The Vanishing Hours

We once shared so many memories — laughter around the table, quiet walks at dusk, the warmth of familiar voices echoing in celebration of life. Those moments were once mine, held like treasured keepsakes in the folds of my mind. I used to revisit them often, especially in quiet, private moments, when the world slowed and I could reflect on the richness of our time together.

But then came the slow unravelling.

At first, it was small — a name slipping through the cracks, a date lost in the blur of days. Then larger pieces began to fall away, whole chapters of my story fading into the fog. The past—once vivid—became fragmented. Then the present, too, became elusive, flitting past me before I could grasp it. Conversations dissolved mid-sentence. Faces became unfamiliar. I no longer trusted the mirror.

And the future? There is no space for it now. No plans, no expectations. It's as though it is forgotten before it even happens.

Now, I sit quietly. Still here, and yet... not. Oblivious to the ticking of the clock, the shifting of seasons, the subtle rituals of daily life. Time no longer holds meaning. It’s just a word others speak.

There is nothing left to share—not because I don’t want to, but because the words, like memories, are gone.

 

Something Shifted

But then, something shifted.

The silence of the ordinary citizen—the teacher, the welder, the nurse, the father, the young woman with no future to chase—began to break. First, it was small groups, gathering quietly in defiance. They met in backyards, barns, abandoned churches. They shared stories of what they’d lost: children pulled from schools mid-semester, jobs terminated for wrongthink, homes vandalized for flying the wrong flag. They were done being afraid.

Then came the pushback.

They took to the streets—not as mobs, but as neighbors. Waving hand-painted signs and wrapped in old flags their grandparents had folded and stored away, they walked shoulder to shoulder. Not in rage, but in resolve. It wasn’t about ideology anymore. It was about reclaiming something they’d been convinced was gone forever: their dignity, their voice, their country.

The corrupt leftist regime that had cloaked itself in the language of compassion and justice now revealed its true face—one of control, surveillance, and punishment. Government-aligned media tried to smear the rising movement as radical, dangerous, extreme. But it didn’t stick. The world could see the difference: one side burning buildings and silencing thought; the other picking up brooms to clean what had been destroyed.

Protests were met with riot police, drones, and arrests. But it didn’t matter. The people kept coming, swelling in number each day. Farmers drove their tractors into the cities, truckers parked their rigs across highways, and parents stood in front of shuttered schools with bullhorns, demanding their children’s futures back.

It wasn’t political anymore. It was human.

A reckoning had begun—not just with the regime, but with the very lie that had been sold to the nation: that chaos equals justice, that censorship equals safety, that obedience is virtue. People were waking up. And once awake, they could not be put back to sleep.

The streets were no longer ruled by fear. They were now filled with courage. And somewhere deep inside the machinery of control, those in power began to feel something they hadn’t in years.

Panic.

 

A Collapsing World

The fire reflected in every shattered window Elira passed, casting a flickering red across her face like war paint. Sirens wailed in the distance—too many to count, each a different pitch, as if the city were screaming through a dozen throats at once. She kept moving, heart hammering, the worn book still pressed tight to her chest beneath her coat.

They were still following.

Not close enough to see clearly. But close enough that she could feel them—those government thugs in tailored suits who never broke a sweat, who could kill without a sound. Their presence was like static in the air, like a sudden drop in pressure before a storm. They didn't chase. They closed in, with the kind of inevitability that made running feel like futility.

Elira ducked down into a collapsed subway entrance, half-submerged in rubble and filth. She nearly slipped on the wet concrete, catching herself on a rusted railing. She paused, just long enough to listen.

Footsteps. Slow. Precise. Just above.

She clenched her teeth and moved again, deeper into the tunnel’s dark throat, past graffiti-tagged columns and puddles of stagnant water. Her breath echoed too loudly. Every step felt like a signal flare. Somewhere overhead, the city continued to burn, but down here—it was silent. Heavy. Like walking through the grave of a civilization.

At last, she reached the place.

An old breaker room behind a maintenance corridor, long since abandoned and overlooked. She slammed the door shut, bolted it, and collapsed against the wall, lungs gasping. For a moment, she allowed herself to shake.

On the floor, hidden beneath a false tile, was a case. She pulled it free. Inside: more microfilms, flash drives, a few crumbling documents—pieces of truth. Unaltered histories. Firsthand accounts of the early fall. A child's diary from the first riots. An economist’s final warning. An outlawed photograph of elected officials signing away the republic behind closed doors.

