Arga had always assumed his life would end in Dusklight Village. The little village surrounded by dense forest had barely changed since the day he was born. Mornings were filled with the sound of roosters and thin mist drifting down from the hills, afternoons with the scent of damp earth rising from the rice paddies, while nights were always silent, accompanied only by the whisper of wind moving through the old trees.
There was nothing truly special about his life.
Every day, he helped Mr. Surya, the man he had always called his father, tend the fields. In the afternoons, he usually sat at the roadside stall with his friends, complaining about how boring life was. Sometimes he imagined what the world beyond the village was like, but those visions always evaporated when the sun rose the next morning.
Until one morning, everything changed.
His mother was cleaning the living room when Arga noticed the family photograph hanging on the wall. It had been taken on his seventeenth birthday. He still remembered clearly how his mother had forced everyone to wear white so they would match.
But something was strange.
There was an empty space between his father and mother.
Arga frowned.
“Mom... is the picture damaged?”
His mother glanced over.
“What picture?”
“That one.”
The woman studied the wooden frame for several seconds before shrugging.
“That’s always been a picture of just Mom and Dad.”
Arga gave a small laugh.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“About what?”
Her smile slowly faded.
“I’m in it too.”
His mother stared at Arga’s face for a long moment, as if trying to remember something. Her expression made Arga’s chest tighten.
“That’s strange...”
“What is?”
“You look so much like my child.”
The words made it feel as though the world had stopped.
Before Arga could ask anything, his mother gave an awkward smile and went back to sweeping the floor as if the conversation had never happened.
All day, Arga tried to convince himself it had been nothing more than a bad joke.
Until that afternoon.
He went to the village hall to pick up a letter his father had requested. When the clerk searched the family records, Mr. Surya’s name and his wife’s appeared on the computer screen.
But there was only one note beneath them.
**No children.**
“That has to be wrong,” Arga said quickly.
The clerk shook his head.
“These records go back decades. They’ve never changed.”
“But I...”
“Who are you?”
The simple question caught in Arga’s throat.
The clerk looked genuinely confused.
There wasn’t the slightest sign that he was joking.
Arga slowly backed away, then ran out of the building.
His heart pounded so hard that his ears began to ring.
When he got home, he opened his bedroom drawer. The childhood photo album he had always kept there was still in its place.
His hands trembled as he opened the first page.
Blank.
The second page.
Blank.
The third.
Blank.
Every photograph that should have shown him had simply vanished. All that remained were pictures of the village, houses, and other people—with no sign of him.
That night, Arga couldn’t sleep.
He tried searching for his name on social media.
Nothing.
He opened his school diploma.
His name was gone.
He checked his identity card.
The photo was still there.
But the name field was empty.
For the first time in his life, Arga asked himself:
What if the world had never remembered that I existed?
At the same time, far along the edge of the forbidden forest, a black-haired girl closed an old book. The compass needle in her hand, which had spun aimlessly for years, suddenly stopped.
Slowly, it pointed toward Dusklight Village.
Nara smiled faintly.
“Finally,” she whispered.
“The erased one has appeared.”