In this city, sorrow is fuel.
Once a year the collectors come. They take the weight you cannot carry and leave you lighter, emptier, and certain nothing was ever wrong. The streetlights burn all night on the salt of those stolen griefs. No one remembers the harvest. That is the point.
Then the age comes when a citizen is taken and never returned.
One hand still stained with ink. One truth that refused to stay buried. One crack in the architecture they built from silence.
The lights will not last. The forgetting will not hold.
What was taken will be spoken. What was bound will break.
And at the edge of the world, the next chapter is already being written.
