Things Left Unnamed
About the Story
An archivist returns to her coastal hometown for her mother's funeral and finds that names are being taken from paper and memory. As blanks appear in photographs and records, she uncovers a deliberate pattern of erasure and a personal link that forces her to decide how much she will keep in order to save others.
Chapters
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The Well in the Walls
A young sound archivist returns to a salt-bitten town to digitize tapes in a condemned library. The building hums with dry pipes and borrowed voices. With a janitor’s beeswax and an analog recorder, she descends into the drained reservoir to confront what listens back and wears her name.
Echoes Under Goliath Station
In a near-future city's abandoned subway, maintenance tech Maya trades a memory to rescue missing workers from a machine that devours names and voices. As she learns the system's appetite for forgetting, she must choose what to sacrifice and how to protect the city's fragile language.
The Hush in the Vault
In a fogbound city, a young archivist discovers a forbidden tape that erases names and memory. Joined by a retired engineer and volunteers, she must confront an experimental transmitter turned ravenous. A nightly struggle to reclaim voices becomes a cost paid in small, ordinary losses.
Open Line
Night-shift dispatcher Mira answers a whisper no system can trace: a child warning of something in the vents of a condemned tower across the harbor. Defying protocol, she enters the building with a lineman’s test set and an old man’s advice—keep talking. In the hush that feeds on silence, her voice becomes the weapon.
The Hollow Ear
A young sound designer enters the stairways of an old tenement to rescue her vanished friend and confront a creature that feeds on voices. Armed with a listening stone, a salvaged spool, and fragile courage, she must bind hunger with sound and choose what to sacrifice.