Filed under: unresolved attachments; memory rendered sacred.
The world did not end with fire.
It ended with silence.
The boy stood still while the world slowed around him, the edges of the warehouse fading into soft, colorless memory. All the watchers—the gods, the folks, even Tesla—stepped back.
Only Clara remained close, her breath caught in her throat. She reached toward the boy but didn’t touch him. She knew this space belonged to someone else.
A hospital corridor replaced the memory field. Not fully—but enough.
White linoleum. Fluorescent lights that flickered like a nervous habit. The smell of lemon cleaner just strong enough to hide the smell of something else.
Down the hallway, a pair of wheels turned slowly. A wheelchair. A girl in it.
She was small. Not frail—but small like stillness is small. Her frame was compact, tucked beneath a loose cardigan. Her hands rested in her lap like petals. Her hair—what was left of it—curled gently against her cheek.
She didn’t speak. But her presence was louder than most shouting.
The boy couldn’t meet her eyes. He looked down at his shoes—one lace undone, one sock bunching near the ankle.
He hadn’t come often. He knew that. He had stayed away.
She had lived longer than anyone thought she would. Long enough that people started saying maybe she would always live. But the boy had always known the truth. Because his brother made sure he knew.
His brother had whispered it in the dark: “She’s going to die. You know that, right?”
“It’ll be worse for you than for her.”
“You better start preparing.”
So he prepared the only way he knew how: he didn’t go.
And now she was here—not dead. Not alive. Just remembered.
TESLA (quietly, from far away): “She doesn’t feel like a ghost.”
CLARA: “That’s because she isn’t. She’s a question. A wound that opens and waits.”
The girl’s wheelchair stopped in front of the boy.
She looked up—not directly at him, but near him.
Her voice came like light between leaves: soft, shaped by shadow.
ELIZABETH: “You loved me. But you were afraid. And now you carry both.”
The boy trembled.
The air shifted again. The gods turned away, one by one.
No one knew what to do with love that became guilt.
A voice in the dark whispered:
“She was always watching. You just forgot how to look.”
Scene Two – The Veil Tears
The Host stirred.
It had watched enough.
A sound like a scream caught in a cathedral pipe echoed through the memory engine. Shadows bled upward from the floor. Elizabeth’s wheelchair began to dissolve—first the wheels, then the frame.
Clara shouted. Tesla moved.
But it was too late.
The veil split in a line of pure white.
And everything fell.
Scene Three – The Wastelands Begin
At first: darkness.
Not evil. Not painful. Just empty. Unwritten.
CALDWELL (voice only): “This again?”
HOWELL (voice): “We don’t even have form. Are we data?”
CALDWELL: “No. Worse. We’re memory residue. Scraps.”
HOWELL: “So we’re dead?”
CALDWELL: “If this is death, it’s boring.”
They existed as voices, floating in the void. The silence stretched long.
Then—color.
A fractured skyline. Ruins. Glitches of text half-buried in dirt. A broken mirror reflecting too many versions of themselves.
HOWELL (surprised): “Wait. That’s—my hand?”
CALDWELL: “We’re re-forming.”
A spark flickered in the sky—blue and gold. Tesla’s signal.
Another—soft and radiant. Clara.
The two lights wove together, pulling the archivists up from the abyss.
And they rose—slowly, painfully—into the Wastelands.
Where every discarded idea, lost hope, and half-finished truth waited.
Waiting to be found.
Continue reading here – https://empirenevadathenovel.wordpress.com/2025/04/12/unto-a-golden-dawn-dossier-20-what-we-bury/
Frank M. Anderson's Writing 
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