Aaratrika Roy
The evening the horizon cracked, the sea smelled like rusted coins and wet moss, and the sky wore the color of old bruises, and I stood on the seawall gripping my father’s compass like it might point me toward a version of myself that wasn’t stuck between everybody’s pity and my own silence; gulls shrieked overhead, kids played cricket on the sand with a plastic bat that had lost its stickers years ago, Naina texted three times to ask if I was still “brooding like a Victorian ghost” and I didn’t answer because the word brooding felt exactly right and also because I didn’t have the language to explain the way the horizon had been looking wrong for days—as if someone had squeegeed the sky clean and I could see a faint, vertical line where nothing should be, a hairline seam in the place we were taught to call infinite. I pressed the compass lid open with my thumb. It stuck, the hinge always catching, before popping with its small brass sigh. The needle trembled like a nervous animal. “North,” I whispered, though the direction here was always the same: seawall, gray rocks, the lighthouse like a chipped tooth, and the strip of shops with fried fish oil floating in the heat, and the tide rinsing the shore in long tired breaths. My father used to stand where I stood, two hands on the rail, eyes narrowed into the gunsmoke distance, telling me scraps of stories I pretended not to believe: that the horizon wasn’t a line but a door; that some doors looked like lines until you were brave enough to touch them; that some doors didn’t want to be touched at all. When he died—boat overturned in a sudden squall, body found days later, the town’s grief heavy and public like garlands hung on a statue—I thought the stories would dissolve, but instead they came back sharper, as if grief had sanded their edges and now they cut when I accidentally grabbed them in the dark. I could hear him even then, the way his voice would drop at dusk: careful, Aarya, the world is thinner at the edges.
A truck rattled past on the road behind me, the seawall swallowing the rumble, and a girl’s laughter peeled off the beach; my phone vibrated again—where r u—and I told myself to leave because I had homework and Naina would drag me to that stall for lime soda and I would pretend I hadn’t come here to haunt a memory—but the line out there pulsed. I don’t know how else to say it. It wasn’t light. It wasn’t movement. It was like the way your eye catches the shimmer of hot air above a road, that wavery not-thing; but this shimmer folded inward. For a second I thought I was seeing the slick back of a whale, or the gleam of a container ship turned just so, except there were no ships scheduled this week—the harbor app would have told me, because yes, I’m the kind of person who checks harbor schedules as if they were horoscopes. The seam deepened. It wore a pale gleam the way a cracked phone screen catches light. My mouth had already formed Naina’s name, but what came out was a small, ridiculous sound, like the noise a kettle makes just before the boil, and suddenly the evening felt wrong in a way that made the hairs on my arms prick. Somewhere behind me a temple bell rang—six o’ clock, Arati time. Afterward the priest would scramble eggs at his cousin’s stall, because here God and hunger and gossip shared the same thirty meters of road, and everything overlapped like monsoon puddles. The bell kept ringing, and the seam kept getting brighter, and without deciding to I walked down the stairs from the seawall to the beach, my shoes sinking into the damp places where the tide had recently been, and the wind lifted my hair and blew it into my lip gloss, and I hated that tiny ordinary irritation because it felt like the world trying to insist on normal while normal braided itself into something else.
When I reached the waterline the surf hissed over my toes and retreated, and I told myself three things very quickly: one, this is a mirage; two, if it’s not a mirage I don’t have to go close; three, if I go close I will not touch it; and that was the exact moment a filament of sound came from the seam, high and thin, the kind of sound glass makes when you run a wet finger around the rim of a bowl. It wasn’t loud, but it was absolute. It pressed inside my ears. It skated along my teeth. I thought of my father’s toolbox, of screws singing against metal, of the night he made me a pinhole projector so we could watch the eclipse as it chewed the moon. I stepped forward. The seam was not out at the horizon anymore; no, that’s wrong, it was out there but it was also here, a sense that the line had extended itself to meet me, a strand of dull silver tethering far away to my feet. The next wave padded up the sand and left something behind: a sliver the size of a fingernail, clear as ice and yet not cold. It lay there glittering with a patient sort of light. I crouched, heartbeat jabbing at my throat, and stared. It looked like a shard of glass with no cut edge, every side polished and soft and somehow alive, the way a sleeping animal holds its warmth. My hand hovered. I remembered rule three—do not touch—but all of grief is touch, isn’t it; all of missing is reaching for what is not there. I picked up the shard.
It was heavier than it should have been. It hummed. Not out loud, not like my phone or a fan, but in my palm, through my wrist, a tiny current winding into my elbow. For a second my vision doubled: the beach and also not the beach, the seawall and also a road of pale stone flanked by trees whose leaves shone like small mirrors. I blinked hard. The wind dropped flat, as if someone had cupped the air in both hands. The temple bell stopped. The kids down the beach stopped shouting. A quiet knitted itself over the evening so complete I heard my own swallow, the click in my throat. And then a voice—so near I actually turned my head before I understood it wasn’t outside—said my name the way my father said it on the last morning when he’d handed me the compass and laughed at my bedhead and told me to tie my hair if I insisted on visiting the seawall before school, Aarya as a shape cut clean into the air, and I closed my fingers over the shard like I might hold his voice there. But the voice wasn’t his. It had the youth my father’s never had in my memories. It had a glittering undertow.
“Aarya,” it said again, and the seam out at the edge of the world made a sound like pressure eased, a cool sigh through a cracked window, and a figure stepped out of the water as if the water were no deeper than a mirror: a boy with wet hair clinging to his forehead in dark commas, eyes too pale for this coast, jacket that looked like someone had stitched the night to the lining, and sand didn’t cling to him, the way it clung to everyone else; the tide wrinkled around his ankles like it didn’t know what to do with his weight. He stood as if standing were new. He looked at me like looking had a price he was willing to pay. I wanted to run. I wanted to say something obvious and human like hey or who are you or are you okay because nobody just walks out of the sea at twilight without a backstory, and he answered the question I hadn’t asked.
