Stranger Than Human

Asthya Shree doesn't remember anything older than two years ago. He believes he's stuck in a two-year cycle, the beginning or end of which he can't remember, and he's okay with that, because: remembering less means losing less. He carries a Black-Book. It's been empty since the day he found it. He remembers finding it, perhaps on the day of his mother's funeral. Everyone knows what an empty book means: either you've done everything it says, or you've never used it.  Asthya has always believed that. He's wrong. — Every night, his book contains the name of a stranger and a way to find them. Each time, he goes and touches them with ‘Cataclysm’, which is capable of reducing anything to ashes; and each time, a fragment of his own memory is burned away in exchange for the murder.  The next morning, he wakes up with no memory, absolutely convinced his book was always empty; absolutely convinced he never killed anyone. He's not an innocent man waiting to become a murderer. He's already a murderer, trapped in a cycle, and he's the only one of the survivors who doesn't know it. When a Book user named Vera Halloran finds him, and he sees, for the first time in his memory, the towering figure that has stood behind her her entire life, the cycle begins to break.  Around them, a government program called the 'Solace Epitome' has begun to measure grief as a resource, a gang of assassins roams refugee camps with impunity, and somewhere in the city, a Book is bearing a name Asthya should never have seen: his own. It is a psychological, supernatural drama about memory, complicity, and the rest of a man's existence when he is stripped of all reason for the actions he takes. — Note from the author:  [Before we proceed, a quick note about punctuation. You'll see semicolons instead of commas, and sometimes hyphens in words that don't normally use hyphens.  This isn't a typo; it's just a habit I've developed while reading books, and one I can't quite shake. Consider this a minor mistake, not a major oversight. If you mark it as an issue, I will try to resolve it.] Also, thank you for reading. This is a slow-moving story, told mostly through what the narrator doesn't remember, not what he does remember, so patience, not rushing, will be the key. I hope you'll read to the end…