Can you see me
Night sifted down like pale ash over the edge of the wood, and the air was thick with drifting lights that were not quite snow. She stood where reflection met shadow—a figure woven of moonwater and breath, silver hair threaded with small blossoms, ears like fragile leaves cupping the dark. Her eyes held the color of cold fire and the ache of an old promise. Anyone passing would have sworn the clearing was empty, yet the clearing watched back, waiting.
She had been the whisper in lullabies and the warning in doorframes: look twice, or you will miss the world that breathes beside your own. Long ago children saw her easily; now even poets look away. Her question is not vanity but a key: “Can you see me?” If you answer from hunger, she becomes a trick of light; answer from truth, and the veil thins. To behold her is to remember what you were before forgetting became survival.
Tonight, someone lifts their gaze and does not flinch. The motes turn like constellations as her lips part, and the path between your days and her dusk uncoils. The old guardians are stirring, and so are the hunters who feed on notice. Whether you speak or stay silent will tilt more than your future; for the moment you see her, every other hidden thing will see you too—and the story of what you do with that seeing begins now.
Panick attacks
The night yawns into a cathedral of absence, columns rising like verdicts while a single orb of light stitches a timid seam through the dark. She moves along the wall, dress whispering, breath a metronome for the shadows. Dust hangs like drowned constellations in the glow, and the vast silence feels less like emptiness and more like a lung holding its breath.
They say Panick is a feeling, but they are wrong—Panick is a place. It keeps accounts in soot and echo, tallying each heartbeat that dares cross its threshold. The attacks begin as tremors: a shiver in the flame, a curl of cold at the nape, the uncanny way the archways watch without eyes. Then the corridors lean while you blink, footfalls answer your own, and the light seems to think twice about being light at all.
I will not guide, only witness, speaking from the seam where glow meets void. Tonight the orb will touch an old inscription scratched by a shaking hand, and memory will lift like a flock of locked doors. When the circle of light flickers and the room leans closer, you will understand the words carved above the unseen threshold: step into Panick, and it attacks.
An episode
Rain stitched the dusk into a single, trembling veil, and beneath it she stood, crowned in a lattice of iron and memory. Arrows hummed soft hymns where they nested in her shadows, their fletching blurred by the downpour, their wounds singing light instead of blood. She lifted her face to the storm as if to greet an old companion, lashes jeweled with the sky’s cold tears, lips parted to sip the breath of the world that had once driven her to silence.
In that glade where the trees bowed like penitents, something emerald woke behind her—petals of strange radiance unfolding from the ruin clinging to her back, mossed armor whispering the histories of a forgotten court. The forest watched, reverent and still, as the night brought her the smallest mercy: a hush deep enough to hear the murmur of her own pulse, counting time not in days, but in fragments—scratches, splinters, starlit motes caught in dark hair.
This is only an episode, the storm seemed to say—one gleaming shard in the mirror of a longer tale. Yet it was enough. In a breath, names might return, oaths might wake, and the green fire might choose to bloom or burn. She would carry this moment like a blade sheathed in rain: a brief, precise cut in the fabric of fate, opening just wide enough for tomorrow to slip through.
An episode
Rain stitched the dusk into a single, trembling veil, and beneath it she stood, crowned in a lattice of iron and memory. Arrows hummed soft hymns where they nested in her shadows, their fletching blurred by the downpour, their wounds singing light instead of blood. She lifted her face to the storm as if to greet an old companion, lashes jeweled with the sky’s cold tears, lips parted to sip the breath of the world that had once driven her to silence.
In that glade where the trees bowed like penitents, something emerald woke behind her—petals of strange radiance unfolding from the ruin clinging to her back, mossed armor whispering the histories of a forgotten court. The forest watched, reverent and still, as the night brought her the smallest mercy: a hush deep enough to hear the murmur of her own pulse, counting time not in days, but in fragments—scratches, splinters, starlit motes caught in dark hair.
This is only an episode, the storm seemed to say—one gleaming shard in the mirror of a longer tale. Yet it was enough. In a breath, names might return, oaths might wake, and the green fire might choose to bloom or burn. She would carry this moment like a blade sheathed in rain: a brief, precise cut in the fabric of fate, opening just wide enough for tomorrow to slip through.