“Not a ghost,” he said, with a tiny smile like the idea amused him. “Not yours, anyway.”
I should have laughed. I should have thrown the shard back into the surf and told Naina she was right, I was brooding myself into hallucinations. Instead I heard myself say, “Did you call me?” which felt both like a mistake and also like the only sentence left in the world. The boy tilted his head, the way gulls do when they assess an unguarded samosa. A muscle jumped in his cheek. For a beautiful, stupid heartbeat I thought he would say my father’s name.
“I followed the crack,” he said. “It was singing. To you.” He looked at my hand, at the shard glinting there. His gaze made a light more inside it. “You shouldn’t hold that without a glove.”
I almost said I don’t have a glove because I say small practical things when the world edges toward unthinkable, but the shard warmed quickly, like embarrassment traveling into skin. “Who are you?” I asked, and the boy looked toward the horizon. The seam flickered. Behind him the lighthouse blinked once, twice—the keeper switching it on, late—and every blink felt like a yes, a warning, a breath. The boy’s voice softened. “Kael,” he said. The name slid through the air like a reed-flute note. “I’m—” he stopped, seemed to taste the sentence before letting it out. “From the other side.”
Somewhere in my pocket the phone buzzed again, insistently r u alive???, and I thought if I answered I would break the spell or break myself, and the shard pulsed like a heartbeat, and Kael’s gaze flicked to the seawall above us, to the shallow steps and the road with its fried-fish oil and temple bell and rubber slippers and scooters and the whole ordinary world I had been clinging to like it could keep me from drowning in my own history. When he looked back his face was the kind of serious that belongs to people who’ve learned too young that seriousness can be a shield. “There isn’t time,” he said. “The glass is failing.” He lifted a hand, palm outward, and the seam out there stuttered like a breath caught mid-sob. “You’re the Keeper, Aarya.”
I wanted to say You’re wrong or That’s not a real thing or I’m sixteen and can barely survive Chemistry, but the shard brightened and for a second my father’s compass spun so fast the needle blurred, and a cold wind came off a sea that had been warm a moment before, and all the tiny facts of my days—the homework, the lime soda, the way the school bell never rang on time—fell away like sand shaken from a towel. Kael took a single step closer, careful as if I were the one made of light, and his voice thinned to a thread. “If we don’t seal it before moonrise,” he said, “both worlds bleed.” He glanced at my hand, and I knew he wanted the shard, and I knew I should let him take it, that I had no business with a thing that hummed a song I almost remembered. I closed my fist tighter. “Prove it,” I said, because that was the last tiny strip of ordinary I could still claim. Kael’s smile—sad and starved and real—flashed. He looked past me toward the steps. “All right,” he said quietly. “Turn around.”
I did, breath locked in my ribs, and saw a woman standing on the lowest stair in a shawl the color of dusk, a lantern cradled in her hands though it wasn’t yet night, her hair braided with slivers of what I first thought was tinsel and then knew, with a certainty that had no source, were threads of glass; her eyes were the patient eyes of people who have watched a thousand tides without learning boredom. When she spoke, the air around us felt like the moment before a storm when pressure changes and you know something’s coming whether you want it or not. “Child,” said the Horizon Keeper, and the lantern’s light made a small gold universe on the wet sand. “You’re late.”
The Keeper’s voice rang like it had been waiting inside my bones, like she wasn’t speaking for the first time but reminding me of something I had already heard in sleep, in grief, in the way the tide sometimes murmured my name when I was alone on the wall. Kael dropped his gaze, respectful in a way that felt rehearsed, and the lantern in the woman’s hand flared, showing her skin wasn’t quite skin—too smooth, too translucent, as if she had been carved from the glass itself. “You’re late,” she repeated, and I hated how small I sounded when I whispered, “I didn’t know I was supposed to come.”
The lantern tilted toward me, and inside it the flame bent strangely, not upward but sideways, pressed against the glass like it was trying to reach my hand. My fingers ached around the shard, which pulsed hotter, brighter, and suddenly the beach felt crowded even though it was just us: Kael, the Keeper, and me, with the rest of the town behind us eating fried fish, buying soda, pretending the world was unbroken.
Kael took a step nearer, voice quiet. “She touched the shard before I could warn her. It’s… choosing.”
The Keeper’s eyes snapped to me, twin shards themselves, and she studied me like an examiner at school waiting for me to blurt the wrong answer. “Then it begins.” She stepped onto the sand, the surf licking at her toes without wetting them, and raised the lantern high. The seam out at the horizon answered—flared brighter, widened, a wound of light. For a heartbeat, I thought I could see through it: towers curved like seashells, a sky with two moons, trees whose branches poured silver instead of leaves. My stomach pitched.
“What is that?” I whispered.
“The other side,” Kael said simply. “My home. The place your father once swore to guard against, though not out of hate.”
The word father cracked open the air around me. “You knew him?”
Kael’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile, not quite grief. “Everyone knew him, Aarya. He was the last Keeper who tried to hold the horizon. But he failed.”
The Keeper’s lantern flared sharp, cutting the conversation like scissors through paper. “Enough. The crack widens with every wasted word. Girl, you’ve inherited the watch. That shard in your palm is your bond to the Glass.” She lifted her chin. “But you are untrained. And time is short.”
“I don’t—” My throat closed. I wanted to say I don’t want this, I can’t do this, I just want my father back, but the shard burned hotter, as if scolding me. The Keeper watched without pity. Kael’s eyes softened, though, like he knew the edge of every excuse I might make.
“You have until moonrise,” the Keeper said. “Seal it, or let it break. Two worlds will flood each other, and neither will remain whole.”
