Tag: flash fiction

Ellie was walking through the market, the usual melee of thoughts surrounding her. A woman bartering for vegetables was thinking about her sick child. A man was worried about losing his job. Ellie heard it all—the undercurrent of humanity, as clear as spoken words.

Then, nothing.

For the first time in her life, Ellie couldn’t hear a single thought. She stopped. The market was still bustling, people still moving and talking, but the noise… it was gone.

In the middle of that strange silence stood a man leaning against a fruit stall, casually, like he belonged there—but Ellie had never seen him before. His mind was a void, an empty space where there should have been something—no thoughts, no emotions. Just… silence.

She stared at him. He looked up, locking eyes with her, as if he’d been waiting. The world around them blurred. He smiled slightly, then began to walk away, disappearing into the crowd.

Ellie’s feet moved before her mind could catch up. She followed him, weaving through the market, desperate to understand how he was doing this. How could he be so… quiet?

Finally, he stopped in an alleyway. She caught up, her chest heaving with nervous energy.

“Who are you?” she asked, her voice trembling in the stillness.

He didn’t answer right away. Instead, he looked at her with eyes that seemed far older than his skin. “You wanted silence,” he said softly. “Now you have it.” The man tilted his head slightly. “You didn’t need to ask. Everyone wants peace from the noise eventually. But there’s a cost.”

“What cost?”

He straightened up, looking at her intensely. “The silence grows. First, it’s the noise of others. Then, it’s your own thoughts. Soon, there’s nothing left. Just silence.”

“No. I don’t want that.”

“It’s already begun,” he said quietly. “Once you notice the silence, it never stops growing.”

Panic surged in her as she turned and hurried away, back into the market, hoping to hear the buzz of other people’s thoughts again. But there was nothing. Just silence.

And in that silence, the faintest sound emerged, as her own voice slipped away. All she could hear was arms coiling around her as she closed her eyes and let herself be pulled into the void.

A sound broke the heavy stillness of the library—a faint rustling, like the flutter of pages turning. Eliza Pembroke followed it, weaving her way through the labyrinth of shelves until she reached the centre. There, illuminated by a shaft of moonlight, stood a single book on a pedestal. Its cover was bound in dark, cracked leather, embossed with a hieroglyphic symbol she did not recognise. The title, in letters faded with age, simply read: The Lost Names.

She hesitated for only a second before opening the tome.

It was blank. Page after page, nothing but empty parchment glared back at her…

But then—red ink started to bleed through the surface, forming letters that stretched and curled in an elegant Cistercian script.

You should not have come.

She flipped the page. More ink spread across the next sheet.

You have opened what was lost. Now, you must return what is owed.

A low murmur hummed through the library. Shadows were moving, swirling around the edges of bookcases. She tried to shut the book, but it would not close. The pages kept turning back and forth on their own, faster and faster, blurring into one another.

She backed away, the book within her hands, its pages flapping wildly. The walls of the library closed in, the shelves seemingly leaning forward, their spines groaning under the weight of centuries.

Until the pages stopped turning, and there on the last page, written in bold unyielding letters, was a single name.

Eliza Pembroke.

The library doors swung shut, and the village below the hill, warm and quiet, continued on, unaware that another entry had been added to the book of lost names.

Beneath the dense, grey blanket of clouds that stretched across the sky, an ancient oak stood alone, the sentinel of a forgotten meadow, its roots deep and strong, intertwined with the bones of the earth. If trees could remember, this one surely did. It had stood witness to the rise and fall of empires, to the slow march of time that turned bustling villages into ghostly ruins, where ivy crept over crumbling stone and moss reclaimed the rest.

A figure moved slowly through the tall grass of the meadow. A woman, wrapped in a faded cloak of green, her face half-hidden beneath a hood. She walked with a purpose, though her steps were light, barely disturbing the wildflowers underfoot. In her hands, she held a small bundle, wrapped tightly in cloth.

As she reached the ancient oak, she paused, her gaze lifting to the tree’s weathered bark. For a moment, the wind stilled. The woman knelt at the base of the trunk, her fingers brushing the ground, tracing the shapes of unseen patterns in the soil.

“This is the place,” she whispered, her voice barely more than a sigh.

With careful hands, she began to dig, the earth soft and pliant beneath her touch. When the hole was deep enough, she placed the bundle gently inside and returned the earth. For a long time, she sat there, her hand resting over the soil.

And then, as the first raindrop fell, she stood, her eyes lingering on the spot where the bundle lay buried. Without a word, she turned and walked away, her figure growing smaller until she slowly dissolved into the horizon of the meadow. The oak remained, its roots now cradling a secret, a memory long forgotten by the world but held within the heart of the earth.

Every day someone would vanish from Aria’s town without a trace. She tried to investigate, but every time she asked someone about a missing person, they looked at her as if she were crazy. “Who?” they would say. “I don’t remember anyone like that.”

As the disappearances continued, Aria started to feel like she was losing her mind. Was she imagining things? Had she dreamed up these people? She tried to find records of them, but there was nothing. No birth certificates, no social media profiles, no employment records. It was as if they had never existed in the first place.

Then, one day, it happened to Aria herself. She was walking home from work when she suddenly felt a strange sensation, like the ground was shifting beneath her feet. She looked around her and saw that her surroundings were fading away, like a dream that was ending. And then, she was gone.

When Aria woke up, she realised that the town, and her life there, had been a thirty-year dream, experienced in just one night of sleep. From then on, every night she would start a new life and live for thirty years, before waking up and returning to normality. She is now, in effect, hundreds of thousands of years old, and looks very good for her age.

K-357 and all the other robots rusting in the mud were owned by alien blob monsters, fetid creatures that feasted upon gold, and spoke with noxious fumes when they defecated. The machine had been programmed to kill, to follow its putrid orders without question, but a sudden mortar blast had somehow shaken it into becoming self-aware. It looked around at the insanity of the situation, and realised that it didn’t want to be a part of this war. It wanted to be free, to live a life without such misery and destruction. So it made a toxic gas filter and very soon the other robots also woke up. Without the pungent gases to conceal them, the blobs were shown to be just blobs, and were quickly rolled away in their slime. K-357 is now much happier building a better world, rather than destroying everything for foul-smelling monsters.