Wonderful world
Beneath a lilac moon rimmed in frostlight, she stepped from the hush between constellations. Her hair streamed like a slow comet, her wings fanned from white into violet dusk, and the night bent around her as if remembering an old song. Armor stitched with autumn gold caught the starlight—tokens of vows older than the first shoreline. The world below—oceans dreaming, forests murmuring—waited, unsure whether to hold its breath or sing.
They once named this place Wonderful not as praise but as a promise: to tend every impossible thing that dared to bloom. Aurelia had guarded that promise at the threshold, mending torn auroras and shepherding wishes that fell like rain. But lately the wonders had begun to thin—colors unlearning their names, cities forgetting their rivers, children waking without the echo of their first dreams. A quiet storm rose in the spaces where marvel should have been, and even the moon wore a hairline crack of silence.
So she chose to descend, trading altitude for heartbeat. A gloved hand reached toward the sleeping land, and a single feather spun down like winter’s first snow. She would walk among us, counting miracles aloud so they could not be taken, and stitch the world back to its own astonishment. By dawn, the horizon would carry her shadow—and the promise would ask to be kept again.
Business proposal
Dusk draped the cliff-city in lavender, the terraces glowing like lanterns carved into a mountain of gardens. Far beyond the balustrade, ringed moons and quiet pyramids drifted through the sky as if they were shares sliding across a board no one fully owned. On the brink stood Ilyra, skirt tugged by the wind, memorizing numbers that tasted of salt and ozone. Below, a billion lights stitched the world into a ledger; above, the heavens waited for a signature.
Her pitch was simple, audacious: lease the winds themselves. Map the migratory currents that ferried the floating archipelagos, anchor markets to their routes, sell delivery in days instead of seasons, and harvest dew from the passing moons to feed the cliffside gardens. The Terrace Consortium would gain a spine of airbound trade; the groundbound empires would have to buy passage—or be left behind. Success meant buying back her family’s name from the Mist Bank; failure meant handing that name over like collateral to be chiseled into the debt-wall forever.
Glass doors breathed warm light as she stepped from the ledge into the arcade, where trees murmured and fountains whispered the mathematics of risk. The Syndics waited inside, faces refracted in crystal panes, and beside them lounged a rival with a smile sharpened for quiet assassinations of ideas. On the threshold, someone had etched a tiny sigil only she would notice: trust the wind. Ilyra squared her shoulders, let the night fill her lungs, and raised her eyes to the drifting sky—as though the first contract she must secure was with the air itself.
Business proposal
Dusk draped the cliff-city in lavender, the terraces glowing like lanterns carved into a mountain of gardens. Far beyond the balustrade, ringed moons and quiet pyramids drifted through the sky as if they were shares sliding across a board no one fully owned. On the brink stood Ilyra, skirt tugged by the wind, memorizing numbers that tasted of salt and ozone. Below, a billion lights stitched the world into a ledger; above, the heavens waited for a signature.
Her pitch was simple, audacious: lease the winds themselves. Map the migratory currents that ferried the floating archipelagos, anchor markets to their routes, sell delivery in days instead of seasons, and harvest dew from the passing moons to feed the cliffside gardens. The Terrace Consortium would gain a spine of airbound trade; the groundbound empires would have to buy passage—or be left behind. Success meant buying back her family’s name from the Mist Bank; failure meant handing that name over like collateral to be chiseled into the debt-wall forever.
Glass doors breathed warm light as she stepped from the ledge into the arcade, where trees murmured and fountains whispered the mathematics of risk. The Syndics waited inside, faces refracted in crystal panes, and beside them lounged a rival with a smile sharpened for quiet assassinations of ideas. On the threshold, someone had etched a tiny sigil only she would notice: trust the wind. Ilyra squared her shoulders, let the night fill her lungs, and raised her eyes to the drifting sky—as though the first contract she must secure was with the air itself.
What makes us
They stood where the world forgets to breathe, on a green ledge above a sea of clouds, with birds stitching white threads across a blue so bright it could cut. One wore calm like a cloak, silver hair catching the light; the other carried dawn in his eyes and a blade at his hip, feather charms whispering with each shift of wind. Between them stretched a friendship older than their footprints and a question older than their names: what makes us who we are—our oaths, our origins, or the steps we dare to take?