The lantern dimmed suddenly, like it had spent itself. She stepped back into the stair’s shadow, and her form blurred, the shawl dissolving into dusk until only the faint gold line of her braid lingered in the dark. Then even that was gone.
I stood with the shard digging into my palm, the sea curling at my shoes, the lighthouse blinking like a frantic eye. Kael didn’t move. His voice, when it came, was quiet enough to be mistaken for the tide. “She won’t help us. They never do. It’s always the new Keeper who pays.”
Something inside me cracked at the word Keeper, like it was trying to stretch and fit around my name. “I’m not—”
“You are,” Kael said firmly. “And the horizon doesn’t wait for your denial. Look.”
I turned, because what else could I do, and the seam was wider, the crack spreading across the sky like lightning that never faded. Inside, through the wound, something shifted—something with wings made not of feathers but of sharp glass, beating against the barrier. My breath stuck like ice in my chest.
Kael’s hand hovered near mine, not touching but close enough that the shard in my palm hummed louder, like it wanted him. “We need to bind it. Tonight. Before it comes through.”
I couldn’t look away from the thing battering the glass. My father’s voice slipped across memory—careful, Aarya, the world is thinner at the edges—and the words burned. My voice broke when I finally asked, “How?”
Kael’s pale eyes glimmered in the growing dark. “With you. With me. And with the shard. But it will hurt.”
The horizon split again, the sound a brittle, shattering note that stabbed into my teeth. The sky above us bruised purple, the first star shivering awake. The moon was climbing, slow and merciless.
And I understood—whether I wanted it or not—that my ordinary life had already cracked wide open with the horizon.
The crack in the horizon groaned again, a sound like the sea being folded back against itself, and I flinched as the shard in my palm seared hotter, brighter, until I half expected it to melt into my skin and carve itself permanent, and Kael was already stepping closer, his presence too calm, too certain, as if he had rehearsed this moment across a hundred other evenings and knew exactly what had to be done while I still felt like I had stumbled into a nightmare with my father’s ghost at its edges. “Don’t fight it,” he said, his voice low and steady, the tone someone might use when coaxing a frightened animal out of hiding, “the shard listens to your fear and twists it, you have to let it listen to something else.” The wind whipped harder, and the lighthouse beam swung across us like an accusation, and the children on the beach were gone now, the stalls shuttered, the town settling into its usual night rhythm, and I hated that everything ordinary still continued while my hands shook and the sky split, because how unfair was it that the world did not pause for me, that grief had not paused for me, and now even magic refused to. “Something else?” I rasped, but Kael only looked at me, expectant, and it was the same look teachers gave before you realized the test had started ten minutes ago. The shard vibrated harder, a high whine in my bones, and against my will I remembered the lullaby my father had hummed whenever storms rattled the windows of our flat, a tune without words, low and looping, like waves rolling into themselves, and before I thought about it my throat had let the tune slip, fragile and halting, the air quivering with a melody too small for the giant wound yawning open at the horizon. But the shard quieted. It didn’t cool, not yet, but the frantic pulse steadied into something almost bearable. Kael’s eyes lit with a strange reverence. “That’s it,” he murmured, “your blood remembers, even if you don’t. The Glass doesn’t answer power, it answers memory.” He lifted his hand, palm up, and though I hesitated, the shard tugged toward him, as if my hand had been chained to his unseen. Our fingers brushed when I let the shard rest between us, and the heat doubled, surged, light spilling in ribbons that tangled with the wind and cut shadows across our faces. Kael’s jaw tightened, and he whispered words I didn’t know, words that felt like they should be carved into stone, and the ribbons stiffened into beams, stretching toward the horizon crack, threads of light sewing themselves across the wound.
For a moment it looked like it was working. The jagged edge of the seam paused, the glass-winged creature behind it halting mid-beat, its pale eyes furious, the surface shuddering as if it might re-fuse. But then the moon crested fully from the horizon, silver washing across the beach, and the seam widened like a mouth gasping for air, tearing the threads apart, shattering the fragile work we had stitched. The shard screamed in my hand, not with sound but with unbearable pressure, and I cried out, my knees buckling, sand grinding into my skin, the taste of salt sharp and metallic in my mouth. Kael dropped beside me, his breath ragged. “It’s stronger than I thought,” he said, his voice raw. “The first breach always is. We need more than memory—we need anchor.”
“What does that even mean?” I snapped, though my voice broke, thin with terror. He grabbed my wrist, not unkind but urgent, and forced my gaze to his. His eyes weren’t just pale, I realized—they held reflections, tiny fractured images of things I didn’t know: a tower, a fire, faces I couldn’t name. “An anchor is what holds you to this world, Aarya,” he said. “If you don’t choose one, the Glass will take whatever it wants.”
The crack shrieked again, another fissure spidering outward across the horizon, the sky bleeding with impossible colors, and for one unbearable second I thought the sea itself tilted, pulling toward that wound. I thought of my mother asleep in our flat, of Naina with her endless sarcasm and her insistence on lime soda at every chance, of my father’s compass heavy in my pocket, of the way the tide always returned even after storms, and I seized on that because it was all I had: the certainty of return. “The sea,” I whispered, choking, “the sea is my anchor.”
The shard answered. It flared with blinding brilliance, and suddenly the ground under me felt steadier, the pull toward the horizon slackening. Kael’s expression sharpened with awe, maybe relief, and together we lifted the shard higher, its light uncoiling into a broad, burning net that flung itself over the wound. The glass-winged creature screeched, its cry muffled, the crack straining against the weave of light. For a heartbeat it held—the seam stitched, the horizon trembling but shut.
Then silence.
The shard dimmed, collapsing into a dull glow, and I collapsed with it, sand damp against my cheek, breath tearing at my ribs. Kael steadied me, his hand firm on my shoulder. “You did it,” he whispered, and though part of me wanted to believe him, another part knew by the way the air still throbbed and the sea still heaved that nothing was finished. The horizon was quiet, yes, but not healed. It pulsed faintly, a bruise waiting to split again.
