A Sip of Oblivion
Introduction
"Ὁ πίνων ἐκ τῆς Λήθης ἑαυτὸν ἀποβάλλει."
“He who drinks from Lethe casts himself away.”
The ancient Greeks believed the domain of Hades, the land of the dead, was crossed by five rivers:
Acheron, the river of sorrow
Cocytus, the river of lamentation
Phlegethon, the river of fire
Styx, the river of oath
Lethe, the river of forgetting.
To drink from Lethe, the poets said, was to erase all memory, to become a shade, drifting peacefully in the afterlife. It was release, the gift of peaceful rest: from pain, from identity, from self.
For centuries, it was thought to be only myth. But in truth, the ancients were more right than they knew. In some of the countless realms beyond the Veil, the rivers were real. They flowed through landscapes no human should have seen, binding the laws of death and memory.
Then the Cataclysm tore the Veil apart.
Since then, death no longer stays where it should.
The rivers still run, but they do not wait for the dead.
Lethe bleeds through the cracks, seeping into dark corners, forgotten ruins, silent forests.
But what a sip of its waters does, is no longer the same.
To be forgotten
"Λήθη οὐδεμίαν χάριν παρέχει τοῖς τῆς μνήμης ποθοῦσιν."
“Lethe offers no grace to those who long for memory.”
Death is not the end
What people came to understand after the Cataclysm is that beyond reason lay worlds once dismissed as myth. With the Veil torn, those myths gained flesh and bone and most terrifying of all, an appetite for proving they were always real. Humanity must now defend itself not only from cold, hunger, and pain, but from the collapse of the very certainties that once defined existence. Even death has become a battlefield.
Philosophies and religions once offered comfort, each with its own truth about the soul and what lay beyond. People believed, or doubted, or dreamed. But that age is over. The questions have been answered.
There is an afterlife.
There is a soul.
But with the barriers collapsed, neither promises peace.
Survivors have seen it with their own eyes: the essence of the dead drawn toward the broken Veil, only to be caught, torn, devoured. What was once a mystery is now a threat. The afterlife is real. And it is cruel. In the Age of Ash and Blood, people no longer fear dying.
They fear what happens after.
They fear the soul’s death.
And in that fear, a new myth has taken shape, whispered like a final prayer, passed from fire to fire, always beginning the same way:
There was a river…
The Water of Lethe
The Myth
There was a river called Lethe.
The ancients said her waters brought forgetting: drink, and your memories would fade.
But that was before the Veil tore.
Now, what our souls seek isn’t peace. It’s escape
Not from death, but from what waits after it.
They say Lethe saw what became of us. That she wept.
And that her tears changed what her waters used to be.
One sip, and the world forgets you.
They say her water marks the soul, wraps it in silence, hides it from harm.
From the hollow-eyed. From the broken gods. From the nightmares that lurk between the cracks.
There is a river called Lethe.
Not a normal one - no.
This river doesn’t roar or run.
It slips through cracks where the sky is torn.
Where her tears drip, the water runs upward, and everything grows still.
They say that if you find it and drink, your name fades.
Your face is lost from the memory of the cosmos.
You vanish from stories, from songs, from fate.
You walk unseen, untouched.
Free.
But alone.
The Forgotten
No one truly knows what happens after drinking from the waters of Lethe.
The ones who do can’t tell you. Or rather, you wouldn’t remember if they did.
The only stories come from the guesses.
They say those who drink from Lethe don’t die, but they don’t stay either. The river unhooks them from the world. It doesn’t kill them. It erases the thread that ties them to memory, to time, to place. The world forgets them. Not just people, but the land, the sky, the Veil. Some say the stars forget to cast light where they walk. That their reflections never settle in water. That their shadows fall in directions they shouldn’t.
The myth says the Forgotten walk freely between realms. That Lethe’s mark shields their soul with absence. And absence, in this age, is armor. The nightmares can’t find what isn’t named. The Amorphus can't break what was never written. Even death pass them by.
No bond survives them. No love holds fast. They are the kind of truth that can’t be spoken. But for those desperate enough, this is a price worth paying.
To them, it's better to be nothing than to be devoured. Better to vanish from a story than scream in one forever.
When they appear - if they appear - silence follows. A strange stillness in the air. A name on your tongue that slips away before you speak it. A sense that something has passed nearby; not watching, not threatening, just... gone, like a breath held too long.
You don’t hear their steps. You don’t dream of them.
And if you ever knew one, you don’t anymore.
The only thing left is a feeling. That something is missing. That something chose to be forgotten.
And was.
The Vigil
The Spirit Mages are the ones who actively search for Lethe's tears. They call their silent watch: the Vigil.
They do not speak of it openly. Even among their dwindling number, few admit they believe the river bleeds into the world. But in the cold hours before dawn, when the wind slips sideways and the fire won’t catch, you may find one staring into the dark, listening for silence that isn’t natural.
They do not seek Lethe to drink. They seek it to protect.
Because Lethe, if the stories are true, is mercy.
And mercy can be dangerous.
There are those who would seek to corrupt it, twist its waters into weapons, bind it into spells that erase not just memory, but truth. Others would give anything to vanish, not to find peace, but to escape fear. Hunted souls. Desperate Immortals seeking to outsmart their hunger. Survivors too broken to continue.
But worse than them are the creatures that crawl through the broken Veil. The Amorphus and their servants. The old things that remember what gods never knew. If Lethe truly grants protection - if her waters mark a soul beyond the reach of fate - then these beings would do anything to claim it. To use it and become a phantom threat that leaves no tracks, or even reshape it into something crueler.
And so, the mages keep vigil, searching for the right signs to discover the paths that lead to Lethe.
Forests where no echo returns.
Stones arranged in flawless, inhuman symmetry.
Pools that ripple without wind.
Clearings where neither light nor shadow can reach.
They say that when Lethe’s tears gather, time forgets to pass. Language falters. Rain pours from the ground to the sky.
If Lethe’s tears fall, they fall there.
The Gun Saint
“Better a name lost than a name devoured.”
Lethe's waters may erase your name from memory, but for some that forgetting holds a strange kind of freedom: a shield against the darkness that hunts the living and the dead alike. Whispers speak of those who have found Lethe’s tears and walk unseen, carried by silence and free of fear. They are lost to the world, but perhaps in that loss lies a chance, a chance to endure, to escape, and to fix what was broken. For even in oblivion, hope whispers beneath the surface, waiting for the right soul to listen.
Some say one has sipped from Lethe’s waters.
They call them the Gun Saint.
They come in silence.
Solve what must be solved.
Then vanish like smoke from a dying fire.
No one knows where it began.
A Reaver with no name. A sinner. A saint. A killer. A whisper.
They came from nowhere, wearing a long coat and carrying a gun that never needed reloading.
The Gun Saint wanders the edges of the world; where the Veil is thin and horrors are lurking. They fix what others cannot, frees those trapped by shadows, and kills what should have stayed dead.
When the work is done, they are gone.
Not just gone. Forgotten.
The River’s Whisper
The waters of Lethe promise something far more complicated than oblivion. A chance to vanish, to slip beyond memory and fate, and to find a fragile refuge from the horrors that hunt the soul. But to be forgotten is to be alone. To be erased from the stories of the living and the dead alike.
So this tale ends with a profound question. In a world broken beyond repair, where nothing is certain but suffering and silence, what is the better choice?
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This is fantastic!!
Homework And Camp Progress
andMy World
Thank you so much ^^