Beneath the cold gaze of a sterile night sky, something stirs. A man rises—not from sleep, but from a century of silence. The year is 2349, and Earth has forgotten what it means to mourn. Graveyards are gone. Corpses feed the flames. Death itself is impolite conversation.
William Lantry walks again. Not a ghost, but a grievance. The last breath of a world erased, flickering inside a man with dust on his tongue and grief in his bones. The living pass him by. He is obsolete. He is unclean. And yet—he moves.
The Incinerator looms, its great throat devouring history one cinder at a time. They say fire cleanses. Lantry remembers otherwise. He carries no weapon but memory, no shield but the brittle shape of sorrow, and a single pocketknife dull with time.
In the end, there will be music. And ash. And a whisper in the smoke that says: not everything can be burned away.