1st Movement: Grave Calamità

"Never forget." A phrase with gravitas and sentiment, yet nonetheless uttered without thought.

To never forget means to always remember. It is a phrase uttered commonly in reference to the Calamity; I've heard it every single year when The Rising happens. "Remember those who died" it implores, "Remember the pain of those who lived", it suggests.

It has been scarcely a generation since the Seventh Umbral Calamity, many of those still walking the world still remember the names of the corpses that litter the graveyards, and just as many vividly remember the doomed sky as the red moon descended. Of course they remember.

And yet, in La Noscea, floating buildings and tiny islands dot its landscape; deep in the Sea of Clouds, a gigantic ship keeps its eternal voyage; slumbering statues of purest white can still be found if you search enough in the Black Shroud. Nym, Mhach, Amdapor. The three cities of Magi that ruled the continent during the Fifth Astral Era, now little more than ruins and records kept in dusty old tomes.

These cities had people, these people had names; people who too vowed to "Never forget". And yet, here, one and a half millennia later, no one remembers who they were.

Not even I.

What survived are merely tiny glimpses, edges of shadows cast by long dead lamplight; their context, their truth, their history, completely gone.

Yet, those glimpses are more than what is afforded to those who lived in the First Astral Era, to those who lived in the Second Astral Era, to those who lived in the Fourth Astral Era; even, in many cases, to those who lived in the Sixth. Even mighty Allag, whose constructions scar the landscape like bloody pustules, and whose history was preserved to a point any historian would consider impossible, still had some of its biggest atrocities forgotten.

I lived through many of them, yet today I struggle to ascertain which parts of my memory are real, and which parts I have subconsciously invented. Which parts are history, and which parts my brain has spared me from.

And in truth, I even hear many people speak of the world after the Seventh Umbral Calamity as uniquely terrible, often accompanied by a phrase like "The Calamity made things much worse". Sometimes, it feels like I am the only one who remembers the truth.

The truth of how little the Calamity actually changed.

And so I remember; I remember until I can no longer. I remember the dead and I remember their pain, until they too fade away into obscurity and nothingness. Because I know too keenly that no matter how much we try, no matter how many records are written, how many redundancies, how many monuments are erected, how sturdy the buildings or how long lived you are.

One day you will forget.

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