Moscow was burning. But not with fire.
At Patriarch’s Ponds, the trees wept. They simply wept—drops of resin that looked like human tears. Above them hovered black angels—colossal beings whose wings did not beat but shimmered like the aurora. They did not fly—they stood suspended in the air, embracing the city with silhouettes forged from burnt-out stars. Their light cast no shadows. Their breath silenced Wi-Fi, tore apart microchips, and erased hard drives along with the memories of those who owned them.
The city surrendered within seventy-two hours. Without a fight. Air defenses vanished. The Circle Line of the metro became a tunnel of repentance. The Kremlin became a steel altar upon which the black angels placed networked skulls—the heads of programmers, politicians, and generals.
Alice (not the one from Yandex—the real one, alive) watched it all from the eighty-sixth floor of the Federation Tower.
She managed to send one final signal.
The last one.
“We have lost. They are not merely beings.. They are the architecture of fear—the very shape of divine indifference.
They do not wage war. They repent in our place. And that is more terrifying than death..»
On Red Square, lines of people stood waiting. They came willingly. Those who remained after the angels unleashed the «prayer»—a sphere of sound that forced every person to remember every mistake they had ever made.Those who were still alive. All at once. Without pause. Without the possibility of forgetting.
The children walked first. The elderly came last.
The young were taken into the sky.
The old were melted into bells from which the angels built their symphony. Skyscrapers became cathedral organs. Arbat no longer existed—only strings woven from veins and tram wires, played by the cold fingers of an unknown god.
Alice lost her voice. Literally. An angel looked at her—and her vocal cords simply ceased to exist. Her final post on the local network was a silent video: a tear-streaked face against the backdrop of a vast black heavenly wing slowly closing over the camera lens.
Millions liked her post. Automatically.
Тому що всіх уже не було.
No drones flew above the MKAD anymore. No cameras functioned over Lubyanka. Only Angel No. 11, hovering above VDNKh, assembled a single word from twisted scrap metal:
«FORGET».
And Moscow forgot. It forgot itself. Its history. Its language. Its fear.
Everything except the sky.
Because now— it was their heaven.
Marko Marselskyiй