The shard lay in my palm, smaller now, like it had spent itself. My father’s compass ticked against my pocket, the needle twitching as if caught between directions. Kael looked at me, eyes shadowed. “That will hold until the next rise,” he said. “But the cracks won’t stop. Not unless…” He broke off, as if the rest of the sentence were too dangerous to hand me yet.
“Unless what?” I demanded, though my voice shook.
“Unless we find the core of the Glass,” he said finally, his expression unreadable. “And only a Keeper can.”
The tide reached up, foamed around my knees, retreated again. The town lights flickered far behind us. Somewhere in the distance, a dog barked at nothing. And I realized, with a weight like stone, that I would never be able to stand on the seawall and see the horizon as just a line again.
Night thickened around us until the sea was no longer silver but black glass, the shard in my palm faint as a buried ember, and Kael helped me stand though his hands felt colder than the tide itself, as if the horizon’s residue still clung to him, and I wanted to pull away but the shard tugged me toward him again, invisible thread insisting that whatever I had begun wasn’t something I could finish alone. “The core,” he said, quiet, as if naming it might summon danger, “lies where the Glass was first bound, before your world knew how to write its own history.” The words pressed against me heavier than the surf, but then my father’s compass ticked, sharp, loud, insistent, and when I pulled it from my pocket the needle spun frantically before locking not north but east—toward the cliffs where the lighthouse kept vigil.
I almost laughed, sharp and ugly. “Of course. Because going home and sleeping isn’t allowed. Because the world’s about to bleed, and somehow my dead father left me a broken compass as a map.”
Kael’s face softened at the bitterness, as if he knew it too well, and he only nodded. “Your father walked further into the Glass than most. The compass remembers. We should follow.”
The climb to the cliffs was brutal in the dark. The path wound steep and narrow, stone slick with sea mist, and once my sneaker skidded and Kael caught my arm so fast it left me breathless, his grip unyielding, his eyes shadow-bright. He didn’t let go until the ground steadied, and even then the shard buzzed faintly in my hand, jealous of my pulse.
At the top the lighthouse loomed, its beam slicing the dark like a blade. Up close the paint peeled, rust streaked the iron, but the door hung slightly open as if waiting. I hesitated. My father had once brought me here on a school trip, let me climb the spiraling stairs while the keeper grumbled below. The memory pricked—him laughing, me dizzy from height, the promise of ice cream after. Now it smelled of salt and oil and abandonment.
Inside, the stairs groaned, each step echoing too loud. At the top the great lamp burned steady, whirling its eye across sea and town, but someone was already there: hunched, wrapped in a shawl darker than midnight, the lantern she had carried on the beach set beside her. The Horizon Keeper did not turn as we entered. She only spoke, voice dry as driftwood. “You stitched a wound, child. It will tear again.”
My mouth was salt-dry. “Then tell me how to stop it.”
Finally she turned, her face half-shadow, half-light, eyes unreadable. “The core rests where the first shard fell. Your father searched for it. He failed. He died because he forgot the price every Keeper must pay.”
The word price hung there like a rope waiting for a neck. Kael stiffened beside me, his silence sharp. I wanted to shout, to demand what price, but the compass twitched violently in my hand and the needle spun before fixing itself downward—through stone, through cliff, toward something buried deep.
The Keeper saw it too. Her thin lips curved, not in kindness but inevitability. “He left you the path,” she murmured. “And paths are cruel things, Aarya. They don’t ask if you’re ready.” She lifted her lantern. The flame bent sideways again, pointing toward a trapdoor half-hidden in the floorboards.
Kael reached it first, pulling it open, the air below cold and damp. Stone steps descended into a narrow shaft, older than the lighthouse, carved rough as if by hands that had no patience for beauty. A smell rose—earth, sea, something older.
I should have refused. I should have run. But the compass needle pointed unwaveringly, and the shard in my palm throbbed with hungry light, and my father’s voice wove through memory again, softer than breath: careful, Aarya, the world is thinner at the edges.
So I stepped down, Kael behind me, the Keeper’s lantern lowering until its glow painted the stones like a forgotten script.
The tunnel narrowed, walls slick, ceiling pressing close. Water dripped steadily, rhythmic as a second heartbeat. We walked for what felt like forever until the air thickened with something metallic, and when I brushed the wall my fingers came away glittering faintly, as if the stone itself was threaded with powdered glass.
Finally the passage opened into a chamber. My breath caught. The walls glimmered faintly, veins of crystal running like rivers through rock. In the center stood a pedestal of cracked stone, and on it lay a circle of glass no larger than a coin, pulsing faintly, steady, alive.
“The first shard,” Kael whispered, reverence softening his features.
The compass needle spun madly. The shard in my hand blazed like recognition. And deep inside me, grief and wonder tangled until I could no longer tell which was heavier.
But before I could move, before I could speak, a hairline crack split across the chamber wall with a brittle scream, and from it seeped not light but shadow, twisting and cold, spilling toward us with the certainty of floodwater.
Kael seized my wrist, eyes wide. “It’s already awake,” he hissed. “We’re too late.”
And the first creature of the Glass began to crawl through.
The chamber howled as the crack widened, air sucked toward it like a held breath breaking, and I stumbled backward, my shoulder slamming against cold stone, the shard burning in my palm until I thought it would fuse with my skin. From the fissure oozed a shadow that wasn’t shadow—it had depth, weight, angles that my eyes couldn’t hold, like broken mirrors stitched with darkness. Then the wings unfolded. They weren’t feathers. They were knives of glass, catching the faint glow of the veins in the walls, scattering light in a storm of reflections.
