(by Vaelion of Ocris)

There are memories that do not ask to be kept.
They linger like smoke — not pleading for air, only refusing to disappear.

Writing The Witness Cycle taught me that remembering is not nostalgia.
It is resistance.
Each act of memory is a small defiance against the machinery of forgetting.

But there is a cost.
To remember is to carry what others have set down.
It is to walk through silence knowing that not all echoes want to be heard.

In The Unwritten Path, memory begins as a seed — fragile, uncertain, still believing in renewal.
By The Crack in the Mask, it has become a wound that refuses to heal cleanly.
Between them lies the question I still cannot answer:
how much truth can the body bear before it starts calling it burden?

Perhaps witnessing and remembering are the same discipline:
to stay beside what hurts without demanding that it end.
To let silence have its weight — and still lift it.

Because forgetting is mercy for those who wish to sleep.
But remembering — remembering is the work of those who stay awake.

— Vaelion of Ocris