Elior tried to explain it three times before he realized he was already failing.
The first time was in the café, his hands wrapped too tightly around the warm mug, his eyes darting to the windows every few seconds as if the sky might betray him early.
"The sky turned green," he said. "Not like clouds. Like light. Like it wasn't supposed to exist."
Aria blinked at him. "Green how?"
"Alive," he answered immediately. "Like it was watching us."
She smiled, small and uncertain, the way people do when they think humor is the safest response. "Okay. You're definitely stressed."
"I'm serious," he said. "Phones stopped working. Everyone felt it. There was this pressure, like the air itself was wrong. Then heat. Not fire. Just heat. And then—" He swallowed. "Nothing. Everything was gone."
Her smile faltered, but only slightly. "Daniel… you're scaring yourself."
The second time was later that day, in his apartment, pacing back and forth while Aria sat on the edge of the couch, arms folded loosely, watching him like he might suddenly break.
"It wasn't a dream," he insisted. "Dreams don't stay that clear. I remember where I was standing. I remember the exact second it happened."
"You've been working nonstop for weeks," she said gently. "You barely sleep. Your mind probably filled in something dramatic."
"I died," he said.
Silence followed. Thick. Uncomfortable.
Aria exhaled slowly. "Please don't say it like that."
The third time was with his friends that evening.
They laughed.
Not cruelly. Not mockingly. Just… dismissively.
"End of the world?" one of them said. "Man, if that was true, Twitter would've known first."
Another clapped him on the shoulder. "You need a break. Or a therapist."
Elior didn't argue after that. He watched their mouths move, their jokes land, their lives continue uninterrupted. He felt like a ghost sitting among the living.
When he got home, he searched the news.
Nothing.
No strange atmospheric events. No unexplained outages. No reports of panic. No green skies. Just politics, sports, weather forecasts that stretched calmly into the future.
Seven days from now.
He refreshed the page.
Still nothing.
His chest tightened. Doubt crept in, slow and poisonous.
Maybe it was a dream.
Maybe he had imagined it.
Maybe his mind had stitched together fear and exhaustion into something vivid enough to feel real.
But then he closed his eyes.
And saw it.
The green sky wasn't blurry. It wasn't distorted like a fading memory. It was precise. Sharp. The color wrong in a way his brain could not invent by accident. He remembered the way sound vanished before panic began. The way people looked up in unison. The exact spot on the street where he had been standing.
Most of all, he remembered the feeling.
That wrongness.
Centered on him.
Elior sat on the edge of his bed and pulled out his phone. His thumb hovered over the calendar app. He hesitated, just for a moment, afraid that writing it down would make it real.
Then he tapped.
Seven days from today.
He added an event.
He didn't name it at first. He stared at the blank title field, his heart pounding, his breathing shallow.
Finally, he typed:
Green Sky.
He saved it.
The reminder appeared, small and harmless, sitting quietly in his future like it belonged there.
Elior locked his phone and stared at the wall.
No one believed him.
But the memory hadn't faded.
And that scared him more than anything else.