Chapter 2 — The Weight of Remembering
Darkness inside the passage was not empty.
It was layered.
Ryuuji felt it the moment he crossed the threshold—like walking into a room where too many people had once whispered secrets and never left. The air carried a faint metallic taste, and each step echoed longer than it should have, as if the stone itself hesitated to let sound go.
Behind him, daylight shrank.
Then vanished.
The wall sealed with a sound like a sigh.
Ryuuji turned sharply.
Stone.
Unbroken. Untouched.
No crack. No opening.
Only ancient symbols etched so deeply they looked wounded into the wall.
His heart pounded.
So this was it.
No retreat. No witnesses.
The kind of situation his father had warned him about in half-spoken sentences and fearful glances.
"Calm down," Ryuuji muttered, forcing his breathing steady. Panic was how people died in Erdveil. That much tradition had drilled into him well.
The passage sloped downward.
Not steeply—intentionally gentle, as if meant for frequent use long ago. His hand brushed the wall, and the stone was warm.
Too warm.
Then—
The symbols moved.
Ryuuji jerked his hand back, nearly stumbling. The etched lines shifted like veins beneath skin, glowing faintly with a dull amber light.
"Do not run," the voice said again.
"Memory breaks easily when rushed."
"Memory?" Ryuuji whispered. "Whose?"
The light intensified.
The corridor widened into a vast chamber, its ceiling lost in shadow. At the center stood a circular platform carved with concentric rings of symbols—far older and far more complex than anything in Kareth's records.
And on that platform—
A figure knelt.
Or rather, the shape of one.
It looked human, but its edges were blurred, as though unfinished. Ash clung to its form, drifting upward instead of falling, orbiting slowly like debris around a dead star.
Ryuuji's instincts screamed danger.
But his feet carried him forward anyway.
"Are you… alive?" he asked.
The figure lifted its head.
Where a face should have been, there was only light—dim, fractured, unstable.
"Alive is a word the Sky taught you," it replied.
"We used another."
Ryuuji swallowed. "Who is we?"
The ash froze midair.
"The Remembered."
Long before Erdveil became a land of Stillness, humanity had been different.
That truth poured into Ryuuji without warning.
Not as words—but as experience.
Cities that reached upward without fear.
People who argued openly beneath the Sky and were not struck down. Machines of stone and light that stored knowledge so it would never be lost.
And above all—
The Sky was silent.
No punishment. No judgment.
Just sky.
Ryuuji gasped, collapsing to one knee as the flood of memories tore through him. His mind screamed, struggling to contain thoughts that were not his.
"Stop—!" he choked.
The figure raised a hand.
The memories slowed.
Dripped instead of crashed.
"This is why the Sky fears you," it said.
"You remember too easily."
Ryuuji's vision blurred. Tears streamed down his face—not from pain, but from grief.
"So it's true," he whispered. "The Sky wasn't always like this."
"No," the figure replied.
"The Sky was made this way."
Silence crushed the chamber.
Ryuuji looked up slowly.
"…By whom?"
The ash resumed its orbit.
"By humans who feared themselves more than they feared extinction."
The figure rose.
As it did, the chamber walls ignited with light, revealing murals carved into the stone—history erased from the surface world.
They showed war.
Not against monsters.
Not against invaders.
But against knowledge.
People burning their own cities. Collapsing towers. Executing scholars. Shattering machines that could preserve truth. Above them all loomed the Sky, now filled with countless symbols—commands, restrictions, laws.
"A cage," Ryuuji whispered.
"A leash," the figure corrected.
Ryuuji clenched his fists.
"So all of this—Stillness, the Wardens, the customs—"
"—are the terms of survival," the figure said.
"Humanity was given a choice: remain ignorant and live… or remember and be erased."
Ryuuji thought of his father.
Of Kareth.
Of the man who had turned to ash without a scream.
"And those Omens?" he asked bitterly. "The ash, the punishment?"
The figure's light flickered.
"Maintenance."
The word hit harder than any revelation.
Maintenance.
Not wrath.
Not justice.
Just upkeep.
The chamber trembled.
Dust fell from the ceiling.
"Time is short," the figure said.
"The Sky has noticed you noticing."
Ryuuji forced himself to stand.
"Why me?"
The figure stepped closer. For the first time, its form sharpened—revealing scars across its body, each one shaped like a symbol from the walls.
"Because you are a flaw," it said softly.
"And flaws are how systems fail."
A mark burned itself into Ryuuji's forearm.
He screamed—not in pain, but in recognition.
The symbol felt familiar.
Like something he had always known and only now remembered.
"You will be hunted," the figure continued.
"Not by monsters… but by those who truly believe the Sky must never be questioned."
The light dimmed.
"When the time comes, choose carefully, Ryuuji Valis."
"Revolution destroys as much as it frees."
The chamber began to collapse inward—not violently, but deliberately, sealing itself layer by layer.
Ryuuji found himself pushed backward—
Through stone.
Through darkness.
Through fear.
He collapsed onto cold ground.
Night air filled his lungs.
Above him, the Sky was calm.
Too calm.
Ryuuji stared upward, forearm burning, mind heavy with truths the world was never meant to remember.
Somewhere in Kareth, the Wardens would be searching.
Somewhere beyond the city, other nations would have felt the disturbance.
And somewhere far above—
The Sky was adjusting.
For the first time in generations, Erdveil had produced a Rememberer.
And history, long buried, had begun to breathe again.
End of Chapter 2