Prologue: The Great Forgetting
Kirk - First Person
The boat forgets how to float.
Not literally—though at this point, I wouldn’t rule anything out. What happens is this: Rhett forgets he’s steering. His hands stay on the wheel, muscle memory intact, but the knowing drains from his eyes like water through a sieve. He looks down at his hands—tanned, familiar, covered in the fading symbols from the Lake of Shambhala—and asks the question that shouldn’t be possible:
“What are these for?”
Jade’s tablet slips from her fingers. Doesn’t matter. She’s forgotten what screens do.
The Indian Ocean stretches around us in every direction—turquoise and gold in the afternoon sun, deceptively calm. We’re three hours out from Sri Pada, three hours into what was supposed to be a meditation cruise to decompress after El Dorado, after Aurelia’s sacrifice, after I nearly became a living statue of anxiety made of gold.
Three hours into what just became something infinitely worse.
“Rhett?” My voice cuts through the engine’s drone. He doesn’t respond. Doesn’t even register the name as his own. Just stares at the wheel with the blank confusion of someone encountering an alien artifact.
I reach for him. Touch his shoulder.
The contact sends information flooding through the roots in my chest—dormant since El Dorado but never truly gone. They pulse with alarm, showing me what my anxiety already suspects:
This isn’t just Rhett.
This is everyone.
I close my eyes. Let my catastrophic imagination—my weapon, my curse, my gift—show me the scope:
A woman in Tokyo forgets her daughter’s face. Stands in a kitchen holding a school photo, wondering who this child is, why she feels she should know.
A man in London forgets his own name. Stares at his driver’s license like it’s written in hieroglyphs.
A surgeon in São Paulo forgets mid-operation. Scalpel in hand, patient open, suddenly uncertain what any of this means.
World leaders forget their titles. Parents forget their children. People forget language, forget purpose, forget the fundamental narratives that hold human consciousness together.
And it’s not gradual.
It’s instant.
“Kirk?” Jade’s voice sounds younger. Frightened. She’s looking at me with recognition that’s already starting to fracture. “I know you, right? We’re... friends? Or...” She trails off, grasping for connections that keep slipping away.
The panic hits me like a physical thing. Not my usual anxiety—this is primal. Terror at watching the people I love dissolve into blank confusion while I—
I remember.
Everything.
Atlantis. Avalon. Arcadia. El Dorado. Every Anchor, every Herald, every moment of growth and terror. The names feel solid in my mind when they should be dissipating like everyone else’s memories.
Why am I different?
The roots pulse an answer: Because you’re connected. Because you carry pieces of all four Anchors in your consciousness. Because your anxiety keeps you tethered to catastrophic futures, and memory is just catastrophe in reverse.
“Rhett.” I grab his arm harder. Make him look at me. “Your name is Rhett Chen. You’re a rock climber. You’ve saved my life approximately six times. You’re my best friend. You—”
His eyes clear for a second. Recognition flickers. “Kirk? I was... steering? We were going to...”
Then it’s gone. Like watching someone slip underwater. The blankness returns, deeper this time.
The boat drifts.
Behind us, Sri Pada rises from the ocean—that sacred pyramid of stone where pilgrims climb to touch Buddha’s footprint, where three religions converge, where reality is supposedly thinner than anywhere else in the Indian Ocean.
The peak is glowing.
Not sunlight-glowing. This is bioluminescence. The same impossible light I’ve seen in Atlantis’s depths, Avalon’s fog, Arcadia’s vegetation, El Dorado’s gold.
Blue.
Pulsing.
Calling.
And I understand with the clarity of catastrophic certainty:
This isn’t random. This isn’t natural cognitive failure or mass amnesia or any kind of medical emergency that hospitals could handle.
This is the fifth Anchor.
Waking up.
“Oh,” I whisper. My hands are shaking. The anxiety that usually spirals out of control is instead laser-focused, showing me connections I don’t want to see: “Shambhala. The Lake of Shambhala. The memory palace. Where the world stores its collective consciousness, its shared narratives, its—”
The glow from Sri Pada intensifies.
I can feel it now. Not through the roots, exactly. Through something deeper. The Anchor isn’t just waking—it’s hungry. Feeding. Consuming not bodies or sanity but something more fundamental:
Identity itself.
Every memory that makes a person who they are, every connection that binds humans to each other, every story that gives existence meaning—all of it flowing toward that mountain like water toward a drain.
And I’m the only one who remembers.
The only one still anchored to reality while everyone else drowns in blank confusion.
Jade slumps against the railing. Rhett sits heavily, staring at his hands with childlike wonder. Around the world—I can feel it through the catastrophic futures unfolding in my mind—seven billion people are becoming strangers to themselves, forgetting their lives, their loves, their purposes.
Forgetting everything except one thing:
The mountain is calling.
They don’t know why. Don’t remember their names or families or the entire constructed reality they inhabited five minutes ago. But they know they need to go to the mountain. Need to climb. Need to return.
I grab the wheel. Force the boat to turn toward Sri Pada.
Because if the world is forgetting, if Shambhala is consuming human consciousness like the other Anchors consumed their elements, then someone needs to remember. Someone needs to climb that sacred peak and find whatever’s at the top before humanity loses itself completely.
