The Artist of Revenge

In a city forgotten by time, where streets dissolved into mist and buildings whispered secrets only shadows could hear, lived a woman named Eira. Not by choice—no one ever chose invisibility—but by curse, or perhaps by fate. She was erased, truly erased. Her name had never been spoken aloud, her face never drawn in ink or memory. She was the blank page in the world’s book, the silence between notes of a fading song.

The city had no name. Or perhaps it did once, but names eroded quickly here, like paint peeling from old shutters. The river that once fed its heart now ran silent, its banks thick with reeds that whispered only to the wind. Statues in the plazas wore moss like forgotten kings, and lamp posts blinked uncertainly, as though unsure of their duty to the night.

The city thrived on stories—tales spun like silk that clothed every stone and breath. To be seen was to exist; to be remembered was to be alive. But Eira was no story. She was the absence between stories. People walked past her as if she were a ghost of a ghost, a hollow echo that flickered at the edge of their vision.

She became a ghost haunting a city that had forgotten to remember.

Every morning, Eira wandered the labyrinthine streets searching for a trace of herself—any fragment of recognition. At the market, vendors spoke in murmurs that dissolved when she approached. In the cafés, laughter swallowed her silent attempts at conversation. Children ran through the alleys chasing sunbeams but never noticed the pale figure who moved with them yet was not part of their games.

Once, she had tried to buy a rose. The vendor's hands, gnarled with time, hovered over the petals, arranging them for unseen eyes. Eira reached out, brushed the soft bloom with reverence.

“How much for one?” she asked, voice barely above a breath.

The vendor didn’t look up.

“Strange wind today,” he muttered, tying a ribbon around a bouquet.

Eira stood there for what felt like an eternity before stepping away. The rose remained. So did the silence.

There were nights Eira lay curled beneath alley awnings, tracing raindrops with her finger on the cold stone. She would pretend each drop was a memory someone might have of her—a laugh shared, a childhood secret, a name spoken with affection. But the stones stayed silent. So did the rain.

One evening, as twilight bled into night, Eira found herself drawn to the old clock tower—the one place where the mist was thinnest and the echoes deepest.

The climb to the top was always the same: 147 steps, each one older than the last. The stone walls breathed with cold, and the iron railing trembled under her grip, as if recoiling from her touch.

At the summit, time seemed suspended. The massive gears ticked in slow, mournful groans. It was here that the voice always returned, soft as dust but clear as truth.

There, beneath the crumbling stones, she heard it again. A whisper pulled from the void, yet it carried warmth and strange comfort.

“Forgive,” it breathed. “Forgive the pain of being unseen. Forgive the emptiness where your life should have been. Let go and be free.”

The voice promised peace. It promised rest from the endless ache of invisibility. It offered forgiveness—the chance to stop struggling and dissolve softly into the quiet.

But Eira did not want peace. Not this peace. Not the peace of forgetting.

Her chest tightened. The silence around her was not sanctuary—it was a cage, a void threatening to swallow her whole. She felt the weight of non-existence pressing down, demanding she vanish.

She could forgive. She could release the pain and drift away into oblivion. That was the easier path.

But she did not.

Instead, she chose revenge.

Not the revenge of hatred or rage. No, her revenge was something altogether stranger, more defiant. It was a rebellion against erasure. A scream into the void.

Eira reached inside herself, deeper than she had ever dared, and pulled out a spark—bright and burning. It was fragile and fierce, a single pulse of light in the unyielding darkness.

With trembling hands, she began to weave.

She spun the spark into threads of color and sound, weaving a tapestry of light that stretched across the empty city. Her creation did not harm, nor destroy. It illuminated.

Walls that once whispered of decay now glowed with her story—vivid murals that bloomed in the mist. Streets hummed with melodies she composed from silence, songs that wrapped around the bones of the city like a living thing.

People stopped. They could not walk past anymore.

They saw her—not as a shadow, but as a blazing comet carving a new constellation across the night sky.

Her revenge was not against others. It was against oblivion itself.

Days passed, then weeks.

The city changed. Its veins pulsed with Eira’s creation, and with it, her presence grew impossible to ignore.

An old woman paused at the wall where Eira had painted the memory of a garden long gone. Her eyes welled up.

“My sister had a swing there,” she whispered to no one. “How did someone remember that?”

Children danced to the notes Eira wove into alleyways, their laughter rising in harmony with her silent song.

“Mama,” one asked, pointing at the glowing arch, “who made this?”

“No one knows,” the mother said. “But someone wanted us to remember.”

But the transformation was not without cost.

Eira felt her body strain beneath the weight of the spark she had summoned. Each thread she wove pulled at her, demanding more of her essence. Her reflection remained absent; mirrors revealed only the mist where she should have been.

Still, she persevered.

One night, perched atop the clock tower where the mist was thinnest, Eira looked out over the city she had reclaimed. She no longer felt like the blank page. She was a living story now—fierce and bright.

And yet, the voice of forgiveness lingered in her mind.

“Let go and be free,” it urged softly.

Eira closed her eyes, breathing deep.

To forgive would be to release the pain, to let the spark die, to fade once more into nothingness.

But to forgive was also to forget.

And she would never forget.

Revenge had given her life. It had made her impossible to ignore, impossible to erase.

In a city that forgot, Eira became legend—a blazing comet cutting through the gray.

Because sometimes, revenge is not the destruction of others.

It is the creation of self against oblivion.