Kael shoved me behind him, arm taut, but the creature was already half through, claws scraping stone. Its cry wasn’t sound but fracture, a brittle screech that clawed my teeth and rattled the compass in my pocket until the hinge snapped open on its own. The needle spun wildly, pointing not east, not down, but directly at the creature.
“The shard!” Kael shouted over the shriek. “It knows you—use it!”
My breath faltered. “How?”
“Call it.” His eyes, pale fire, locked onto mine. “The way you did before—memory, anchor, anything. But do it now.”
The creature lunged. Its body was translucent, glass within glass, but the edges were sharp, every wingbeat cutting the air. Kael darted forward, faster than I expected, pulling a knife of dull silver from his jacket. It looked useless against something not fully flesh, but he swung anyway, blade meeting wing with a sound like two windows shattering. The creature reeled, but only for a heartbeat. Then it struck back, claws grazing his arm. The wound bled dark, but the blood shimmered faintly, as if it didn’t belong to this world at all.
I wanted to freeze, to fold myself into the corner and pretend this wasn’t real, but the shard throbbed with heat so violent it stole choice. My anchor, Kael had said. The sea. And memory.
I closed my eyes, clutching the shard so tight its edge bit my skin. I thought of waves breaking against the seawall, of my father’s laugh echoing above them, of Naina’s voice yelling my name across sand, of all the ordinary nights when the horizon was just horizon. The shard pulsed, a rhythm syncing with my heartbeat. The memory unfolded in sound—the lullaby, low and steady. I hummed it through clenched teeth, desperate.
The shard answered.
Light surged, not golden but ocean-deep blue, spilling from my hand in veins that crawled across the floor, up the walls, over the crack itself. The creature shrieked again, rearing, wings smashing against the glow, but the light wrapped it, strands weaving into a net that pinned its form. Its body flickered—solid, then fractured, then solid again. Kael staggered back, knife forgotten, eyes wide.
“Hold it!” he cried. “Don’t let the song break!”
The lullaby wavered, my voice shaking, but I forced it steady, breath ripping at my lungs. The light thickened. The creature’s form splintered. For one unbearable moment it looked directly at me, and I saw not fury but hunger, bottomless, endless, as if the crack itself were starving and I was the meal.
Then it shattered.
Glass shards scattered across the chamber, dissolving before they touched the ground. The crack hissed, edges sizzling with blue light, then sealed with a sound like a sigh. Silence slammed down.
I collapsed to my knees, gasping, the shard in my palm now cool, too cool, as if it had spent itself. My hand ached, blood seeping from the cut where I’d clenched too hard. Kael dropped beside me, breath harsh, his arm bleeding bright with that strange shimmering wound. He caught my wrist, his grip firm, his eyes searching my face. “You anchored it. You bound the first breach.”
“I nearly broke,” I whispered. My voice sounded small, lost in the vastness of the chamber.
He shook his head once, sharp. “You didn’t. And now it knows you.”
“The creature?”
“No,” Kael said softly, almost reverently. His pale gaze dropped to the shard, which flickered faintly again, as if answering his words. “The Glass.”
The veins in the walls still glimmered, steady, alive. The compass needle stilled, pointing once more east, beyond the chamber. I realized with a hollow certainty that this was only the first breach, the smallest taste of what lay waiting beyond the horizon.
The Keeper’s words rang again in my skull: He died because he forgot the price.
I shivered, clutching the shard tighter. The sea might be my anchor, but anchors can drag you down as easily as they hold you steady.
The chamber air still trembled with the ghost of that shriek, my ears ringing long after the last shard of the creature had dissolved, and the silence pressed so heavy it felt dangerous, as if the world itself was waiting to see whether I would breathe wrong and crack it open again. Kael wiped his injured arm with the edge of his sleeve, the wound glimmering faintly under the lantern light, not quite blood, not quite anything I had seen before, and when he caught me staring he muttered, “Later,” as if explanation were a currency too costly right now. The compass needle quivered once, then froze, pointing back the way we had come, as though even it wanted out of this place.
We climbed in silence, footsteps echoing sharp in the narrow shaft, until the trapdoor creaked open and the lighthouse air hit me—damp, salty, alive. But we weren’t alone. The Horizon Keeper was waiting, her lantern dimmed but steady, her eyes the color of fractured glass catching the last scraps of Kael’s strange blood on his sleeve. She didn’t speak right away. She only studied us with the patience of tides wearing down stone, and when she finally opened her mouth her voice was colder than the cave air we had left behind.
“You’ve tasted the breach,” she said. “And you bound it. But binding is not sealing. Every Keeper learns this truth. Few survive it.”
I wanted to demand answers, to shout that she could have warned me about claws and glass wings and hunger, but the shard in my hand throbbed once, silencing me, and Kael spoke first, his tone clipped. “She anchored it. Stronger than most do on their first breach. The Glass has chosen.”
The Keeper’s gaze sharpened, sliding to me, weighing me. “Chosen, yes. But choice demands price.”
My throat tightened. “What price?”
Her lantern flared, the flame bending until it pointed at Kael. “Every Keeper has a tether. Without it, the horizon devours you. Your father chose the sea. It wasn’t enough.”
Her words struck like stones thrown into still water, rippling outward. My father’s compass felt heavier in my pocket. I gripped it as though it could anchor me right there. “What do you mean, not enough?” I asked, hating the way my voice cracked.
The Keeper stepped closer, the shawl around her shoulders dragging shadows across the floor. “The Glass demands balance. To seal its core, you must offer not only anchor but sacrifice. A memory. A bond. Something you cannot replace. Only then will it close.”
Sacrifice. The word burned hotter than the shard. My mind darted to my mother’s laugh when she burned the rice, to Naina’s texts stacked like impatient footsteps, to my father’s voice in memory, fraying thinner every year. What could I give that wouldn’t ruin me?
Kael shifted at my side, shoulders taut, and for the first time I saw not confidence but unease flicker in his expression. He knew what she meant. He’d known all along.