And my anxiety—that relentless, catastrophic, exhausting anxiety—is apparently the only thing keeping me tethered to who I am.
“Hold on,” I tell Rhett and Jade, even though they don’t remember why they should.
The mountain pulses brighter.
The forgetting spreads.
And somewhere in the depths of my consciousness, the roots from four different Anchors whisper in harmony:
Welcome home, Kirk Lions. Shambhala remembers. Even if you don’t want to.
Present Day - Sixteen Hours After The Forgetting
Dr. Sarah Chen - Third Person
The UN Emergency Session meets in Geneva at dawn.
Or tries to.
The problem becomes apparent when the Secretary-General stands at the podium and says, with perfect clarity and complete confusion:
“Why am I here? What is... this?” She gestures at the assembly hall, at the delegates, at the documents in front of her that might as well be written in extinct languages. “I know this is important. I know I should know what this is. But I don’t. I don’t remember what any of this means.”
One by one, the world’s diplomatic elite realize they’re in the same state.
They know they’re important. Know they have roles. But the specifics—treaties, borders, the entire concept of nations—have dissolved into fragmentary impressions.
Dr. Sarah Chen watches from the observation deck, heart hammering, because she’s one of maybe twenty people in the entire building who still remembers what the United Nations is.
She’s a neuroscientist. Was—is—a specialist in collective memory formation and cultural transmission. Her research focuses on how societies construct shared narratives, how groups maintain cohesive identity through time.
Research that just became horrifyingly relevant.
Her tablet shows the global situation:
Zero deaths. Zero physical injuries.
Seven billion cases of complete episodic memory failure.
Everyone affected can still speak, still move, still perform basic functions. Motor skills intact. Language preserved. But autobiographical memory, semantic knowledge, conceptual understanding—gone. Erased so completely that people can’t reconstruct even basic facts about their own lives.
Except.
Sarah pulls up the data file that’s been making her hands shake for the past six hours.
There are exceptions.
Not many. Maybe one in ten million. People scattered across the globe who still remember who they are, where they came from, what the world was before 2:47 PM UTC yesterday.
The pattern should be random. Should be genetic, or neurological, or based on something quantifiable.
It’s not.
Sarah knows because she’s one of them. And she’s spent the last sixteen hours compiling data on every confirmed case of retained memory she can find, trying to understand why she remembers when her husband, her colleagues, her entire research team has forgotten.
The answer keeps circling back to one thing:
Everyone who remembers was in a state of heightened anxiety at the moment the forgetting began.
Not just worried. Not casually stressed. Fully activated fight-or-flight, catastrophic-thinking, anxiety-spiraling panic.
Sarah was having an anxiety attack when it happened. One of her bad ones—the kind where her mind races through every possible disaster, where her body locks up and her thoughts fragment into cascading worst-case scenarios. She was in her office, hyperventilating into a paper bag, running mental simulations of professional failure and personal catastrophe.
And somehow, impossibly, that saved her.
The anxiety tethered her. Kept her consciousness anchored to memory when everyone else’s minds went blank.
Her phone buzzes. A message from the one network still semi-functional—a hastily assembled group of the handful of scientists worldwide who still remember what science is:
CONFIRMED: Kirk Lions still conscious. Last reported position: Indian Ocean, en route to Sri Lanka. Bio-scans show elevated cortisol, heightened amygdala activity. Subject appears immune.
Sarah’s blood goes cold.
Kirk Lions. The name triggers recognition, even though it shouldn’t. She’s never met him. But she knows of him—from the Atlantis reports, the Avalon incident, Arcadia’s emergence, El Dorado’s transformation. The man at the center of every impossible thing that’s happened in the last four months.
The man whose anxiety levels are so consistently elevated they’ve become his baseline.
Of course he remembers, Sarah thinks. Of course the person most equipped to survive a memory apocalypse is someone whose brain runs catastrophic simulations 24/7.
Another message arrives:
Sri Pada showing massive bio-luminescent signature. Energy readings consistent with previous Anchor manifestations. Locals reporting universal compulsion to climb. Kirk Lions approaching the mountain.
Sarah looks at the General Assembly hall, where the world’s diplomatic leaders are sitting in confused silence, having forgotten what diplomacy means.
She makes a decision.
If Kirk Lions is heading toward whatever’s causing this, if his anxiety is the key to staying conscious, then someone needs to be there when he arrives. Someone who understands memory, consciousness, the way human identity constructs itself through narrative.
Someone who’s terrified enough to stay anchored.
Sarah’s been afraid her whole life. Afraid of failure, of inadequacy, of the inevitable decay of everything she loves. Afraid in ways that drove her to study memory—to understand why brains insist on preserving painful experiences, why consciousness refuses to let go.
That fear just became the only thing keeping her ,her.
She books the first flight to Colombo that still has a pilot who remembers how to fly.
Three hours.
That’s how long she has before Kirk Lions reaches Sri Pada.
Before the fifth Anchor fully awakens.
Before the world forgets how to be the world.
Her hands shake as she packs. Anxiety floods her system—not the clinical kind, not the treatable kind. The useful kind. The kind that whispers: This is catastrophic. This is essential. This is the only thing that matters.
And for the first time in her life, Sarah Chen is grateful for her catastrophic thinking.
Because in a world that’s forgotten everything, anxiety is the only anchor left.
