The sky above the Glass Dunes shimmered with electric currents, a storm trapped forever in the atmosphere. Liora, an architect of memory palaces, sifted through the crystalline shards buried in the sand, extracting fragments of forgotten lives. Her latest commission demanded something impossible—a reconstructed childhood for a man who never had one.
She pressed a shard to her temple. Flickers of warmth, laughter, and a mother’s voice lit up her mind. But they were not his memories—they were hers. The dunes mirrored them back, offering only reflections, never creations.
The man would pay handsomely, but as Liora hesitated, she recognized the truth: a memory not lived could never be real. She let the shard slip through her fingers. Some pasts could not be built, only accepted.
As the storm rumbled overhead, she walked on, leaving behind both the commission and the fleeting echoes of who she had been.
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