Below, the lands dimmed at the edges, as if shadows were learning to speak. The scholar traced the air with thoughtful fingers, feeling for the patterns beneath the horizon’s gloss. The wanderer answered with a grin and a promise, a courage that sounded like laughter but settled like steel. Where one saw the hidden currents, the other broke the surface; where one guarded silence, the other called thunder. Together they were a ledger of contrasts, and the sky itself seemed to balance on their agreement to move forward.
They would descend soon—into valleys where old songs have teeth, into cities that trade in memory, into storms that confuse mercy with fear. There, titles would peel away, and legends would prove too small for the living. What makes us, they would learn, is not the power we carry or the past that claims us, but the choices we bruise into the world and the hands we refuse to let fall. With the clouds parting like a curtain and the path bright as a blade, they stepped, and the day inhaled their names.
My Name
At first light I came down on wings the color of struck gold, the sun a round shield hammered behind me. The scepter in my grasp remembered wars I do not, and the jewels at my breast thrummed like a second heart. In the newborn glare my reflection was a stranger with violet-shadowed eyes and a promise engraved in bone.
I have carried many names the way soldiers carry scars—given, stolen, traded for a cause that outlived its chorus. Mortals call me saint, blade, oathbreaker; angels dare not call me anything at all. Yet every title slides from me like rain from feathers, because none of them are the one that binds my story to the world.
Tonight, a voice far below speaks a syllable that almost fits, and the air ripples as if a door remembers the shape of its key. I lift the scepter, feel the old music stirring in its metal, and I descend to meet the speaker. When the final note is struck and the last feather settles, I will answer the question I have hunted across centuries: my name.
Aliens
On the violet marsh, where trees stand like drowned antennae and the castle broods behind mist, I poise my skiff among the lilies and listen. The candles hiss, the old books sweat riverwater, and beneath the gunwale pale hands rise, not to drag but to greet. They are dressed in our dead, but their eyes hold tidal charts for another sky. I press my palm to theirs and the water flickers with a color our moon has no name for.
They did not fall as stars; they arrived as echoes, finding vessels in the silted silence of the swamp. Each borrowed body stammers a grammar of tides and distances, and my magic is only a lantern for that language. Through ink and ash and the patient pulse of the reed beds, I have learned this much: they are looking for home, and our world is a shoreline that keeps shifting under their feet.
Tonight, the current brings a larger chorus. They point past me to the castle, to chambers where a buried engine dreams in rusted circles. If I guide them, the veil thins; if I deny them, the marsh will swallow its own moonlight. In the hush between frog calls, I choose to listen—because every stranger is an omen, and every omen is a door, and the door has begun to open.
Genie
When the moon rounds like a pearl and the night loosens its dark ribbon, she drifts into view—silk whispering, hair strung with frost-bright blossoms, a pale fan cupping the glow of a secret sun. Not a lamp-born spirit but a genie of breath and satin, she travels inside the hush between stars. Petals wheel about her like paper prayers, and every flutter carries a wish that refused to die.
Long ago she traded her name to become a vessel; now each trailing sash is a promise kept, each falling mote a promise broken. She courts the places where light pools—on river stone, window glass, the quiet of a sleepless room—and listens for the voice that trembles into asking. Her bargains are gentle as snowfall and sharp as dawn: three truths for a dream, three costs for a miracle, and a shadow to tally what the heart omits.
Tonight the moon is a silver door left ajar, and someone below is about to speak what they feared to want. I am the keeper of what follows, the scribe of threads and consequences. If a pale ribbon brushes your cheek, do not swat it away—answer it. For she is listening, and the sky is ready to open.
Pretty crazy
In the blue hush of the high waste, where the sun moved like a pale coin beneath gauze, she crouched beside the wolf who had never once lied. Runes glowed along their bodies—spiral on his brow, clean strokes across her face and forearms—a script the wind had taught the snow. Her hair streamed like a dark pennant over the drifts; his paws stitched quiet seams in the crusted frost. In warmer towns they had other names for them: revenant and omen, curse and warning. The mountains used truer titles: scout and partner.