The Keeper’s lantern dimmed, and she straightened, her face unreadable. “Moonrise tomorrow. If the breach opens again without sealing, you won’t close it. You’ll drown with it.”
Her lantern winked out entirely. The room darkened, the only light the revolving eye of the lighthouse sweeping across our faces in intervals, making Kael look carved from shadow and me like a ghost pinned against the wall.
And when the beam passed, the Keeper was gone.
Kael exhaled sharply, almost a laugh but bitter, his hand raking through his wet hair. “They never tell you everything,” he muttered. “Only enough to break you before you begin.”
The shard cooled to a dull glow in my palm. The compass needle trembled again, uncertain, as if waiting for me to decide which way my sacrifice would point.
And for the first time since the horizon cracked, I wondered if the real breach wasn’t out there in the sky at all—but inside me, waiting to split.
The walk home felt endless, the streets of my town stretched longer than they ever had, each shuttered stall and darkened balcony watching me like a witness to something I hadn’t meant to survive. Kael walked beside me in silence, his sleeve pulled tight over the wound that still shimmered faintly, though he didn’t flinch, didn’t complain, as if pain had been his roommate for years and he had grown tired of mentioning it. The shard lay cold in my hand now, a pebble of dead light, and the compass kept twitching like an insect trapped under glass. I shoved them both into my jacket pocket, half hoping they’d burn a hole right through and fall away into the gutter, but of course they stayed. The world never let you off that easy.
Our flat smelled of cumin and old varnish, the faint perfume of my mother’s incense still lingering from her evening prayers. She was asleep already, her door closed. I paused outside it, listening to her soft uneven breathing, thinking of the word sacrifice the Keeper had sharpened against my skin. How many things in this house were already sacrifices? My mother cooking for two when she ate for one, her bangles set aside in a drawer because the clinking reminded her of laughter she’d lost, the way she never went to the seawall anymore, as if the horizon had stolen her husband and she would not give it a second chance.
My room was small, the desk cluttered with textbooks, a stack of my father’s old notebooks shoved under piles of worksheets I hadn’t touched in weeks. The compass needle had pointed here before, in small ways—my father had always told me to keep them close. Kael stood by the window, pale eyes reflecting the streetlight, while I knelt and pulled the notebooks out, dust rising like memory itself. The covers were frayed, the edges salted white from years of sea air, and when I cracked them open the handwriting tilted across the page in restless strokes. At first it was maps, tide charts, weather notes. Then diagrams, over and over: a line across a page, a crack splitting it, circles drawn around the break like ripples. The words beneath them made my breath stumble.
Anchor: the sea. Price: memory. Failed containment. Losing tether. She is slipping from me.
Page after page, the words repeated, broken into fragments. Sometimes whole sentences, sometimes just single words. Horizon, breach, anchor, sacrifice. In one notebook a line scrawled across the middle page in darker ink than the rest: I can’t remember her laugh today. Can’t remember her eyes. My own daughter, a stranger.
My stomach dropped, as if the floor had been pulled from under me. I pressed the page with trembling fingers, like touch could summon what ink had lost. Kael’s voice cut the silence. “He gave you up.”
I whipped my head toward him, anger sudden, raw. “He didn’t—”
“He did,” Kael said, not unkindly, but merciless in its truth. He stepped closer, shadows folding around him. “To keep the Glass sealed, he sacrificed his memory of you. It wasn’t enough. The horizon doesn’t forgive half-offerings.”
The words cracked something in me. The memory of his distant eyes before he left for that last voyage, the way he had hugged me stiffly, as if rehearsing a gesture he couldn’t fully feel—it all slid into place with sickening clarity. He hadn’t grown cold from grief or exhaustion. He had simply forgotten me.
I pressed my face into my hands, the notebook slipping from my lap. Rage and sorrow knotted inside me, too tangled to separate. “He chose wrong,” I whispered. “He chose the sea instead of me.”
Kael crouched in front of me, his face near mine, his expression stripped of irony, of secrets. “He chose both. That was his mistake. The Glass doesn’t allow both. It takes everything unless you give it one thing fully.”
The shard in my pocket pulsed faintly, like it agreed. My throat ached. “So if I do this—if I try to seal it—I’ll have to give up someone I love?”
Kael didn’t look away. “Yes.”
For a moment there was no sound except the faint tick of the compass and my own uneven breathing. Then I noticed Kael’s sleeve again, the shimmer beneath it. “What about you?” I asked, sharper than I meant. “Why does your blood look like that? What are you really?”
He hesitated. For once, Kael—the boy who stepped out of the sea like he had been waiting for applause—looked uncertain. “I was born on the other side,” he said finally. “Bound to the Glass. My life was meant to serve as its guide. When Keepers falter, I appear. I don’t always…stay.” His eyes flicked to me, luminous with something that wasn’t quite sorrow. “But this time, I broke the tether. Every moment I stand here, I’m unravelling from it.”
The words chilled me, though I couldn’t explain why. “So you’re—what? My ally until you disappear?”
His mouth twisted. “Or until the Glass takes me back. Either way, my bond to you grows. And bonds are dangerous for Keepers. They’re what the horizon feeds on.”
I wanted to deny it, to shove his words back into the dark, but the shard burned hotter, as if warning me. Kael saw the flicker in my eyes, and his voice softened. “I’ll help you as long as I can. But when the time comes, you’ll have to decide what you’re willing to lose. No one else can make that choice.”
Outside, the sea roared faintly, waves striking the seawall like the heartbeat of a giant. The compass needle trembled toward the window, pointing not at the cliffs this time but further—deep into the ocean where no streetlight reached. I closed my father’s notebook, my hands shaking, and whispered into the dark, “I don’t know if I can.”
Kael’s reply was almost too quiet to hear. “That’s how every Keeper begins.”
