2025-11-17 07:06:21The rain had stopped three nights ago, but the streets still smelled of rust and wet stone. The kind of smell that lingered like memory. Harold walked alone under a thin gray dawn, his hands tucked deep in his coat pockets, his eyes scanning the corners where no one else bothered to look.
He moved quietly, as if the city might wake up and ask him what he was doing out so early. He wasn’t heading anywhere, at least that’s what it looked like—but his steps always led him to the same place: the old municipal library at the edge of the industrial district.
The building was a ruin of its former self. Windows shattered, ivy crawling over its walls, and a door that never quite closed. It had become a shelter for stray dogs and drifters, but Harold had claimed a corner room upstairs as his sanctuary.
When he pushed the door open, dust rose like smoke in the light from a cracked window. The silence was heavy, almost sacred. He liked that. Here, the world didn’t shout. It whispered.
He crossed to his table – a warped desk piled with scavenged books and scraps of paper. Some were torn pages from psychology manuals, others stolen copies of military field tactics, all bound together by curiosity and obsession.
He sat, opened his black notebook, and began to write.
‘People move like water, he wrote. They find the easiest path, and if you block it, they turn angry. Anger means predictability.’
He paused, chewing on the pencil’s edge, then added beneath it: ‘Never fight anger. Redirect it.’
A gust of wind rattled the windowpane. Somewhere below, a bottle shattered and a voice cursed. Harold barely noticed. He was tracing the shape of the city in his mind—gangs, territories, dealers, cops. Every name had a purpose. Every person a pattern.
The notebook was no longer a collection of thoughts; it was a map of control.
---------
Around noon, footsteps echoed on the stairs. Harold didn’t look up until Diego’s voice broke the silence.
“So, this is where you disappear to,” Diego said, leaning against the doorway with his usual half-smile.
“Didn’t know I needed to report my location,” Harold replied without looking up.
Diego stepped inside, brushing dust from his jacket. “You don’t. I just start to worry when you vanish for days. Thought maybe the ghosts finally got you.”
Harold turned a page. “Maybe they did.”
Diego walked closer, eyeing the desk covered in notes. “What is all this?”
“Reading material.”
Diego chuckled. “You call that reading? Looks more like madness on paper.”
Harold finally looked up, his expression unreadable. “Knowledge is madness until someone uses it right.”
“Yeah, and you’re the one who’ll use it, huh?” Diego said, picking up a page. It was filled with scrawled notes—phrases like ‘Chain of Command, Fear Equals Loyalty, Silence as Power.’
“Where do you even find this stuff?” he asked.
Harold shrugged. “Some in here. Some from listening.”
“Listening to who? Street rats and drunk dealers?”
“Everyone,” Harold said. “Even fools teach you something—how not to be them.”
Diego grinned, shaking his head. “You really are turning into a philosopher.”
“Better than turning into a corpse.”
-----
For a while, they stayed there, the two brothers in the dusty light, one restless, one steady. Diego walked between broken bookshelves, running his fingers along the spines of books eaten by mold.
“You know,” he said, “you could make money teaching this stuff. Half the punks out there would pay to know how to survive like you do.”
Harold smirked. “Then they’d all know what I know. That’s bad business.”
“Fine, then publish a book. Call it ‘How to Be Smarter Than Everyone Else’.”
Harold looked up. “You think this is a joke?”
“No,” Diego said softly. “I think it’s… impressive. You never stop thinking. Me? I just act.”
“That’s why we work,” Harold said, writing again. “You move. I plan. You speak. I watch. Together, we don’t die.”
Diego sat on the edge of the desk, looking at the notebook again. “What’s that one called anyway?”
Harold hesitated, then said simply, “My notebook.”
Diego grinned. “Not very creative. Maybe call it ‘The Book of the Street’.”
Harold gave a faint laugh. “I’ll think about it.”
As Diego leaned closer, he noticed names scribbled across several pages—names of known gang leaders, crooked cops, dealers. Each had notes beside them: ‘drinks too much, afraid of dogs, owes money to Hugo’s men.’
Diego frowned. “You’re cataloging them.”
“I’m understanding them,” Harold corrected. “Every empire collapse from the inside. I just want to know where to press when the time comes.”
Diego’s grin faded. “You scare me sometimes, you know that?”
Harold didn’t respond, he just turned another page.
-----
The next few weeks became routine. Days of running small hustle, nights of Harold retreating to the library. Diego often joined him—not to study, but to talk, tease, or sometimes just sit in the stillness.
One evening, the light outside was gold and thick. Diego sat across from Harold, idly tossing pebbles at a tin can. “You ever think about what we’re doing? Like… what the endgame is?”
Harold’s pencil paused. “Endgame?”
“Yeah. All this surviving, all this scheming. What’s it for? We gonna rule the whole damn city someday?”
“Maybe,” Harold said. “Maybe ruling isn’t about crowns or guns. It’s about understanding the board better than everyone else.”
Diego grinned. “You really do sound like a writer.”
“A writer?” Harold asked, looking up.
“Yeah,” Diego said, smirking. “You sit here all day scribbling about people, writing their stories like you own them. You’re the writer now.”
Harold’s lips twitched into something close to a smile. “The writer, huh?”
“Fits you,” Diego said putting a finger on his chin as someone thinking. “Cold, quiet, dangerous.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
“It was,” Diego said. “You just don’t know how to enjoy one.”
------
Later that night, after Diego left to meet some friends at the docks, Harold stayed behind, staring at the notebook in front of him. The word “Writer” lingered in his head.
He wrote it slowly at the top of a blank page, then underlined it twice.
‘The Writer observes. The Writer remembers. The Writer never forgets.’
He sat back, watching the ink dry, and thought of all the names, all the faces from the fire years ago — the men who burned his family alive. Hugo Martinez. His officers. The faceless shadows who smiled as they pulled the triggers.
He flipped through the notebook until he found a blank section and titled it: ‘La Familia de Fuego.’
The pencil moved faster now, furious and steady. Each word was a wound reopening. Each line a promise.
When he finally stopped, hours passed. The candle had burned low. He closed the notebook gently, as if it were something alive.
Outside, thunder rumbled across the city.
Harold looked out the cracked window toward the skyline, his reflection faint against the glass. “They took everything,” he whispered. “So I’ll take it back. Piece by piece.”
He opened the notebook once more and wrote one last line before extinguishing the flame:
Every empire begins in silence.
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“The Mirror”They called it the lost fragment --a single, wind-stained page found tucked between the linings of the same lockbox that held The Price of Flame. Unlike the other writings, this one was not inked in the deliberate, sharp strokes of a man addressing history. It was trembling, uneven, the letters smeared as though written by candlelight, or perhaps by a hand uncertain of its own steadiness.The archivist who found it described the page as “alive.” The edges were signed, not by accident but with precision --as if Harold himself had intended the fire to kiss the paper without consuming it. Across the top, in faint graphite pencil rather than ink, was a title that seemed almost reluctant to declare itself:“The Mirror.”Then, beneath it, the opening line:“Every brother I killed lived in me.”There was no date. No closing signature. Only the whisper of the pen’s trail and the ghost of a man unraveling himself into confession.----------It was unlike anything Harold ha
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