Please Stop Spreading Rumors About Me — They Keep Coming True

Chapter 61: The Vale of Ash

Everything I believed about remembering met its hardest test in a place called the Vale of Ash. For two days, I thought we were going to lose the argument. For two days, I wasn’t sure we were right.

The Vale of Ash was a valley in the far south. A generation ago, the Empire of a Thousand Verses had burned it to the ground — not in a war, but as a lesson. The people of the Vale had defied the Empire. They’d kept their own stories, sung their own names, refused to let the Empire decide who they remembered. So the Empire made an example of them, the way it made examples, and burned the whole valley and most of the people in it. The survivors were old now. They had spent their entire lives carrying the memory of the worst thing a person can carry: watching everyone they loved die, in fire, for the crime of remembering.

This was not Greywater. In Greywater, the people grieved a lost love, and the pain was the shape of that love, and I could sit with a man and help him see it. The survivors of the Vale of Ash didn’t carry the memory of love. They carried the memory of horror — fire, and loss, and a cruelty so total it had no bottom. When we arrived and found the Forgetters already there, already at work, I understood for the first time the full and genuine power of what the Editor was offering.

The Forgetters were offering these old, broken, lifelong-suffering people the end of the worst memory in the world. Forget the fire. Forget the screaming. Forget the day your whole family died in front of you. Set down, at last, after fifty years, the unbearable thing you have carried every single morning of your life. Rest. Looking at those old faces — faces that had not known a day’s peace in fifty years — I could not, in my heart, call that offer cruel. It looked like the kindest thing anyone had ever offered them. It looked like mercy.

The Forgetters had a champion there, a senior one sent by Grand Archivist Lu himself. She said to me, gently, in front of all the gathered survivors: "Look at them, demon-slayer. Fifty years of nightmares. Fifty years of waking up in the fire. And you would tell them to keep it? You would force these people to carry their own torture for the rest of their lives, so that your sky can have a few more lights in it?" Her eyes were kind, and certain, and that was the worst part. "We are not the villains here. You are. We offer the broken peace. You offer them a duty to suffer. Tell me, in front of these people who have suffered enough — what gives you the right?"

I had no answer.

I’ll be honest with you, because I’ve been honest with you this whole way. I stood in the Vale of Ash, in front of those old suffering faces, and her question went into me like a blade. I didn’t have an answer. Worse — I wasn’t sure there was one. Maybe she was right. Maybe my whole gospel was fine for grief and monstrous for trauma. Maybe some things should be forgotten. Maybe forcing a tortured old woman to keep her torture, in the name of a principle, was exactly the kind of cruelty I’d spent the whole war fighting. The survivors were listening. The Forgetters were winning. And for the first time since this all began, I thought: maybe we’re wrong.

It was the First Author who found me that night, sitting alone in the ash with the noodle pot and no idea what I believed anymore.

"You’re losing because you’ve accepted her question," she said quietly, settling beside me. "She asked you to choose between making them suffer and letting them forget. You cannot win that question — both answers are cruel. So stop answering it." She looked out at the dark, scarred valley. "I have erased eleven thousand people, Lin Bo. Some of them carried memories like these. I told myself, every time, that I was giving them peace — that forgetting the horror was a mercy. And do you know what I learned, being the one who is not allowed to forget?" Her ancient eyes were wet. "I learned that there is a third thing. Not ’suffer forever.’ Not ’forget it all.’ A third thing — and it is the thing the Forgetters can never offer, because the Editor does not understand it, because the dark has never had to live with anything." She turned to look at me. "You can heal. You can carry even the worst memory in the world in a way that no longer destroys you. The horror doesn’t have to be either a fresh wound or an erased blank — it can become a scar. Something that happened, that you survived, that you carry, that no longer bleeds. The Forgetters offer to cut off the wounded limb. They never tell these people the limb can be healed instead — that you can keep it, keep what it remembers, and one day stop screaming." She took my hand. "That is your answer. Not ’you must suffer.’ Not ’you may forget.’ ’You can heal — and keep them.’ And there is one person in your family who knows exactly how to teach a broken soul to do it."

I thought of Mu Chen. The boy who’d been worn down to a weapon and a hollow, who’d had his own name and self burned out of him by the same Empire, who knew better than any living person what it was to carry an unbearable thing — and who had become, since I freed him, the gentlest healer of the bereaved in the world.

Then I understood the other thing too. The thing that made the Forgetters’ mercy not mercy at all.

"And it’s not just their pain," I said slowly, the fog lifting, anger and clarity rising together. "Look at who’s offering it. It’s the Empire. The Empire burned this valley. The Empire murdered these people’s families — for remembering — and now the Empire’s Forgetters have come to offer the survivors a way to forget the Empire did it." My voice hardened. "That’s not mercy. That’s the murderer offering to wipe the witness’s memory. If these people forget the fire, the Empire wins. The atrocity gets erased. The dead get murdered a second time, and no one’s left who remembers what was done or who did it. Forgetting the horror doesn’t just free the survivors — it pardons the killers. It lets the worst thing the Empire ever did slide quietly into the blank, as if it never happened." I stood up, the ash falling from me, certain again for the first time in two days. "Some things you remember not because the memory is sweet. You remember them because forgetting them is how the people who did it get away with it. You remember so it can never happen again. You remember to honor the murdered. You remember so the powerful can’t burn a valley full of people and then burn the memory too."

The First Author smiled, sad and proud at once.

"Now," she said, "you have your answer. Go give it to them. Both halves. You don’t have to suffer forever — Mu Chen can teach you to carry it and heal. And you don’t have to let them get away with it — your memory is the last justice the dead will ever have." She rose. "Tomorrow, don’t argue with the Forgetter. Don’t accept her question. Offer these people the third thing. And let them choose it freely, awake, knowing the whole truth."

I looked out at the dark Vale of Ash, where a generation of suffering had been offered the false mercy of oblivion by the very power that had caused it.

"Yeah," I said quietly. "Let’s go heal them instead."