Fragment XIII — Shutters in the South
She wakes before the scream reaches her throat.
For a moment, she does not know which silence she is in.
The room is dark, but not the kind of dark that belongs to smoke. The air is still. No boots on gravel. No splintering wood. No lanternlight seeping through cracks like liquid fire.
Yet her palms are slick. Her jaw aches from clenching.
In the dream, she had been running again.
Not away.
Searching.
A small hand had slipped from hers — or had she let go? The memory refuses to stay still. In one version, she turned to answer a voice. In another, she bent to tie a sandal. In another, she was already too late.
In every version, he was gone.
The street had been alive with shutters slamming. Windows darkening. Doors barred from the inside. The kind of quiet that is louder than shouting — the quiet of neighbors who have decided not to see.
And the other girl — the older one — had not been there.
That is the detail that unsettles her most.
In the true memory, the older girl had always been there. Quick hands. Steady voice. A plan forming even as smoke gathered. But the dream insists on subtraction. It edits the past. It removes protection.
It leaves her alone.
She sits up slowly.
Her breathing steadies, but the images do not fade. They rearrange.
The southern provinces were ports and salt wind. Masts like forests. Sails stitched with clan sigils and merchant marks. Men who knew the weight of rope and tide better than the weight of decrees.
They had traded beyond the Empire’s patience.
That was the whisper.
Or perhaps they had not.
Perhaps someone else had needed a reason.
The raids came at dusk. Always at dusk. When the sea glowed red and the streets were busiest. When accusations could be shouted and swallowed in the same breath.
False flags were not called false. They were called corrections.
A cache of weapons discovered. A coded letter intercepted. A signal fire misread as treason.
It did not matter that the letters were planted. That the crates were empty before they were filled with evidence. That the signal fires had burned there for generations to guide ships through fog.
By nightfall, you were not a trader.
You were a destabilizer.
By morning, you were not a citizen.
You were a threat.
She presses her fingers to her eyes.
In the dream, the soldiers had not looked at faces. They had looked at lists.
Names written in careful script.
Names that turned neighbors into enemies in their own streets.
She remembers — or thinks she remembers — a soldier pausing before a door, glancing at a page, nodding once before striking.
Did he believe it?
Or was belief unnecessary?
The nightmare changes each time she revisits it. The streets narrow. The sea recedes. The boy’s laughter grows fainter. The older girl stands further away, until she is no longer visible at all.
Memory should harden with age.
Hers dissolves.
Was the hand truly torn from hers by force?
Or did she loosen her grip first?
Was there shouting?
Or only the sound of wood against wood as homes sealed themselves?
She rises and crosses to the window.
Outside, the city sleeps as if empires do not rehearse their fears in the dark.
Somewhere far south, the ports still stand. Ships still dock. Ledgers still balance. Children still chase each other between crates of salt and dried fish.
And somewhere, perhaps, another list is being drafted.
Another neighborhood studied.
Another dusk selected.
She closes her eyes.
In the dream, she is searching.
In waking, she is remembering.
And she is no longer certain which is more dangerous.