Married to the Cold Hearted CEO

The Forge had known silence before.

There was the peaceful silence that settled after a long day's work when lanterns flickered softly and the embers in the cooking pits sighed their last breath. There was the reverent silence of mourning circles, and the silence of meditation beneath the Heartroot Tree. But the silence that descended this time was different. It was deep. Vast. Expectant.

And it began with a pot.

A solitary, dust-covered pot placed at the foot of the Heartroot Tree before sunrise. No one had seen it arrive. No one claimed to have placed it. It was simply there, as if unearthed from the memory of the land itself.

The vessel was handcrafted in a design they hadn't seen in any of the archives. Curved and wide-bellied, covered in an iridescent patina that shimmered blue-green under the early morning light. Etched into its sides were symbols neither purely geometric nor entirely organic. The language was unfamiliar, yet not unreadable. It pulsed faintly, as if the very clay retained breath.

Maya discovered it during her pre-dawn circuit, the hour she reserved for grounding. She halted when she saw the pot. Then she knelt slowly and whispered a blessing over it, not knowing why.

Inside the pot were scrolls six in total tied with woven threads dyed in burnt ochre and clouded indigo. The parchment was brittle but intact. The writing, although sparse, carried a gravity that silenced even the birds.

"Our walls are weeping.

Our songs rot unspoken.

Come before the silence becomes final."

Maya rose, scroll in hand, her pulse beating with the weight of the message. There was no signature. But she knew.

Soluma was calling.

Soluma. The Lost City of Memory.

Once spoken of as myth, then theory, and only recently as rumor. A city designed not just for function, but for remembering. Where architecture was consciousness, and memory was seeded into clay. Its founders had believed that stories should not be told alone they must be built, walked, inhabited.

But Soluma had fallen silent decades ago. No messages. No travelers. No remnants. Not even the seekers who went in search of it had returned. The Forge had long accepted it as a story with a tragic ending.

Until now.

The delegation was assembled with solemnity and intention.

Maya, chosen to lead, had once designed the original Memory Walk of the Forge, mapping trauma across migration paths.

Kian, the empathic archivist, brought no notebooks this time only a stack of fabric pages that recorded heat signatures, emotional pulses, and frequency waves.

Luma, voice of the Map of Questions, agreed to serve as the city's listener. Her questions were never demands they were invitations.

Josan, the sound sculptor, had recently crafted an instrument from clay and honeyed resin that captured ambient grief.

Naima, an architect of reparative space, brought with her not plans, but rituals.

Ello, just thirteen, came not by assignment but by insistence. The child had touched the pot and heard its cry. The others listened.

They prepared in silence. Not for travel, but for encounter.

The journey took seven days, crossing through contested terrain and the remnants of collapsed borders. They passed ruined farms turned into bio-reserve commons, old military posts reclaimed as wind hubs, and a landscape slowly healing from a century of exploitation.

The nights were harsh. Not for their chill, but for the dreams. Each of them dreamed the same thing: a city made of breath, its walls whispering names that could not be remembered.

Ello woke crying on the fourth night.

"She's losing herself," she murmured. "Soluma doesn't want to be forgotten. But she doesn't know how to ask for help."

On the eighth day, they crested a hill and saw it.

Soluma.

Not buried. Not overgrown.

Still standing.

It was nestled in a natural basin, cradled between cliffs like a secret kept by the land. Its towers were squat but wide, shaped to mirror coral or lungs or perhaps the ventricles of a heart. The domes reflected the sky, cracked but glimmering. The city was not empty it was waiting.

They entered through an arch shaped like an open hand. The air changed instantly. It smelled of old incense, wet clay, and something else loss, perhaps, or longing.

The first building they entered was a circle of amphorae, each sealed with wax. When Josan hummed a note, one of the jars quivered.

A low voice emerged. Faint, and distant, like hearing a story underwater.

"The last song was sung by a child. We have repeated it for seventy-three years. We are tired."

Ello touched the amphora. "They don't want to be preserved. They want to evolve."

The delegation split into teams. Kian and Luma began mapping emotional currents places where grief pooled, where memory crackled. Josan walked the outer circles, playing his instrument, marking resonance. Maya marked nodes with her chalk a delicate blend of ash, pollen, and mineral designed to conduct remembrance.

Naima moved silently, laying hands on walls, whispering apologies in all five languages she knew.

Ello simply listened.

They stayed for fifteen days.

Soluma began to open.

They found the Hall of First Breath, where newborns had once been brought to learn the city's heartbeat. The pulse was faint now. But it returned when Josan played.

In the Garden of Fragments, they uncovered ceramics etched with names written in forgotten dialects. Kian sang each one aloud, restoring them.

The city wept.

Literally. Moisture formed on walls and trickled down like tears. The Forge team collected this water and mixed it with dye to paint messages of restoration.

On the eleventh day, they discovered the Core Chamber. A circular vault beneath the oldest dome.

In it: a mural.

Hundreds of silhouettes holding each other.

But none had faces.

"Lost identity," Maya whispered. "The city's deepest wound."

They formed a circle. Placed their palms on the mural. Closed their eyes.

And each spoke their full name, their lineage, their purpose.

The mural changed.

One by one, the silhouettes gained features. Not those of the team. Different ones. People long gone. Remembered not in image, but in presence.

They did not repair a single structure.

They did not replace a single tile.

Instead, they witnessed. They breathed. They remembered.

Naima built a ring of memory stones each placed to absorb the echo of footsteps. Luma asked a final question aloud:

"What do you need to forgive yourself?"

The city did not answer.

It pulsed.

The delegation understood.

They left on the sixteenth morning.

Before leaving, Ello sang a lullaby beneath the central dome.

When she stopped, the city echoed it back not as mimicry, but as evolution. A new melody. A new voice.

They left behind:

A crystal seeded with all their heartbeats.

Scrolls soaked in Forge ink.

A tile etched with one word: Listen.

Back at the Forge, the pot was returned to the Heartroot Tree.

It pulsed once.

And a flower bloomed on a branch that had been bare for ten years.

Soluma remembered.

Because it had been remembered.