Proof.

Elira knew she wouldn't make it out of the city. Not tonight. Maybe not ever. But someone would. Someone had to. And if they had this, they’d know what really happened.

She began packing it all into a small courier satchel, methodically, hands trembling but steady enough. From her coat, she pulled a flare pen—one of the few tools she still had—and scrawled a symbol on the wall: a broken chain.

A message to those who would come after.

We were not all blind.

Suddenly—a thud. The soft click of polished shoes on concrete. The door handle jiggled. Then stopped.

Silence.

Then... a voice. Male. Calm. Cold.

“Miss Denevar... we only want to talk.”

She stared at the door, backing away slowly. No answer. No trust. She knew their kind. Talking always came after the van had sealed, after the room was dark, after the truth had been ripped from you one memory at a time.

She slipped the strap over her shoulder, clutching the satchel close.

And then, very quietly, she began to look for another way out.

 

Untamed Truth

Elira had taught history once.

Real history—not the sterilized timelines and heroic myths the Directorate approved, but the raw, untamed truth. She taught from memory, from smuggled pages, from half-burned books salvaged in the early years of the collapse. It was dangerous work. But now, with the city in flames and the sirens screaming like banshees, that danger had become fatal.

They were hunting her.

Not the street gangs or looters—she could have reasoned with them, even helped them. No, this was different. The men after her wore suits, not armor. Quiet voices. Polished shoes. Precision in every movement. They didn’t need to shout or threaten. Their silence was the threat. The Ministry called them “Compliance Officers.” The people called them “shadows.”

She had spotted them earlier, cutting through the smoke-filled streets near the old university district, where she'd hidden microfilm copies of banned texts. They didn’t chase. They simply followed—calm, patient, clinical. Like wolves stalking an injured deer.

Elira kept moving.

Around her, the city was an inferno. Concrete split under the heat. Holographic billboards sparked and died. Citizens tore down government drones with ropes and pipes, cheered as they crashed into the pavement. It should have felt like a kind of justice.

It didn’t.

She ducked into the skeletal remains of a library annex—her old haunt, now nothing but scorched shelves and dust. Somewhere beneath the ash, she had stashed a relic, wrapped in cloth: a first-edition copy of The Federalist Papers. Worthless to most, priceless to her. She clutched it tight and whispered: “They burned this once before. Not again.”

Behind her, footsteps—soft, deliberate.

They were close.

She slipped through a maintenance corridor and into the back alley, weaving through the chaos. A wall of fire rose two blocks away as a fuel truck exploded, sending a mushroom cloud of flame into the night. The city screamed. Not in words, but in collapsing metal and the roar of betrayal.

She could still feel the presence of the shadows. Always just a corner behind.

Why now? she wondered. Why come for me when the world is already falling?

And then the answer came, cold and clear.

Because stories survive. Because memory endures. Because truth is the last thing they haven’t extinguished.

If people knew what came before—if they understood how the fall had happened—then maybe they’d stop begging for chains and start demanding freedom. Maybe they’d rise up for real. Not just burn buildings, but rebuild minds.

And so Elira ran, not to escape, but to preserve.

Because in a world ruled by lies, memory was rebellion.

And she would not be silenced.

 

Ashes on the Wind

The morning breaks, then fades by noon,

The day is gone, the night comes soon.

We chase the light, we grasp, we plead—

Yet time still plants its quiet seed.

The footsteps that we leave in sand

Are smoothed away by nature’s hand.

No matter how we fight or cry,

All marks we make are meant to die.

The voices loud, the dreams we shout,

Are swallowed whole by creeping doubt.

We rise, we fall, we laugh, we weep—

And still, we’re carried into sleep.

Ashes scattered on the breeze,

Names forgotten by the seas.

What once was precious, fierce, and proud,

Now drifts unseen beneath a cloud.

A fleeting kiss, a fleeting scar,

A fleeting wish upon a star—

They all dissolve, they all grow cold,

As time reclaims what it once sold.

Yet in that end, a peace is born,

A place beyond regret and scorn.

The wheel must turn, the song must cease—

To make the space for newer peace.

So while the glass still holds some sand,

Reach out, reach out with open hand.

For life will slip, and death will mend—

And we are here, and then we end.

 

Beneath the Fury

The streets heaved like a living thing—angry, hungry, loud. They surged with people who had long forgotten what peace felt like, or maybe had never known it at all. Young and old, masked and painted, armed with makeshift clubs or just bare fists—they didn’t come with hope. They came with rage.

