Elior did not go home immediately.
When the taxi dropped him off a few blocks from his apartment, he stood on the sidewalk for a moment longer than necessary, one hand still resting on the door handle as if he had forgotten how to let go. The driver glanced at him through the rearview mirror, waiting. Elior muttered a distracted thank you, closed the door, and stepped back onto the pavement.
The car pulled away. The sound of traffic filled the space it left behind.
He told himself he needed air. That his head was pounding from recycled cabin oxygen and too little sleep. That walking would help him shake off the sense of dislocation that always followed travel. These were reasonable explanations. Normal explanations. He held onto them tightly.
The city felt unchanged. Almost aggressively so.
People argued at crosswalks, their voices sharp with impatience. A street vendor called out prices with practiced rhythm. Someone laughed too loudly into a phone, the sound echoing briefly between buildings before dissolving into the general noise. Life moved forward without hesitation or awareness, and the ordinariness of it scraped against Elior's nerves.
He started walking.
At first, he moved with purpose, angling toward his apartment out of habit. After a block or two, that purpose thinned. His steps slowed. He found himself drifting instead, letting his feet decide where to go. He told himself it did not matter. He told himself he was just burning time before going inside.
This is fine, he thought. This is normal.
He checked the time on his phone. Still early. Earlier than he expected, actually. Plenty of time before anything was supposed to happen, assuming that anything was going to happen at all.
The thought brought a flicker of irritation with it.
You cannot keep living like the world is about to end every minute, he told himself. Not when nothing is happening. Not when everything looks like this.
He passed a cafe with its doors open to the street, the smell of coffee drifting out. A woman stood outside arguing with someone inside, her voice tight with frustration. Elior barely registered the words, only the tone. Familiar. Human.
A little farther on, he paused at a convenience store, the decision forming without much thought. Inside, the fluorescent lights hummed softly. He grabbed a bottle of water from the cooler, not because he was thirsty but because his hands felt restless.
At the counter, the cashier glanced at him, then did a double take.
"You look wiped," the man said, not unkindly. "Long trip?"
Elior nodded. "Something like that."
"Welcome back, then," the cashier said, sliding the bottle toward him. "City's been boring without you."
Elior almost smiled.
Outside again, he twisted the cap off the bottle and took a few sips. The water was cold, grounding. He focused on the sensation, the swallow, the way it settled in his stomach. He reminded himself that he was here. That he was present.
As he stepped back onto the sidewalk, the angle of the sunlight caught his attention.
It was low, but not quite evening. The light stretched across the street at a shallow slant, warming the stone facades of buildings and throwing long shadows across the pavement. It was an unremarkable thing, the sort of detail people noticed only in passing.
Except Elior noticed it too clearly.
A small knot of unease formed in his stomach.
Don't be stupid, he told himself. You are tired. That is all.
He resumed walking.
He took a turn without thinking, then another. The route felt comfortable, familiar in a way that did not immediately raise alarms. He had walked these streets countless times. He knew where they led. Or at least he thought he did.
With each step, a strange sense of recognition crept in. It was not a sudden realization, but a gradual tightening, like a thread being drawn slowly through his chest. The spacing of the buildings. The width of the sidewalk. The way the noise seemed to thin just slightly, enough to leave room for his thoughts to echo.
Elior slowed.
His heartbeat picked up, not racing yet, but alert.
No, he thought. Not here.
He scanned the street, searching for something unfamiliar, anything that would break the pattern forming in his mind. A new sign. A closed storefront. A detour. The city offered none of it.
Someone brushed past him, muttering an apology. Elior barely reacted.
He stopped walking.
The street stretched out before him exactly as he remembered it, though he had tried not to remember. The same storefronts lined either side, their signs faded in the same places. The same lamppost stood at the corner, its base marked with old stickers and peeling tape. Even the cracks in the pavement matched, branching outward in a shape he had traced with his eyes more than once in other lives.
His breath caught.
"No," he said quietly, the word slipping out before he could stop it.
A man passing by glanced at him, brows knitting together. "You okay, buddy?"
Elior did not answer.
He looked down.
The discoloration in the concrete was still there beneath his feet, faint but unmistakable. A darker patch where something had once spilled and never fully faded. His stomach twisted violently.
This was it.
The place where the world had ended.
The memory did not creep in. It crashed into him.
Aria standing beside him, mid sentence, her hand brushing his arm. The way the air had thickened, pressing inward without weight. The first ripple of green in the sky, subtle enough that no one had understood it yet. The moment when everything ordinary had tipped into something irreversible.
Elior staggered back a step, bumping into a parked car. The metal was solid and cold against his spine. He gripped the edge of the trunk to steady himself.
A woman nearby noticed his distress. "Hey," she said cautiously. "Do you need help?"
Elior shook his head, the movement sharp. "I'm fine."
He was not fine.
His hands were trembling now, fingers twitching as if they no longer belonged to him. He forced himself to lift his gaze upward.
The sky had begun to change.
At first, it was almost nothing. A faint wash of color near the horizon, pale enough to dismiss as reflection or illusion. Daniel might have convinced himself it was nothing, if not for the way his chest tightened in immediate recognition.
The green deepened slowly, deliberately, spreading outward like ink in water.
"Oh," someone said nearby, laughter in their voice. "That's weird."
Another person raised a phone. "Is that some kind of light show?"
Elior felt the pressure return.
Not pain. Not yet. It was the same wrongness as before, a sensation that did not belong to the body but to the space around it. Heat without flame. Light without source. The air felt thick, resistant, as if the world itself were holding its breath.
People began to murmur. Confusion rippled through the street, voices overlapping, questions colliding without answers.
"What's happening?"
"Is this normal?"
"Are you seeing that?"
Elior stood perfectly still.
A man near him laughed nervously. "Probably just a reflection off the clouds, right?"
Elior turned toward him. The man's smile faltered when he saw Elior's face.
"It's not," Elior said. His voice sounded distant to his own ears.
"What?"
"It's not a reflection."
The green intensified, washing over the buildings, tinting windows and skin alike. Sound began to thin, the city's noise flattening into something dull and distant.
Elior understood then.
No wall had closed around him. No force had dragged him here. There had been no moment where his body had moved without permission. Every step had been his own. Every turn justified by fatigue, habit, curiosity, the simple desire to feel normal again.
He had wanted to be a good man.
He had wanted to be present when he was needed.
He had wanted to believe that choice still belonged to him.
And so he had walked here willingly.
Someone screamed. The sound cut off abruptly.
The green light surged, filling everything, erasing edges and depth. The pressure became unbearable, crushing inward from all directions at once.
Elior closed his eyes.
"I chose this," he whispered, not in accusation, not in anger, but in a quiet, devastating understanding.
The world ended.