The air inside the Tower's first floor was heavy, almost sentient. It clung to Erevan's skin like cold oil, resisting his every step. The Garden of Forgotten Names stretched out endlessly before him—an impossibly vast forest where the trees bore names carved into their trunks, some glowing faintly, others bleeding sap as dark as the void. These were not names of the dead, but of those the Tower had devoured.
Erevan's cosmic-touched skin shimmered subtly in the dim light, adapting to the damp, sentient atmosphere. Each time his foot touched the mossy ground, the terrain shifted slightly, like it was testing him. It remembered him. And perhaps, it feared him.
Behind him, Marek stumbled, eyes wide with a child's terror. Erevan did not slow his pace. The Tower did not wait for the weak.
"Wh-why does everything whisper here?" Marek asked, voice trembling.
Erevan didn't answer immediately. He stopped beside a weeping willow that bled silvery tears and traced a name etched into its bark with his gloved finger. The name twisted and changed as he looked at it, refusing to settle on a fixed identity. A name lost to time.
"Because this is where the Tower collects what it cannot kill," he finally said. "Names are power. Names are memory. It stores them here, like trophies... or warnings."
Marek gulped and stuck closer.
Suddenly, a screech echoed through the trees, unnatural and layered, as if several voices cried out from the same throat. Erevan turned swiftly. From the mist emerged a creature stitched from memories—its body was a collage of faces, arms, and names, all screaming silently. A Warden.
[New Threat Detected: Memory Warden Lv. 12]
[Warning: Resist Mental Intrusion]
The creature lunged.
Erevan did not hesitate. His blade, humming with absorbed cosmic residue, met the Warden with a crackle of unreality. The impact exploded in a burst of grey light. For a moment, the Warden split into dozens of flickering versions of itself, each echoing a different moment of a lost soul's life.
Then Erevan whispered.
A name.
One not heard in centuries.
The blade pulsed, devouring the echoes. The Warden howled in agony as its stolen memories unraveled. With a final strike, Erevan cleaved it in two, and it dissolved into a storm of whispers, leaving behind only a small, flickering flame.
[Remnant Acquired: Fragment of Forgotten Will]
[Stat Update: Remembrance +0.2%]
There it was again.
Remembrance.
The hidden stat slowly unveiling itself. He felt something stir in his mind—a locked door shaking at its hinges. But not yet.
Not yet.
Marek stared at him, awestruck and terrified. "You... knew its name?"
Erevan shook his head. "I knew a name it had stolen. That was enough."
The boy didn't ask how he knew it. He wouldn't have understood.
They moved forward.
As they walked, the trees began to thin, revealing a clearing bathed in silver moonlight. At its center stood a statue, a woman cloaked in stars, her eyes blindfolded, her hands holding two scales.
Erevan stiffened.
He knew this image.
She was the Judge of the Lost—a being erased from history, whose existence had once challenged the Tower itself. The statue should not have been here. Unless...
[Hidden Memory Triggered: ???]
[Memory Locked. Requirement: Remembrance 5%]
The System always taunted him. Always held truth behind locked doors.
He looked at the statue and for a moment, something human flickered behind his eyes.
"Forgive me," he whispered, almost too soft for Marek to hear.
And then he walked on.
Behind him, the statue wept silver tears.