The next evening the horizon was a bruise again, purple streaks stitched with pale light, the tide restless as if the sea itself knew what waited. I hadn’t told my mother. How could I? I left her with a kiss on the forehead, her hair smelling faintly of coconut oil, her eyes tired even in sleep, and walked out with the compass heavy in my pocket and the shard pulsing in my hand like a second heart. Kael walked with me, silent, until the seawall steps appeared and the air thickened. The Keeper was waiting.
She stood in the shadow of the lighthouse, lantern lit, flame bent sideways. Her face looked less human than ever, lines sharpened into facets of glass. “You carry your father’s blood,” she said, voice like stone dragged through water. “Now you must face what he could not. The Trial.”
The shard flared, nearly burning my palm. Kael shifted closer, but she ignored him, raising her lantern until its light spread wide and then folded inward, swallowing everything. The world around me dissolved.
I stood in a room that wasn’t mine but felt familiar: my childhood bedroom, the walls still painted with stars my father had sponged when I was six, the books stacked unevenly, the smell of talcum powder from my mother’s sari drawer. At first I thought it was memory. Then the door opened. My mother stepped in, carrying a plate of mango slices. “Aarya,” she said gently, “you’ve studied too much. Come eat.”
I froze. She looked so solid, so unbearably real. I reached out, but when my fingers brushed her sleeve the cloth rippled, not like fabric but like water. Behind her the wall cracked, pale light spilling through.
“Not her,” Kael’s voice snapped somewhere behind me, though I couldn’t see him. “It’s a lure.”
My mother’s face shifted. She smiled, and for a moment it was her smile, warm, familiar, then her mouth stretched too wide, her eyes glass-bright. “Give me,” she whispered, “and the Glass will be satisfied.”
I staggered back, clutching the shard. “No.”
The room collapsed. I stood in the classroom at school, chalk dust in the air, Naina sitting cross-legged on a desk, grinning, waving her phone at me. “Brooding again, Aarya?” she teased. “You’ll die of seriousness one day. Better give me up before I drag you into something dangerous.” Her laughter rang bright—but the crack opened behind her too, the light reaching for her outline.
The shard pulsed violently. My chest tightened. Naina was everything tethered: her sarcasm, her stubbornness, the way she refused to let me vanish into grief. I almost screamed.
The Keeper’s voice slid through the light. “Choose.”
My throat burned. “I won’t.”
The scene shattered.
Now it was my father, his face clear, alive, eyes alight with the stories he used to tell at the seawall. He held the compass out to me, smiling. “Come, Aarya. Walk the Glass with me.” His voice was temptation and longing all at once, the ache of every night I had wished him back.
The shard screamed in my hand, light pouring out, my body shaking under it. I wanted to run into his arms. I wanted to believe he was more than memory. But the words in his notebook bled through me: She is slipping from me.
“No,” I choked. “You already gave me up. I won’t give myself again.”
The figure dissolved like smoke.
And then—darkness. Silence. Only the shard’s glow painting my skin blue. Kael’s hand grabbed mine, steady, real. His breath was harsh in my ear. “Hold fast, Aarya. They’ll keep showing you until you break.”
The Keeper’s voice came, colder, almost pleased. “Stronger than he was. But strength is not enough. You must still pay.”
The darkness split. I was back at the lighthouse, the sea below restless, the lantern’s light dim. My chest ached, tears burning my face, but the shard still glowed, steady, as if proud.
The Keeper studied me. “You refused. Admirable. But refusal delays nothing. At the core, the Glass will demand sacrifice. If you withhold, the breach devours both worlds. If you choose, you survive.”
Her lantern bent toward Kael then, and her mouth curved in something too sharp for a smile. “But beware, child. Bonds cut deeper than memory. And the bond you weave with him will break you more than any blood.”
The lantern snapped shut. The air thinned. She was gone again.
I turned to Kael, my breath jagged. “What bond? What is she talking about?”
He didn’t answer. His eyes shone with guilt and something heavier, something almost tender.
The shard flared once more, hot enough to sear my palm. And I knew, with sick certainty, that the Keeper wasn’t wrong. The Glass was already pulling at the one bond I hadn’t admitted yet—Kael himself.
The compass dragged me east, its needle vibrating like it wanted to break free of the hinge, and Kael followed a half-step behind as we wound down the cliffs into the mouth of the sea caves. The tide sucked at the rocks with a hollow breath, each wave curling in with the sound of glass scraping stone. I could feel the shard pulsing through my pocket, hotter with every step, as though it was impatient with me, as though it already knew where we were headed.
The cave swallowed us, the ceiling low, walls slick with salt. Glow-veins threaded the stone, faint ribbons of light running deeper, guiding us like veins under skin. My breath fogged in the damp air, and Kael’s movements were too quiet, too fluid, like he was walking into a memory instead of a danger. The tunnel bent sharply, widened, and then the chamber opened.
I stopped breathing.
Suspended above the water at the center was the Core: a sphere of glass larger than the lighthouse lamp, hanging without chain or pillar, turning slowly as if on some current we couldn’t feel. Inside it flickered images—our world, its seas and rooftops and clouds, and then another, stranger one, with towers that bent like reeds and skies lit by two moons. The surface rippled with each turn, and I realized the sphere was not just glass but liquid and solid at once, a heart beating between worlds.
The compass needle went still, locked onto it. The shard in my hand burned nearly white. Kael’s voice dropped to a whisper. “The beginning. And the end.”
Before I could speak, the first fissure split the chamber wall with a shriek. Then another, then another, glass veins cracking open like overripe fruit. Shadows poured out, twisting, pulling themselves into winged shapes, claws of jagged light. The air collapsed under the weight of them, mirrors breaking across the chamber.
Kael moved instantly, knife flashing, his blade cutting through one creature with a sound like breaking bottles. But his blood spilled again, shimmering where it struck the water, and more creatures pressed forward, clawing at the Core, battering against the unseen tether that held it suspended. The entire cavern shook.
