The streets were empty. The usual dreamers—the anxious students, the nostalgic old women, the children chasing paper dragons—were gone. The lamplighters hadn’t come. Instead, a thin, gray fog coiled through the alleys, and from the fog came a sound: the soft, wet shush of a broom sweeping dust.
He wrote her name. And then he began to build something that even the Yumeost could never sweep away.
“Because if you sweep it away, I’ll forget the way she laughed. I’ll forget the smell of her pancakes. I’ll forget…”
The figure turned its blank face toward him. It did not speak aloud. Instead, Kael heard the voice inside his own skull, soft as moth wings: I am the Yumeost. The dream-eater. The last stop before forgetting.
Kael stood alone in the plaza. The pile of film reels—his mother’s laugh, the wedding kiss, the child’s step—lay at his feet. He knelt and gathered them into his arms. They were cold. They weighed nothing. They weighed everything.