The room hums like memory—soft, wrong, and too still. Like the moment just after you've woken from a dream you almost remember. The kind of stillness that makes your skin itch, like the world is watching but holding its breath.

  It doesn't exist. Not in the way cities do, or rivers, or names. It hovers at the edge of what's real, folded somewhere between yesterday's shadow and tomorrow's lie. The kind of place the world forgets to notice. The kind of place you end up when you've made too many mistakes to die cleanly.

  There is a chair. A desk. A lamp that burns without oil. And me.

  The pen in my hand doesn't scratch the page. It carves—into memory, into time, into the raw place where truth used to live.

  I don't know who this is for. Maybe no one. Maybe someone who remembers how the sky used to feel before it was rewritten.

  But if you are reading this, remember:

  The world you know is not the first version.

  It's not the original story. Not even close. Things have shifted—cities renamed, faces misplaced, memories edited like bad verses in a prayer. And every time, the world swears it was always this way.

  And I— I am the mistake it can't forget.

  Once, I was a boy named Rion.

  I lived in a dead city. Dust and bone. Hunger and silence. No name, no family—just a weaver who once wrapped me in old cloth and called me "river." Said even small things could carve stone.

  She died. I didn't.

  Instead, I found something buried beneath the ruins. A lamp, blackened and warm beneath my fingers.

  When I touched it, the world paused.

  The gin appeared—robed in smoke and script, watching me like I was a puzzle that had answered itself. My heart slammed in my chest. I didn't know whether to speak or run. I'd never seen anything so still, so ancient, so certain. And yet, somehow, I knew he was waiting—for me, and only me.

  "Five wishes," he said.

  I was thirteen. I didn't know what to ask for. Not in the way that mattered.

  So I said the only thing that made sense to a starving boy:

  "I wish... I wish my wishes would never run out. Like... like the grains of sand. Like all the sand in all the deserts. Too many to count."

  He didn't laugh. He didn't argue. He just said:

  "Granted. Four remain."

  The world changed. But it didn't just change—it rewrote.

  The broken streets grew smooth. Strangers called me by name. A girl placed figs in my hand and said, "You're late, Prince."

  The city had a new name. Nythral. The maps agreed. Darith had never existed. Except in my memory.

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  And I remembered everything.

  That was another wish. One I made not long after. Because if the world was going to lie to itself, someone had to carry the truth.

  I didn't understand the cost. Not yet.

  There have been many scars since then. Some shallow. Some deep. And some so old they feel like part of me.

  But of all the echoes I've left in this world—there is one I cannot walk away from.

  Her name was Saela.

  She was not a queen. Not then. Not yet. She was just a woman. A medic in the war camps, though I always called her a healer. That's what we called them, long ago. A believer in things like purpose, mercy, and the idea that love might someday be enough.

  She died in my arms. A wound beneath her ribs, blood blooming into the temple stone.

  "It's alright," she whispered.

  But it wasn't.

  Because her death was my fault.

  A wish I'd made weeks earlier—meant to save a village from starvation—had turned rain into flood. Marshes swallowed fields. An army drowned in the muck. The wish happened in silence. The world stopped, as it always does when the language leaves my tongue. No one sees those moments. No one remembers them—not unless they are like me, or like him. But the consequences... they always resume. The rain came when it should not have. Too long. Too wide. Villages untouched by water bloomed overnight. Crops rebirthed themselves from dead earth. The army believed it sabotage. An unnatural curse. And when the villages whispered of a quiet man who passed through before the miracle, their rage found a shape. They never saw me speak the wish—but they felt its echo. And they followed it. She died because I hadn't known how to stop the water.

  So I held her. And I touched the lamp.

  The gin appeared, seated behind me on the temple steps. Silent. Watching.

  "Make her immortal," I begged. "She doesn't deserve to die for my mistake."

  The drizzle froze mid-air. The blood hovered.

  "Granted," he said.

  She breathed again. Her eyes opened. Her wound closed like water forgetting it was ever cut.

  And for a hundred years, we were in love. I still remember the way she pressed her forehead to mine when we danced in the ruins of a forgotten library. The scent of smoked tea in her hair. The way she'd whisper stories into my ear just to hear me laugh. The world shifted around us, but for a time, she was my anchor—and I was hers.

  It was real. It was warm. We traveled, built quiet places in broken lands, laughed in new cities. I thought I'd beaten the Chain. Thought I'd made something good.

  But immortality doesn't just preserve. It empties.

  First her laugh faded. Then her voice dimmed. Then her dreams stopped.

  "I can't die," she said once. "But I don't feel alive."

  I made other wishes. For warmth. For joy. For her to remember herself.

  Each one twisted something new.

  Until, one day, she vanished.

  In her place was a spiral burned into the wall—a glyph the Veil, an order born from my earliest mistakes, would later call The Mark of the Unforgotten. They hunt the anomalies. The breaks in the lie. The places where my wishes left bruises on the world.

  They found her decades later. Leading a cult that worshipped silence. She no longer remembered my name.

  "You gave me forever," she said. "But not a reason to keep it."

  I could not kill her. I wished her into stasis. A cage of time. A mercy.

  That was the fourth wish.

  There are nights I hold the lamp and consider the fifth. Not to undo her. Not to undo anything. But to bury the echo. To cut the chain before it coils again.

  And I don't.

  Because if I silence that lie, what else would unravel?

  So this is not a confession. I'm not asking forgiveness. But if I were... I wonder who I'd ask.

  This is not a warning. It's already too late.

  This is a story. Of a boy who asked for more than he understood. Of a man who watched the world reshape itself around his wishes.

  Of a name whispered through the cracks left in history.

  Wishborn.

  And if you read far enough, you might understand why I almost wished for the end of it all. Not to change the world. Not to fix anything. Just to unmake the chain. To silence the echoes. To give the world back its pain—and its peace. I have all the wishes I could ever want. And none I can bear to make—yet.

  But there are still stories left to tell. Too many. Some broken. Some beautiful. All of them mine.