All day the people had been told to wait.

Wait for bread. Wait for power. Wait for medicine. Wait for justice.

And now, at last, they had stopped waiting.

It began with a whisper in the slums near the energy district: “They still have food in the towers.” The message spread like dry fire. It didn’t matter if it was true. In times like these, belief was more powerful than fact. Within hours, they were marching. By nightfall, they were rioting.

The government towers stood like smug gods above them, guarded by private mercenaries who looked down on the crowd as if they were insects. Drones hovered overhead, capturing footage for the state media who would edit the narrative by morning: “Unprovoked violence. Dangerous radicals. The government is responding to restore order.”

But there was no order to restore. Only a fragile illusion, held together with plastic words and digital lies.

People smashed windows not to loot but to scream. They hurled bricks not for gain but to be heard. And when the armored trucks rolled in and the tear gas hissed from rooftops, they did not run. They stood their ground and howled back at the gas, at the bullets, at the sky itself.

Among them were faces warped by years of indignity—mothers who had watched their children die from untreated fevers, veterans discarded like trash, the jobless and the homeless and the hopeless. But also, the young—burning with reckless purpose, wrapped in tribal cloth and slogans they barely understood, yet ready to bleed for the promise of something better… or the satisfaction of tearing down what remained.

Street fires lit the night orange. Statues toppled. Banners burned. In the distance, someone shouted into a makeshift loudspeaker, a voice trembling with fury: “They said they’d take care of us! They lied! This is our city!”

Cheers erupted, but they were jagged and hollow. No one controlled this anymore—not the factions, not the enforcers, not the politicians holed up in their guarded high-rises. The crowd was a storm, and it obeyed no one.

And yet, beneath the fury, a deeper current flowed—one of grief. Of betrayal. Of the aching, quiet knowledge that no one was coming to save them. The government had become a myth, a god that only showed its face to punish or deceive. And now the people were done worshiping it.

As buildings burned and walls fell, the city cried out—not in hope or triumph, but in mourning.

The funeral of a fallen nation had begun, and the streets were its procession.

 

Something Real

The smoke had become a permanent feature of the skyline.

What used to be Capitol Sector—once the administrative heart of the city—was now little more than ash and echo. Fires spread block by block, unchecked, licking at the steel bones of empty towers. Riots had turned from outbursts to routine, as common as the morning food lines. Entire neighborhoods burned because someone didn't get their ration card, or because the wrong emblem was painted on a wall. No one even remembered how the violence started—it just was, like the air, like hunger.

Kade moved through the ruins like a shadow. His cloak, singed and ragged, blended with the ash-flecked air. He stayed close to the old sewer routes beneath the Market Commons, popping up only when necessary. Above ground, chaos reigned. The tribal colors were everywhere—red scarves, yellow sashes, black armbands—each group claiming some ideology they barely understood, passed down like scripture from failed influencers and disgraced former officials.

Tonight, the red-scarved faction had set fire to the Bureau of Food Distribution. A statement, they claimed. But all it did was leave tens of thousands without even powdered protein for the week. The crowd cheered as the building collapsed in on itself, unaware they’d sealed their own fate. The politicians would spin the story by dawn—blame it on rival factions, call for new restrictions, more surveillance.

Kade wasn’t watching the blaze for spectacle. He was looking for someone.

Among the howling mobs and crumbling concrete, there were still a few who hadn’t given in. He had word that a teacher from Old Midtown had survived—the kind who taught real history, not state-mandated fiction. Someone brave enough to still use the word “truth” like it mattered.

He ducked behind a toppled monument to the Unity Party—its faceplate torn off, graffiti scrawled across its chest: WE SEE YOU. A good sign. His contact was close.

A child ran past, barefoot, clutching a can of stolen food. No older than ten. Behind her, two enforcers in black armor sprinted in pursuit. They didn’t care about the can. They never did. It was about the message: no one took without permission.

Kade threw a chunk of rubble across the street, drawing their attention. When they turned, the girl vanished into an alleyway. The enforcers shouted and gave chase to the wrong shadow. Good enough.

Sirens wailed, but no one flinched anymore. They were background noise now, like the flickering lights and distant screams. The city wasn’t falling—it had already fallen. They just hadn’t buried it yet.

And as it smoldered, Kade kept moving. Not to escape, but to find others like him. Builders. Thinkers. Carriers of memory.

Because somewhere in this burning graveyard of a civilization, he still believed something could rise again.

Something real.