voss was quiet for a long moment. "Some days are better than others," she said finally. "He reads. He writes. He knows things he shouldn't know, and sometimes he says things that turn out to be true later." A pause. "He's not — he's not who he was. But he's nothing. He's still Elias." Her voice was steady, but the effort of keeping it steady was audible. "Just — less of him, somehow. Like something went and didn't fully come back."
A book with pages missing.
"I'm sorry," Silas said again, because it was inadequate and true.
"He said you'd be fine," she said. "He was very certain about it. He said you had the right — he called it the right architecture. That you were built for it in a way he wasn't." A pause. "He seemed happy about that. Which was strange. He doesn't seem happy about many things anymore." She paused again. "He said to tell you one more thing."
"Okay."
"He said: the letters are the key. Read them when you're ready. Not before."
Silas looked at the kitchen drawer.
"Okay," he said.
"Okay," she said. A long pause. "Thank you for calling. I didn't think — I'd given up thinking anyone from that flat would call."
"I'm sorry it took this long."
"You're seventeen," she said. "You're doing better than most adults would." Another pause, shorter. "Take care of yourself, Silas Crane."
"You too," he said. "And — Marie. Tell him I got his letter."
A silence. Then: "He'll know," she said softly. "He already knows."
She ended the call.
He sat in his room for a long time, phone in his lap, the December night outside, the kitchen drawer visible through the open door, the letter in his inside pocket, the archive humming in its settled place.
He thought about Elias Voss — less, but alive. Writing letters, saying things that turned out to be true. Watching from wherever he was. Having enough of himself left to arrange a letter and a messenger and a phone call and a set of instructions for whoever came next.
He thought: that's something. Less is nothing. He's still Elias.
He thought: I am not going to be less.
That night, the King came.
The dream was different from any that had come before.
The white space was there, as always — sourceless, absolute, pressing in from every direction. The King's presence was there, vast and wrong and old in the way that made the concept of old feel inadequate. He was there, aware of himself as a point in the white.
But this time the King did not speak.
It showed him something.
Not a vision exactly — not a thing seen with eyes, because there were no eyes in the white space, no apparatus of sight. More like a knowing that arrived from outside himself, placed into him with the particular directness the King used, but structured differently than the archive's truths. Warmer. More personal.
He was shown, Elias Voss.
Not as he was now — not the diminished version that Marie had described, the book with pages missing. As he had been. In the flat, at the desk, with the lamp on. Dark hair, slight build, the quality of someone spending time in their own head. Reading, writing, reaching into the archive with the focused determination of someone trying to understand everything before they ran out of time.
Alone.
He was shown the dream space — Elias in the white, facing the King's presence without the anchor, reaching for something to hold as the flood came and finding nothing. Not nothing through any failure of effort or intelligence — Elias Voss had clearly had both, had clearly tried — just nothing, because there was nobody, because he'd removed the only thing that could have helped by deciding he didn't need it.
He was shown the aftermath. Elias on the floor of the flat, not the clean waking-up that Silas had experienced, but something harder, longer, the particular damage of a flood that hadn't been stopped in time. The shelf was carefully wiped. The objects, carefully arranged. DON'T scratch into the wood with the last of something.
The King showed him all of this without commentary, without meaning placed into it beyond the showing itself. It was not a lesson, exactly. More like a gift — the gift of understanding not just what had happened but what it had meant, the particular texture of another person's experience handled with more care than he expected from something so vast and so old and so fundamentally wrong.
When it was over the white space was simply the white space again, and the King was simply the King, and the quality of its attention on him had something in it that he still couldn't name — the not-quite-warmth, the interest that was more than interest, the something that existed at the edge of what the King was capable of feeling, if feeling was even the right word.
Why are you showing me this? He asked.
The King was still.
Because you asked, it said. You have been asking since the night you found the name. Not in words. But you have been asking.
He thought about two weeks of carrying Elias Voss's story, of the groove in the plaster and the word on the mirror and the missing persons notice and the letter and the phone call. Of the shape of a person assembled from fragments, from absence, from what was left behind.
He was alone, Silas said.
Yes.
And I'm not.
No, the King said. You are not. A pause — the geological pause, the mountain-old pause. That is the difference. That has always been the difference.
He woke in the ordinary dark, gold eye steady on the ceiling, the archive quiet, the city outside doing its late-night murmur.
He lay for a while and thought about what it meant to be shown something, not told. The distinction mattered. Telling was information. Showing was something else, something that required more from the one doing it, something that acknowledged the person being shown as a person rather than a vessel.
That is the difference.
He reached for his notebook in the dark, turned on the lamp, and wrote, quickly, while it was still fresh:
The King showed me, Elias, tonight. Not told — showed. I saw him in the flat, alone, reaching for the anchor and finding nothing. I saw what the flood did when there was nothing to hold it.
He paused.
I understand now why DON'T was all he had left to write. He used everything else to get back.
He paused again.
The King showed me this because I asked. Not in words. But I asked.
He stopped writing. He looked at what he'd written. Then:
Marie Voss called tonight. Elias is alive. Less, but alive. She said he told her I'd call. He knew my name three weeks ago.
The letters are the key. That's what he said.
I'm going to read them. Not tonight. Soon.
He put the pen down. He turned off the lamp. He lay in the December dark with the letter in his coat pocket and the two envelopes in the kitchen drawer and the phone number of Marie Voss in his contacts and the shape of Elias Voss's story finally, fully in his hands.
He thought about the notebook's small writing section at the bottom of each page — the section that had become its own record, running parallel to the main one. He'd forgotten to write in it tonight. He reached for the lamp, turned it back on, and opened the notebook to the page.
He wrote, in the small writing:
Priya said, "So, tonight, it meant everything. Nora looked at the letter with me and asked the right questions. They were both there.
Don't be alone with it.
I'm not.
He closed the notebook.
He turned off the lamp.
He fell asleep.
The last day of term was a Friday.
He walked into school for the last time before Christmas with the letter in his inside pocket and the phone number in his contacts and the dream still with him — Elias at the desk, alone, the flood coming — and something that had settled in him overnight, some new quality of steadiness that he didn't have a word for yet but that felt like ground underfoot.
Nora was at the main entrance, which she was increasingly always at — he'd stopped pretending this was a coincidence, and she'd stopped pretending she hadn't timed it.
"Last day," she said.
"Last day," he agreed.
They walked in together, and the school was doing its end-of-term thing, and it was loud and slightly chaotic and warm in the way of enclosed spaces full of people who were almost somewhere else, and he walked through it and felt — fully, completely, without qualification — present.
Not managing presence. Not performing it. Actually, here, in this corridor, on this last day of term, with this person beside him.
At his locker, she said, "How was the call?"
"He's alive," he said. "Less, but alive. His sister called. She said he knew my name three weeks ago."
Nora looked at him. "Are you okay?"
He thought about the question. He thought about what the King had shown him, and about Marie Voss's controlled voice, and about the letter in his pocket, and about the dream that was still with him like something solid.
"Yes," he said. "I actually am."
She looked at him for a moment — the real looking, the full attention. Then she said, "Good."
And that was enough. That was exactly enough.
The last day of term proceeded around them, and he was there for all of it. At the end of it, she was at the gate in the December dark, and they walked to the bus stop together. The Christmas lights were on along the street, and the cold was proper December cold now, deep and real, and she had her hands in her pockets and her collar up and the pen still behind her ear even on the last day of term, and he thought:
I am not going to be less.
I am going to be more.
End of Chapter Six.
Etched Oblivion — Chapter Six An original concept by Salaar Irfan