The Known | Unknown (eBook)

The Story Of Forgetten Love

Nitesh Shastri (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2025 | 1. Auflage
400 Seiten
Publishdrive (Verlag)
978-0-00-097469-3 (ISBN)

Infos

The Known | Unknown is a haunting and intimate story about memory, love, and the spaces between.
Julian Vale wakes to a life that feels almost real. He knows the streets, the weather, the faces-but something essential is missing, just beyond reach. As fragments of a forgotten past begin to surface through sketches, letters, and music he no longer remembers writing, Julian is drawn toward a woman whose presence feels like gravity. Told in quiet echoes and fractured time, The Known | Unknown is a story about the people we lose, the versions of ourselves we bury, and the mysterious, beautiful ways the truth tries to return.

Structured as a nonlinear narrative, the story invites you to enter from any chapter, in any moment. Chronology is secondary to emotion; what matters is how the pieces resonate. Like memory itself, it's not about the order of events-but the feeling they leave behind.

Textauszug

CHAPTER ONE

I Forgot

Loop #7

The music shifted.

It wasn’t gradual. It was jarring — like someone had leaned too hard on the turntable and the room didn’t know how to respond. Julian blinked.

A violin string screeched somewhere overhead. Then laughter returned, poured like syrup into the gaps, and everything was polished again — music swelling, guests swirling, chandeliers humming with golden light. But something had cracked.

Julian stepped back from the crowd. His collar felt tighter than before, his shirt too crisp, as if he’d only just been sewn into it. A sense of wrongness coiled in his chest. This wasn’t the first time he’d been here. He didn’t remember being here before. But his body did.

He moved toward the manor’s west wing — past a hall where a boy recited poetry to a chair, past a mirror that didn’t reflect him, past the scent of rosewater that followed but never led. He didn’t know where he was going. His feet did.

At the end of a narrow hallway, a door stood ajar. Heavy oak, dust at the hinges. A room no guest had reason to enter. Julian pushed it open. The air inside was still. Bookshelves loomed like judgment. The fireplace held logs but no flame. It smelled of ink and forgotten winters.

He turned once, half-expecting someone to stop him. No one did. He walked to the far wall, drawn by something silent and urgent. His fingers brushed the spines of books that whispered in languages he didn’t speak. One spine stuck out further than the rest. A plain black volume with no title.

He pulled it. Nothing happened. But behind it — wedged between two volumes of myth and memory — was a leather-bound journal.
It wasn’t dusty. It wasn’t old. It was his. He knew before he opened it. The first page held no date, just a message in his own handwriting:

Let me go, Julian. Please. — C

His hands trembled. He turned the pages — notes, sketches, fragments of poems. Half-formed letters addressed to “the girl in the red rain.” Then: a page torn out. The edges frayed. The next entry read only:

Loop Twelve: She asked me to stop remembering.
Loop Thirteen: I remembered anyway.
Loop Fourteen: I stayed.
Loop Fifteen: She didn’t.

Julian stepped back from the desk, his pulse ragged. A sharp knock at the door. He slammed the book shut. A man in a plum-colored suit stood in the hall.

“There you are!” the man said brightly, though his smile didn’t reach his eyes. “They’re looking for you. You were meant to give a toast, weren’t you?” Julian stared at him.

“I… was?”

The man’s smile widened. “Of course. Come, come — we’re moments away.”

Julian followed, the journal still burning in his pocket. Down the hall. Past the mirror again. This time, his reflection waved. They reentered the ballroom. Applause scattered like autumn leaves. The bride had arrived.

She stood beneath the floral arch, veil trailing like a ghost behind her. The man beside her — the groom — held her hand like it was borrowed. Julian couldn’t breathe.

It was her. Ciora.

She was radiant and unreachable. Her eyes scanned the crowd like she’d forgotten what she was looking for. Then they landed on him. And froze.

The music softened. Time caught its breath. He stepped forward. Only a little. “Don’t,” someone whispered behind him. Too late. Julian pulled the journal from his coat. Her eyes widened. He opened to a page.

Read aloud, barely louder than a breath: “You asked me to forget you. But I remember you in the quiet. In the gaps between songs. In the way my hands still shake when I hold a cup you once drank from.”

The groom shifted uneasily. Guests murmured. The mirror on the wall cracked, imperceptibly.

Ciora took a step toward him. “Julian,” she said. Just that. Like the sound of his name was a memory she’d kept hidden beneath her ribs.

The air distorted — briefly — like heat over pavement. Then she spoke again. Louder.

“Try again,” she said. “But this time… don’t try to fix it. Just feel it.”

The chandeliers flickered. Guests blurred. The groom vanished first. Then the violin collapsed into a single note that refused to end. The manor walls peeled away like theater curtains.

