The Gilded Century

You sign the ledger. The ink dries faster than you expect, and just like that, the fortune is yours. The future-Barylon welcomes you with open hands and closed memories — no one here knows the name of your grandmother, or the slope where your favorite nanny goat liked to sun herself.

You buy a tower of pale glass. You buy a surname that belongs to no family. You buy quiet — expensive, immaculate quiet.

But the mountains have not moved. Each night the wind slides down from the peaks and through your shuttered windows, and inside it you hear them: hooves on stone, a soft impatient bleating, your own younger voice calling them home. You are richer than any merchant who ever whispered of the Hollow Roads. And you are the loneliest thing in Barylon.

No fortune, you learn, is loud enough to drown out a life you left behind.