The shard vibrated so violently in my palm that my teeth ached. I pressed it to my chest, desperate. My father’s voice came in a whisper of memory: Careful, Aarya, the world is thinner at the edges.
I wasn’t careful. I screamed.
The shard burst open, light flooding the chamber in blue waves. Every vein in the rock flared, every crack glowed, and the Core itself turned sharply, its surface splitting to reveal a hollow at its center—an emptiness waiting to be filled. The Keeper’s words slammed back into me: Anchor. Sacrifice.
Kael cut another creature down, panting, his movements slowing. His pale eyes caught mine, urgent, almost afraid. “This is it. The Core won’t seal itself. You have to give it something it can’t refuse.”
My knees buckled, the weight of the shard’s pull dragging me forward. The Core’s hollow yawned wider, blue light beckoning. Images flickered inside it—my mother lighting incense, Naina’s crooked grin, my father’s compass, Kael’s eyes burning like mirrors. One of them would have to go. One of them would have to be given up.
The thought made me sick, raw, furious. “No,” I gasped. “There has to be another way.”
Kael stumbled, a claw raking across his shoulder, his blood spattering the stone. He cried out but pushed forward, slashing blindly. His voice tore through the chaos. “There isn’t! The Glass always takes. If you don’t choose, it will choose for you.”
The Core pulsed, waiting. The shard flamed in my hand, searing through skin. The chamber shook with wings and screeches. And I stood there with my father’s compass, my mother’s smile, Naina’s laugh, Kael’s hand catching mine in the dark—every bond I had, every memory that made me Aarya—knowing only one could stay.
And knowing, with the kind of clarity that crushes you, that the horizon had already decided what price I’d have to pay.
The chamber roared with wings and shattering cries, the Core spinning faster, its hollow widening like an eye demanding I stare back. My body shook with the shard’s heat, every nerve screaming, Kael staggering under claws and blood that shimmered instead of darkened, and the compass needle in my pocket rattled like it wanted to escape my ribs. I wanted to run. I wanted to believe this wasn’t my choice, but the Keeper’s voice threaded through the chaos, a whisper sharp as broken glass: Anchor. Sacrifice. Or drown with both worlds.
My mother’s face burned behind my eyes, soft laughter over the kitchen stove. Naina’s grin, the endless lime sodas, her loud stubborn friendship that never let me vanish. My father’s compass, heavy, his notebooks etched with desperation. Kael’s hand grabbing mine in the tunnel, his pale eyes shining with a bond I hadn’t meant to build. One of them had to go. The Core pulsed again, blue fire spilling across the water.
Kael staggered to me, his knife arm trembling, blood seeping bright silver into the tide at our feet. His voice was raw. “Aarya—you have to choose. Now.”
I shook my head, choking on salt and fear. “I can’t. I can’t lose any of them.”
“You already will,” he rasped, grabbing my wrist. “The Glass never lets you keep everything. It’s the law of the horizon. If you don’t give it one bond, it will take them all.”
The creatures shrieked louder, clawing at the Core, wings smashing sparks off stone. My knees buckled. The shard flared white-hot. And then the answer came, cruel and clean.
My mother.
Not because I loved her less. Because I loved her too much. Because I knew she would keep living even if I forgot her face, because her love was bigger than memory, stronger than loss. My chest cracked open with grief, but it was the only choice I could bear.
I pressed the shard to my lips, whispered her name, and flung it into the hollow of the Core.
The world screamed.
Light burst from the Core, a column of blue fire that burned through the chamber, scorching the air, flattening the creatures into shards that dissolved mid-flight. The cracks sealed with a sound like waves collapsing on rock. The Core spun once, twice, then stilled, its hollow gone, the shard fused within it. My body arched under the force, every memory tearing at me, my mind clawing to hold my mother’s smile, her voice, the way she tucked hair behind her ear. One by one they slipped away, erased not gently but ripped, until only the feeling of warmth remained, the shape of love without its face.
Then silence.
The chamber was still. The Core glowed faintly, steady, whole. The compass needle lay broken in my pocket. My hand was empty. My heart was not.
I collapsed, gasping, my cheeks wet though I couldn’t remember why. Kael was at my side instantly, his hands on my shoulders, his voice shaking. “You did it. Aarya—you sealed it.”
I wanted to say her name. I wanted to say Mother. The word caught in my throat, empty. I sobbed once, dry, hollow, and Kael pulled me against him, his own breath ragged. His wound still shimmered, but he was alive. Alive, and here.
The Core pulsed once, calm, like a heart settling. The cavern’s veins dimmed. The tide stilled.
When we climbed out into night, the horizon looked ordinary again—just sea meeting sky, no cracks, no light. But I knew better. I knew it was a door, and that it had been mine to guard.
At the seawall, the lighthouse beam swept across us. Kael stood beside me, his hair wet with salt, his eyes weary. He looked at me too long, like he wanted to say something he knew would cost me more than I had left. Instead he smiled, faint and broken. “You survived. That’s more than most Keepers.”
I swallowed hard. “What happens now?”
He tilted his head at the horizon, his expression unreadable. “Now you keep it. Until the next breach. Until someone else is chosen. Until the Glass decides the price again.”
I stared at the line where the sea met the sky, the line I had once thought infinite. It looked fragile now, too thin to hold two worlds. I thought of my mother’s incense burning in our flat, the faint warmth I still felt though I couldn’t picture her face, and I whispered into the salt air, “I’ll keep it.”
The tide answered with a hiss against stone. The lighthouse blinked. Kael’s presence stayed, steady as an anchor, dangerous as a bond.
And I stood there, sixteen and broken, sixteen and Keeper, watching the horizon glow faintly before dawn, knowing it would never again be just a line. It was a door. And it was mine to guard.
***