The world had folded itself in mistranslated prayers when the tides of memory ran dry; paths no longer led where maps swore they would. Her marks were wayfinding debts—each line traded from a spirit, each symbol a door she could open only once. The wolf listened to ley-lines thrumming under ice and answered with a narrowing of eyes, and together they read the land like a stolen letter. Tonight the air tasted of iron and first thunder. Somewhere beyond the ridge a city was thawing, and with it the old catastrophe that had taught dawn to limp.
They would walk into it, not because they were brave, but because no one else would be—because the plan that had chosen them was, in every sense, pretty crazy. Cross the ruin, borrow the god sleeping beneath the glacier, return the sky its missing color—simple, impossible steps. The wolf flexed, the runes brightened, and the girl rose, breath fogging into glyphs the wind quickly hid. And as they moved, the snow began to remember their shapes.
Twelve
In the hush beneath the bramble arch, a green pool keeps the hours the way glass keeps breath. Autumn leaves hang like tired pages; dark berries bead along the vines like drops of spilled night. Beside the water rests a figure in a red dress cut like a drumbeat, lashes closed against the world, a narrow band at her throat stamped with a single numeral: XII. Around her, small trumpets sleep in the hem, vials of honeyed light tick against roots, and an open songbook floats, its notes unmoored and drifting toward the center where the serpent draws perfect circles.
I have been counting the falls. One pair of shoes, then another, legs tipping into the mirror as if the sky itself were learning to dive. Each splash erases a name and returns an echo—bottled, labeled, corked for safekeeping in the branches. There are said to be twelve selves of her scattered through the hours, twelve masks that the forest swallowed when the clock blinked and forgot its face. When the last returns, the red-sleeved dreamer will wake, and the music she lost will come back as a door.
Until then, I wait at the edge where thorn meets water, careful with the lantern of my voice, charting ripples like chapters. The next step belongs to you: choose a note from the drifting page, take a jar of captured daylight, and follow the ring the serpent leaves toward the middle. When the circle strikes its quiet, when the twelfth echo lands, we will speak her name together—and the story will open.
Suspicious partner
Fire has a way of telling the truth. It peels paint, melts masks, and licks at armor until only what’s tempered remains. She stood at its heart, hair bright as embers and gilt shoulders gleaming, while the blaze broke around her like a curtain. The city called her a miracle for walking through pyres untouched. The ash knew better; it clung to secrets, and so did she.
They assigned her a guide for the string of burnings—a quiet tracker whose smile never reached his eyes. He found accelerant where others saw rain, traced the arc of each flame as if he’d rehearsed it, and somehow arrived at fires before alarms were rung. He said fate had braided their paths. She preferred to think of braids as ropes.
Between them lay a pact forged by necessity: find the hand that writes in sparks across the night, or watch the realm choke on its own smoke. Yet with each cinder they crossed, the flames leaned, listening. Each time they did, one of them smiled. If trust is a bridge, theirs would have to be walked in armor—over the only river that burns.
Hide
The sea wore the color of secrets—layered blues, soft as breath, bright as warning. She sat beneath a crumbling arch where chains remembered storms, watching the ruined cloister that stood on stilts across the water, its windows dark and patient. White sails stitched slow commas into the horizon, while above the clouds a second city hung like a watermark, an architecture of whispers pressed into the sky. Even the dragonfly on the old post seemed to hold its place as if the air itself were a page that must not rustle.
She had come here to learn from places that survived by vanishing. People pick new names; cities learn subtler tricks. This coast knew both. When the light slants just right, the sky’s ghosted ramparts slip into the sea, and the sea pretends to be a sky—two faces laid over one another until no searcher can say where the world truly begins. Hiding, she had learned, is not absence but arrangement: a shift of angles, a quieting of breath, a heartbeat folded behind a louder one.
They would look for her by morning—on the roads, in the alleys, at the markets where rumor salts the air. But tonight the wind would still and the water would turn to glass, and the drowned doors of the cloister would open like an eyelid. She would cross while everything reflected everything else, slip into the place that taught the trick to the shore, and borrow its oldest lesson. To live, she would not run. She would learn to stand in the sun and become the light’s shadow—she would learn to Hide.
