The Last to Remember

The world had lost its color.

It started slowly, like a sickness creeping into the earth. At first, the skies dulled — blue turned to slate, then to a flat, indifferent gray. The trees followed, their once-vivid greens leeching away until they stood lifeless, their bark and leaves indistinguishable. The flowers withered into husks of gray dust, and the rivers ran like liquid steel. People didn’t notice at first, not really, until the color left their skin.

That was when the panic set in.

Doctors and scientists called it Chromalysis, but the name didn't matter. There was no cure. No cause. No hope. As the last traces of color disappeared, so did something deeper, something inside the people. Laughter faded, art ceased, music became little more than a murmur in the background of life. It wasn’t just the world that was graying. It was the people, too.

And then, one by one, they began to disappear.

Not all at once. Not predictably. At first, it seemed random — one day, someone was there, and the next, they weren’t. Their homes remained untouched, their shoes still neatly by the door, their books still open on tables, as if they had only stepped away for a moment. But they never returned.

Over time, a pattern emerged.

The ones who vanished first were those who had already given up. Those who no longer spoke, who no longer looked at the sky, who no longer reached for another’s hand. The ones who stopped trying to hold on. It became clear- the world did not just erase color — it erased those who no longer fought to remember it.

It wasn’t a disease. It wasn’t an accident.

The world was forgetting them.

And the moment someone let themselves be forgotten, they ceased to exist.

Every morning, she woke up and searched for something — anything — with color. It had become an obsession, a ritual she didn’t understand but couldn’t stop. She remembered when the sky had been blue, when the apples in the orchard had glowed crimson under the summer sun. She could still see those colors in her mind, though she was beginning to wonder if they were just dreams.

She pulled on her boots, cracked and gray, and slung a threadbare satchel over her shoulder. Inside were relics from before — things she clung to like charms. A yellowed photograph, a once-red scarf now drained of vibrancy, a glass marble that had shimmered with swirling blues and greens but now sat dull and empty.

She told herself they still held a memory of their color.

And as long as she remembered, the world wouldn’t take her.

She had known people here. She had loved people here.

Now, they were gone.

She had woken up to silence, found their beds still made, their shoes still by the door. Had they realized, too late, that they were slipping away? Had they let go of the memories that tethered them to the world?

Dominique had tried to leave once. She had wandered through abandoned cities, over fields of gray grass, through forests where the trees stood frozen like statues. But the world stretched on in its endless, lifeless monotony, and she had found nothing.

She had returned — because what else was there?

And yet, she did not vanish.

Because Dominique searched. She remembered. She refused to let go.

She was lonely, yes. The silence pressed against her, tried to erode her piece by piece. But loneliness was not the same as forgetting. As long as she remembered the laughter of her brother, the smell of summer rain, the feel of her mother’s hands braiding ribbons into her hair — she existed.

Memories anchored her.

That was the rule of the world.

Those who stopped remembering faded.

Those who held on — despite the pain, despite the loneliness — remained.

But for how long?

Today, she walked beyond the town’s edge, following a road that led toward the hills. The air was heavy, thick with the weight of a sky that never changed. She climbed over fallen fences, past empty houses.

And then she saw something.

A flicker. A glint.

She froze, her breath catching.

It was small, barely noticeable — a speck of something in the dirt, almost hidden beneath the dust and gray.

Dominique dropped to her knees, brushing away the lifeless earth with trembling fingers.

It was a flower.

Or it had been, once.

Its petals were shriveled, its stem brittle, but there was something there — something different. A whisper of color, so faint she thought she might be imagining it.

She touched it, and the world around her seemed to hum, a soundless vibration in her bones. She closed her eyes, gripping the delicate thing as if it might vanish.

A memory surged through her.

A garden. Her mother’s laughter. The smell of summer rain.

Dominique gasped, eyes snapping open. The gray world stood unchanged, but the feeling remained. It was the first time in years that she had felt something real, something beyond the emptiness.

She cradled the fragile thing and knew, without understanding why, that it mattered.

That it meant something.

Days passed. Then weeks.

The silence pressed against her, but something inside her had shifted. She searched now — not just for color, but for the memories tied to it.

She found other things.

A child's toy, its surface smooth and pale but carrying the shape of joy. A book, its pages nearly unreadable but holding the weight of stories. A seashell that still smelled, faintly, of salt.

And each time she found something, she remembered.

She remembered the way her father’s voice had sounded when he sang in the mornings. The way her brother had chased her through fields that had once been golden.

The way her mother had braided ribbons — red, blue, yellow — into her hair.

And then, one morning, she saw it.

A sliver of color in the sky.

It was barely there, just the faintest streak of blue in the vast gray expanse.

But it was real.

The world had lost its color.

But maybe, just maybe, it was coming back.

And if that was true, she had to find out why.

When she found David, he already knew who she was.

“You have it, don’t you?” he had asked, eyeing the satchel at her side.

Dominique had tightened her grip. “Have what?”

“The memory,” he had said softly. “The things that still remember what color is.”

Dominique’s pulse pounded. “You know what’s happening.”

David nodded.

“The world is trying to forget us,” he said. “But it hasn’t succeeded. Not yet.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a key.

It gleamed. Gold.

A color she had not seen in years.

“This,” David said, “is proof that the world isn’t gone. Not completely.”

Dominique took the key, feeling the weight of it in her palm.

“What does it open?” she whispered.

David smiled, tired but certain. “I don’t know. But I think it’s time we find out.”

And for the first time since the world had lost its color, Dominique believed it could come back.