The air in the great hall of Belogorod was thick with incense and the silent weight of expectation. Twenty nobles stood in two rigid lines, their faces pale and solemn in the flat grey light filtering through high, arched windows. They watched the man at the center of the room. They watched their Knyaz, Sineus Belov. He stood before the city’s founding charter, a heavy scroll of cured hide unrolled upon a dark oak lectern. The ink on its surface was a map of their official past.
Beside him, a man in the plain grey robes of an arbiter held the instrument of their salvation. It was the Sekach Pamyati, a blade forged from dark, non-reflective steel that seemed to drink the light around it. Its purpose was not to kill a man, but to cut what a man remembered. The arbiter held it poised, the tip hovering a finger’s breadth above a single line of text on the charter. He did not move. He waited for the command.
All authority for the act rested with Sineus. The arbiter was merely the hand; the Knyaz was the will. The nobles watched him, their collective gaze a physical pressure. They needed this. They needed their history to be stronger, their foundations purer. They needed to forget the weakness of that first winter. Sineus felt their need as a chill in the air, a hunger for a more convenient truth. He knew the cost. He alone would see it.
His gaze rested on the arbiter’s steady hand, then on the charter itself. He could almost see the memory clinging to the faded ink—a brittle, desperate thing made of empty grain bins, frozen earth, and the gaunt faces of children. A shameful memory. A human one. He was about to command its execution.
He met the arbiter’s gaze. The man’s eyes were empty, professional. A tool waiting to be used. Sineus gave a single, sharp nod.
A subtle shift went through the hall, a collective intake of breath from the assembled nobles. The ceremony moved to its final stage. The arbiter’s hand, impossibly steady, lowered the Sekach Pamyati. The dark blade touched the cured hide of the charter. There was no sound of tearing, no scrape of metal on leather. The blade simply sank into the line of text as if passing through smoke.
The arbiter made a slow, deliberate slice, following the words that described a famine long past. To the watching nobles, it was a simple, symbolic gesture. But Sineus saw the truth of it. He saw it without the aid of a Clarity Lens, a tool lesser men needed. A shimmering thread, pale as woodsmoke and thin as spun silk, lifted from the charter. It was the memory itself, severed from its anchor in the physical world.
The thread of memory, a ghostly echo of starvation and fear, detached completely from the scroll. It hung in the air for a single, silent moment, a fragile wisp of a truth that no longer had a home. Then, it began to dissipate. It did not vanish. It was drawn away, pulled eastward toward the great, grey wound on the horizon where all such forgotten things gathered.
A sound passed through the hall. It was a quiet, unconscious sigh, released in unison from the 20 nobles. They stood straighter. The tension in their shoulders eased. They felt a weight lift from them, a burden of history they no longer had to carry. Their past was now stronger, their lineage cleaner. A false sense of purity settled over them, warm and reassuring. Sineus could almost measure the shift in their confidence, a foolish bravery bought with a lie.
He did not share their relief. He turned away from the desecrated charter and the proud, ignorant faces of his lords. He walked to the high arched window and looked out over the stone walls of Belogorod, toward the dark ribbon of the river and the flat, grey lands beyond. His gaze fixed on the horizon.
There, the Echoing Blight churned, a permanent wall of fog that marked the edge of un-reality. As he watched, a direct consequence of the act just performed, the fog visibly darkened. A patch of it, kilometers long, swirled with a sick, greasy light. It pulsed once, and its edge crept forward, swallowing another three meters of the riverlands. The density of the roiling mists thickened by a fraction, a change no one else would notice for a week. But Sineus saw it. He saw the price.
A high-pitched rasping sound echoed in the silence of his mind. It was the noise a wound in the world makes, a thin, tearing vibration that set his teeth on edge. He felt it as a cold spot deep in his gut, a personal toll for the ceremony that only he was forced to pay. The lie had been told. The Blight had been fed. Reality was weaker for it.
From the high tower of the citadel, a single, deep bell began to toll. Its sound rolled across the city, announcing to the common folk that the ritual was complete. It was a sound of victory, a proclamation that their history had been perfected, their foundations secured. The people in the streets below would hear it and feel pride.
To Sineus, standing at the window and watching the Blight’s slow advance, the bell sounded hollow. It was the toll for a battle won and a war lost, the ringing pronouncement of a debt that was coming due.
Dust motes danced in the grey light slanting through the window. The faint smell of cooling wax and old incense hung in the still air.
The price of the lie crept closer across the land.