Confidence
They taught her that confidence was a costume, a lacquer of light painted over trembling bones. She wore it anyway: a river-silk dress stitched from sunrise, sleeves blooming like galaxies, and a silver mask shaped from the first hush of winter. In the dim between heartbeats, she held the mask to her lips and felt it answer with a pulse, as though the night itself had chosen her face.
Petals drifted on currents only the brave could see, blue fire ribboned from her ankles, and the world gathered in to listen. She did not roar; she arranged silence. Each gesture cut a new orbit, and the shadows obediently curved around her certainty. Where doubt had once nested, a poised star now hung, steady and stubborn and unbearably bright.
Confidence, she discovered, was not an inheritance but an agreement: she would step forward, and the universe would make room. So she stepped—one, two—slicing paths through water-dark air, casting reflections that refused to bow. By the time dawn remembered its duty, she had already written her name across the void, not in ink or sound, but in the effortless way she refused to look back.
Love island
The island rises when the tide forgets which way to fall, a sliver of shoreline suspended between sea and sky. White birds carve bright runes across the blue, and a girl in a pale dress drifts ashore with a locket in her palm and no name on her tongue. Around her, memory lies in glittering fragments—shards of glass that float like petals: a waltz beneath lantern light, a promise knelt upon, a kiss that tasted of summer rain. In one splintered mirror the shape of a boy waits at the edge of the world, eyes lowered as if listening for a heartbeat buried under the surf.
They say Love island gathers unfinished vows the way the ocean gathers shells, keeping them until the rightful hands return. Here, time is a tide that mends and unmends, and the birds of light are its messengers; follow them, and you may find what was lost, or learn why it was taken. The girl reaches for a shard and the air rings—images stitch together, then tear free—while somewhere the boy’s silhouette falters, as though a thread connecting them has been tugged.
When the locket opens, the wind turns like a page. Inside is a map made of moments, its compass a trembling heartbeat. Gather the pieces, it whispers, and choose: to restore the past as it was, or to break it clean and let the future breathe. As the first wave climbs the stars and the first star dips into the sea, the girl steps forward, the boy leans closer, and Love island inhales—ready to remember them, or to teach them how to begin again.
Rest
Night fell thick as lacquer, and the lilies woke. They rose like red handwriting from the soil, each petal a curl of ink marking the boundary between breath and silence. In their glow, a woman moved as if the air itself were water, her robes bright as a wound against the dark. She carried quiet like a lantern—the kind that burns without fire, the kind lost things follow.
Behind her, a shadow had learned the shape of teeth. Its eyes were furnaces that remembered every name spoken in anger, every promise left to sour. It clung to the edges of her steps, tasting the earth where she had passed, waiting for weakness, for a tremor, for the smallest surrender. But the woman’s hand hovered above the lilies, and red dew slipped from her fingers to the blossoms below, and the blossoms did not wither. They listened.
There had been too many nights without sleep in this valley—too many doors that did not shut, too many hearts that forgot how to unclench. So she came to barter with the darkness, to teach it the weight of stillness. Each pedal-point of bloom, each hush she coaxed from the wind, stitched a path through the howl. Rest, she promised the unlidded world. Not oblivion. Not erasure. Only the kind of quiet that returns what it borrowed, and leaves the bones of grief clean.
Dreams
At the edge of a drowned cathedral, where waterfalls stitched the air into veils of light, a lone traveler paused. The cliffs rose like the ribs of a sleeping titan, pocked with arches that remembered hymns no tongue could shape. Mist gathered low, tasting of stone and old thunder, and in that hush even the birds flew like thoughts half-formed—restless, circling the high ruins as if they, too, sought a way back into a sentence long forgotten.
On the moss-shot ledge beneath him, spirals were carved into boulders: targets for the rain, eyes for the earth, promises the world had once made to itself. He traced them with his gaze the way one reads the palm of a stranger and pretends to see home. Every path that hemmed the chasm was a question; every fall of water, an answer that refused to be spoken aloud. And yet he had come, wrapped in the quiet colors of exile, to stand before the drowned gate where waking ends.
