The sky remembered before people did.
It started as a shade too deep, a blue that hurt to look at directly, like staring into someone else's nightmare. Then the first scream came; not from a throat, but from the air itself. A sound that had your own name inside it.
Elias Varnie was buying cigarettes when the world ended for the second time.
The convenience store clerk froze mid-sentence, eyes bleeding clear fluid. His mouth opened wider than bone allowed, and something climbed out; a child-shaped silhouette made of television static and old apologies. It looked at the clerk the way a debt collector looks at a man who swore he'd pay tomorrow.
The clerk dropped dead without a mark on him. The silhouette dissolved into nothing.
Elias paid for the cigarettes anyway. Habit is the last thing to die.
He stepped outside. The street was already learning the new rules.
A woman ran past clutching her ears while phantom voices recited every lie she'd ever told her husband. A man clawed at his own shadow as it grew teeth and began eating the memories he'd buried in alcohol. Overhead, the sky rippled like water, and in that ripple Elias saw a flash of pink ribbon; the exact shade Lily wore the day he pressed the pillow over her face.
He lit a cigarette with steady fingers. The smoke tasted like hospital corridors.
Ten years since the first Event. Ten years since the sky first opened one eye and whispered that nothing was forgiven. Humanity adapted the way it always does: by forgetting harder. Cities built "Silence Districts" where memories were chemically suppressed. Drugs, VR, religion; whatever worked. Most people learned to live half-blind inside their own skulls.
Elias never took the pills. He wanted to see clearly when she came for him.
And she always came.
He walked south through the collapsing district, boots crunching on glass that hadn't fallen from any window. The air smelled of ozone and iron; the smell of secrets rusting in the rain.
A boy, maybe fifteen, stumbled into his path. Blood poured from his eyes, but he was laughing.
"I remembered," the boy gasped. "I remembered what I did to the cat. It was just a cat but I remembered and now I'm free, I'm—"
His chest caved inward as if an invisible hand squeezed. The laughter cut off. The body hit the pavement with the wet sound of a dropped grocery bag.
Elias stepped over him. Waste of a confession. Remembering without integration just kills you faster.
He reached the edge of the Silence District wall; thirty feet of concrete and lead paint designed to keep the sky from looking too closely. Guards in hazmat-yellow suits lay scattered like broken dolls. One was still alive, helmet cracked, staring at Elias with the hollow recognition of a man watching his own funeral.
"You… you're one of them," the guard whispered. "A Confessor."
Elias crouched, offered the man a cigarette. The guard took it with shaking fingers that weren't shaking from fear anymore; they were trying to forget how to hold things.
"How many memories are you carrying?" Elias asked softly.
"Two," the guard croaked. "My partner… friendly fire… and my daughter. She was sick. Like the first wave. I couldn't… I couldn't watch her suffer."
Same story. Always the same story.
Elias smiled. It was not a kind expression.
"Then you're almost strong enough to survive what comes next."
He stood and kept walking. Behind him the guard began to scream; not in pain, but in release. The third memory was rising, and the man had just realized he wanted it.
The wall had a breach. Someone had torn a hole big enough for a truck. Through it Elias could see the Dead City; what used to be downtown, now a forest of black glass spires grown from collective shame. That was where the strongest Eidola nested. That was where people went when they decided pretending was worse than dying.
That was where Lily waited.
He finished the cigarette, crushed it under his heel, and stepped through the breach.
The sky looked down and blinked.
For the first time in ten years, Elias spoke her name out loud.
"Lily."
The word left his mouth and became a physical thing; a ribbon of red light that floated upward and vanished into the blue. Somewhere in the distance thunder answered, shaped like a little girl's laugh.
He was still smiling when the first Eidolon found him.
It wore his mother's face the day she found Lily cold in bed. Its mouth opened and the voice that came out was his own, age twelve, raw and pleading.
"You said it was better this way. You said she wouldn't hurt anymore. Liar."
The Eidolon lunged.
Elias didn't dodge. He opened his arms.
It hit him like a train made of regret. Every nerve lit up with the memory: the weight of the pillow, the small twitch of her foot when air ran out, the way her hand had gone limp still clutching his sleeve.
He fell to his knees in the broken glass and let it burn.
Most people fight the memory. They deny, they justify, they scream. That's why they die.
Elias did the opposite.
He leaned in.
I did it, he thought, clear and cold. I killed her. I chose. My hands. My mercy. Mine.
The pain peaked; then something inside him shifted, the way a dislocated bone slides home. The Eidolon shrieked, its form unraveling into black threads that burrowed under his skin like veins.
When he stood again, his shadow was a little longer. His heartbeat sounded like two hearts trying to share one chest.
Third memory integrated.
He exhaled, and the air around him distorted, carrying the faint scent of strawberry shampoo.
Now he was strong enough to walk into the Dead City without being torn apart in the first minute.
Now he could start.
Because somewhere in that forest of guilt-made-glass was the real Lily; not the Eidolon wearing her face, but the thing that had been born from the exact moment he decided mercy was his to give.
And he had a message for her.
He began walking again. The sky followed overhead, patient, ancient, hungry.
Behind him the breach in the wall sealed itself with a sound like a sigh.
There would be no going back. Not for him. Not for anyone.
Not until every last person remembered what they'd done.
And when the whole world finally confessed…
He wondered if the sky would forgive them.
Or if it would simply close its eyes again and let them sleep.
Elias smiled at the thought.
Sleep was for people who still had the luxury of lies.