In the city of Nepenthe, people don’t just forget their dead—they forget their grief.  

Every time someone dies, a white moth emerges from their lips carrying their final breath. If caught and pressed into the pages of a book, that breath becomes a memory-knot: a single, perfect moment of the deceased’s life, preserved forever.  

The problem?  

The moths are vanishing.  

And Alis, the last archivist of the House of Sighs, knows why.  

---

 The Thief of Absence

Alis has spent her life collecting these breath-moths, curating them into leather-bound volumes. But lately, something’s been stealing them—not the books, but the memories inside.  

Blank pages appear where vivid recollections once lived.  

And the mourners who come to visit their loved ones?  

They leave lighter, as if something has been taken from their chests.  

Then Alis catches the thief:  

A girl made of moth-dust, her body a shifting silhouette of wings, her mouth full of stolen goodbyes.  

She doesn’t speak.  

She echoes.  

Every word out of her mouth is a fragment of the dead—laughter, confessions, last words.  

And when she touches Alis’s wrist, Alis remembers her own mother’s funeral—a memory she knows she’s never had before.  

---

 The Truth About the Moths

The girl isn’t stealing memories.  

She’s returning them.  

The breath-moths were never meant to be caged. They’re supposed to travel to the Duskward Gate, a place where the dead whisper their final truths to the living. But the archivists interrupted the cycle centuries ago, hoarding grief like currency.  

Now, the Gate is starving.  

And the girl?  

She’s its messenger—a half-formed thing made of all the unspoken words piling up on the other side.  

---

 The Choice

Alis discovers something worse:  

The longer a memory-knot remains unread, the more it festers.  

Some of the archived breaths have grown teeth.  

And the girl is terrified of them.  

Now Alis must decide:  

1. Burn the corrupted archives and free the girl to deliver the rest—but erase every preserved memory of the dead.  
2. Preserve the books and let the Gate collapse—but risk the breaths turning into something hungry.