The last thing Julian saw was Ciora’s hand reaching for his. Then —

Darkness. And a bell. Loop reset.

Loop #9

The fog came first. It crawled across the fields like sleep does across a weary mind — slow, stubborn, thick with omission. Somewhere behind it, a bell rang. Not loud. But clear.

Julian opened his eyes. He was lying on a bench. Same bench. Same town. Same beginning. But it wasn’t. He sat up, his coat already dusted with ash from the chimneys of Ashvale. The town was waking — shutters creaking open, shopkeepers sweeping stone steps, the old fountain sputtering like it had forgotten how to run.

He looked at his hands. They were shaking.

A girl on a bicycle rode past him and called out, “You’re new.”

He blinked. “What?”

“Here,” she said, slowing just enough for her voice to reach him. “You’re new here.”

Then she vanished into the fog. Julian stood slowly, the journal still warm in his pocket. He didn’t remember putting it there. He didn’t remember much. But his heart was heavy with something that didn’t yet have a name.

The bakery was open. He ducked inside — not for food, but for orientation. It smelled like honey and cinnamon, like things that wanted you to stay.

A woman with storm-colored eyes stood behind the counter. She wore a long navy apron and a pin shaped like a sparrow. “You’re early,” she said.

“Do I know you?” Julian asked. “No,” she said. “But you will.” He hesitated.

“Can I ask… what day is it?”

She tilted her head. “Isn’t that the wrong question?” Julian frowned. “Then what’s the right one?”

The woman handed him a warm loaf, pressed into his hands with gentle insistence.

She said, “Ask what version of yourself you are today.”

Ashvale was a town of rhythm and decay.

It looped — not in time, but in sensation. That was its cruelty. It didn’t repeat events. It repeated feelings. Joy would arrive the same way every morning — in the smell of rising bread. Dread would always crawl in through the broken window of Room 3 at the inn. Hope wore the same yellow scarf and passed by precisely at noon, humming a tune that no one remembered but everyone missed when it stopped.

Julian wandered.

The town didn’t welcome him. It simply folded itself around him.

He passed a clockmaker who wore no watch. A florist who sold only pressed petals. A boy standing in an alley, drawing arrows in chalk on the wall — all pointing inward.

Julian followed them. The arrows led to the edge of a small hill that overlooked the lake. He’d been here before.

He didn’t know how he knew, but he had. The bench beneath the cypress tree. The stones arranged like forgotten runes.

The way the fog here always felt thicker — like memory resisting clarity. He sat down, the journal burning in his coat. Opened it. Blank. Except for one new line, in handwriting he didn’t recognize: If you forget enough times, even forgetting begins to remember you.

He looked up. And there she was. Ciora. Standing across the lake. Staring straight at him. Like she was waiting.

Loop #12

Julian woke up on a train he didn’t remember boarding.

The window beside him was fogged with breath he hadn’t taken, streaked by rain that hadn’t fallen. The world outside wasn’t moving, and yet the train swayed like it was rushing toward something far and urgent. Or maybe running away.

He looked down. His hands were clean. Too clean. Across from him sat an old woman, knitting a scarf in a color he couldn’t name. She didn’t look up.

The train hummed underfoot. The lights overhead flickered, then steadied. Julian shifted in his seat and caught his reflection in the dark glass.

He looked like himself — but younger. Or older. He couldn’t tell anymore. Then, the door at the end of the car hissed open.     And someone stepped in.

It was Arlo. Same messy curls. Same leather jacket with a patched-up sleeve. He hadn’t changed since the rooftop nights, the cigarettes neither of them smoked but both lit.

“Arlo?”

Arlo grinned. “Still dramatic, I see.” Julian blinked. “Where are we going?” Arlo sat beside him. “Not sure. I got on three stops ago. Thought you’d notice.”

Julian shook his head slowly. “This train…” “Has no destination,” Arlo finished. “I tried asking the conductor once. Got a story about a fox and a broken clock. No real answers.”

Julian turned back to the window. “Are we dead?” Arlo chuckled. “No, mate. Worse. We’re remembering.”

The door opened again. This time, it was Edric Gray. Julian tensed instinctively. But Edric only nodded, sat two rows ahead, and pulled out a battered book with no title. He looked tired.

“Did you ever forgive me?” Julian asked quietly.

Edric didn’t turn. “Did you ever ask for forgiveness?” Julian opened his mouth — closed it. Silence.

Somewhere between one breath and the next, the train passed through a tunnel of lights that blinked like Morse code. Each flash sent shadows dancing across the passengers. When the train emerged, Vera was sitting beside Edric.

She looked older now. Softer.

“Have...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 23.7.2025
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• ISBN-10: 0-00-097469-2 / 0000974692
• ISBN-13: 978-0-00-097469-3 / 9780000974693