There are stories told around fires, along roads and in marketplaces, stories that fade as the years pass. But there are others—stories that insist on surviving, even when the people who once remembered them are long gone.

  One of them is the story of Oblivion.

  No one can say with certainty when it began. The oldest chronicles speak of a time before the Stone Rift, when the world was still bound to its source and the Root stretched deep beneath the earth, unseen yet alive—like a heart that nourished everything.

  It is said that in those days humans knew more than they do now. They remembered things that today seem impossible: the beginning of the world, the ancient names of the land, even the forces that move behind events.

  Then the Rift came.

  No one knows how it happened. Some attribute it to people who touched powers they were never meant to touch. Others say it was the fate of the world itself to one day be severed from its root.

  However it happened, the Root was lost.

  And with it, the memory of the world.

  The centuries that followed flowed slowly, like a river that changes course without realizing it. Cities rose upon foundations far older than themselves, built—so some claimed—long before the Stone Rift. Roads filled with travelers, merchants, and stories that changed a little every time they were told.

  And so the world continued forward.

  As if nothing had happened.

  Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

  As if nothing had ever been lost.

  Only a few remembered.

  The Commissioners.

  To ordinary people they were almost a myth. They had no names spoken in the markets, no faces seen in the cities. They existed only in the shadows of history, observing the slow movement of the world the way an astronomer watches the motion of the stars.

  They did not rule kingdoms.

  They did not command armies.

  They observed patterns.

  For every action, every decision, every unexpected movement left a trace in the web of reality. Most of those traces disappeared quickly—small disturbances dissolving into the flow of time.

  But some did not.

  Some left cracks.

  And cracks could grow.

  In one of the Commissioners’ observatories, in a place beyond the roads and cities of humankind, the light came neither from sun nor flame. The space was almost empty, except for vast surfaces that looked like water frozen inside time.

  Across them drifted slow images of the world.

  Cities.

  Roads.

  Faces.

  Moments.

  And then one of those surfaces began to tremble.

  Two figures stood before it.

  For a long time, neither spoke.

  At last one of them said quietly,

  “Do you see it?”

  The other answered,

  “I see it.”

  The surface cleared and revealed a scene from the world of humans.

  A road.

  A man lying on the ground.

  His body trembled as life slowly drained from within him.

  And beside him stood someone else.

  A man who could have helped him.

  But he did not.

  He stood motionless, watching the moment as if he were observing a natural phenomenon.

  There was no fear on his face.

  No pity.

  Only a strange, cold curiosity.

  The man on the ground stopped moving.

  Life left his body.

  For a moment the surface darkened.

  The second figure spoke first.

  “Deviation.”

  The first nodded slowly.

  “Record it.”

  “As what?”

  For a moment there was silence.

  Then the answer came.

  “As a rift.”

  The man standing in the road had a name.

  And in that moment, without knowing it, he had created the first crack in a world that had been built to remain unchanged.

  At that same time, far away from that road, another story was beginning to move.

  A woman stood before a temple that should not exist.

  She reached out and touched the stone of its gate.

  The stone was warm.

  As if something alive were breathing deep within the darkness of the temple.

  Something ancient.

  Something that had been waiting for a very long time.

  The Root.