Ashes of Memory

Some stories are not bound by the flow of time as we know it. They linger in the in-between places, trapped in a fog of memory, where days stretch out like echoes and faces blur like reflections in water. For Bennett Bentley, that fog was all he knew.

Living was a generous term for his existence. Bennett was trapped, though he didn’t yet realize how completely.

He wandered through stone corridors that stretched endlessly, a monastery suspended in time, somewhere in the year fourteen hundred and seventy-five. Each dawn, he woke to the same light filtering through narrow windows, the same cold, unmoving air, and the same blank faces of silent monks passing by, as unfamiliar to him as strangers on a forgotten street.

Bennett’s mind held no anchors, no way to place himself in time. His face blindness prevented him from recognizing anyone—not the monks, not even himself if he caught his reflection in the glass. All faces were foreign, as though painted without features, and he was left wandering alone in a haze of blank expressions and fading memories. But there was one thing he knew, one ache he couldn’t escape: somewhere beyond this cold stone prison, he had a family.