The world was quiet. Too quiet.
Sunny stood beneath a blood-red sky, the edges of reality blurring as if the world itself wept with him. The object Kael had given him—a shard of impossible design, humming with silent potential—rested in his trembling hands.
"It can change reality," Kael had said, his voice distant in memory. "But only if others desire the change. If they don't, it's nothing but a curse disguised as hope."
And now… another truth had returned. Another relic, one not meant to alter the world, but to erase the pain within it.
A second object, hidden from the eyes of men.
It could wipe memories—memories of pain, loss, of people who once meant everything. But it came at a price.
"If you use it," Kael had warned once, in a whisper Sunny had long forgotten, "You will either lose someone you love… or be trapped in a loop of eternal suffering. A world where pain is your only companion."
Sunny's breath caught.
He could see them—her smile, her eyes full of light. The way she had laughed in the rain. The way she had died.
"I did everything… everything," Sunny whispered, "for her."
A memory burst through—of her hand slipping from his, blood trickling from her lips, whispering his name like a prayer the gods never answered.
"I shattered when she died. It felt like someone ripped out time itself. I didn't lose a person. I lost the only part of myself that ever felt real."
Then came Berzilus. His brother. His pain.
Sunny remembered what Berzilus had once said:
"People go blind in love… they see salvation where there's only fire. I saw a future. She saw a curse."
Sunny dropped to his knees.
"Amon took everything from me. My brother. My love. He let her die. And why? Because some fanatic called her cursed… because she questioned a god?"
A scream welled in his throat, but he swallowed it. He was tired. So tired.
The shard pulsed. The second object glowed faintly beside it.
One offered to change the world.
The other offered to forget it.
In the distance, the voices of the past echoed.
"You cannot choose love without also choosing the pain that comes with it."
He could erase it all. The memories. The agony.
But then… what would remain?
Would he still be Sunny?
Or just another hollow vessel drifting in borrowed silence?
The wind blew. Leaves rustled like whispers of forgotten souls.
He looked at both relics—and chose neither.
Instead, he whispered, "I will remember."
Because forgetting would mean her death was in vain.
Because if pain was all he had left, then it was proof he once loved.
"He who fights the past with forgetfulness becomes a ghost. But he who bears the weight becomes the flame that lights others' paths." — Nietzsche, reimagined.
Sunny rose, eyes red but clear.
He would walk forward. Carrying every scar.