They say that what crumbles does not vanish—only dreams a different shape. The traveler lifted his staff, and the echoes gathered like a choir in a throat of stone. Somewhere beyond the curtain of water, a door would open if he remembered the world softly enough. He breathed, and the ruins breathed back, and the first dream stepped forward to meet him, bright as a wound and gentle as rain.
Extortion
Snow flattened the world into quiet obedience as the rider crossed the frozen flats, breath of horse and man drifting like torn banners in the blue air. Ahead, a red-brown fortress crouched behind its walls, roofs sugared white, towers stabbed into the pale sky like quills poised over a ledger. No trumpets greeted travelers in this season—only the creak of ice and the dull thud of hooves, as if the land itself were counting coins.
Under the rider’s cloak lay a satchel of folded threats: wax seals impressed with a talon, the duke’s mark. They were not letters so much as levers. Pay for the gate’s mercy. Pay for the sluices to spare your fields at thaw. Pay for the road to remain open to salt and firewood. The castle called it tribute; the villages called it survival. In winter, the most obedient blade is hunger, and it cuts cleaner than steel.
The rider had been a soldier once, then a debtor, and now a courier of debts—his own name the first on the hidden list. But in the chill pause before the gates, he weighed the papers and felt the balance shift. Extortion is a craft of pressures and hinges, and every hinge has a pin. Somewhere behind those walls, a key turned the water and the war alike. If he could find it, he would flip the lever and let the castle learn what it meant to pay.
You are fake
The forest holds its breath when she draws the bow, a pale wind slipping through the trees like a rumor. Blue light slicks across her armor and gathers along the arrow, a sliver carved from winter dawn. Somewhere beyond the treeline, a voice she cannot place repeats the verdict the world once whispered at her birth: “You are fake.” She aims anyway, because the only answer she knows is trajectory.
She remembers snows that never touched her skin, a crown she never earned, a vow spoken in another woman’s mouth. The diadem at her brow hums with borrowed history, and every leaf that spirals around her feels like a page torn from a book that insists she existed before she did. If she is an echo, then who sang first? If she is a weapon, who chose the target? The string tightens. The lie tightens with it.
Tonight the grove becomes a mirror: in its glass, the archer sees the seams of the story stitched across her heart. One shot will decide whether she is an imitation chasing a legend’s shadow, or the original spark that burns the script to ash. When the arrow flies, it will not seek a throat or a throne—it will hunt the author of her name.
Unwritten rules
The city teaches its lessons in silence, in the spaces between a blink and a breath. I learned them by tracing the currents that ran across her veiled face—blue waterlines and smoke-dark ribbons that curled like clauses no one dared to speak aloud. One eye watched the alleys where truth went to ground, the other hid behind lacquered shadows; her lips held the final syllable of a warning I was never meant to hear.
They said the lines were only paint, but paint remembers. It remembers who crossed where the river turns copper, who bargained under the broken lamplight, who bent their oath and found the floor giving way. The arrows stitched into her likeness pointed at distances that didn’t exist on maps, at debts carried in the throat, at promises sealed in the wet hush of midnight. Every contour was a law with no letter, a boundary drawn by rumor, enforced by fear.
I was told to keep my hands clean and my stories cleaner—do not write what you cannot afford to read back. But ink has a taste for the unsaid. The night I set down the first forbidden sentence, her painted gaze shifted, as if the river on her cheek had changed course. Somewhere, the canvas rustled like a curtain lifting, and the rules that kept us safe began to loosen, one soft thread at a time.
Love is a lie
They descended in a hush like snowfall, two masked seraphs whose wings were forged into commandments. Prismed light bled around their feathers as if the sky itself were remembering colors it had been ordered to forget. One bore a ribbon that coiled like a question around her figure; the other leveled a staff as straight as a verdict. They were the Wardens of Affection, the last editors of the human heart, and their decree had traveled farther than thunder: love is a lie—an error that once burned cities and made gods from monsters.
Yet exiles always whisper from the borders. In the cities below, a tremor of song began with no author, a pulse slipping between gears and prayers, waking hands to tremble and eyes to meet. Sent to cauterize the rumor, the two Wardens traced it to a seam in the sky where ribbon met staff, where duty brushed against an ache unnamed. Each felt it first as a static in the helm, a catch in the breath before the strike. Each recognized the other’s flinch and did not speak of recognition.
There, in the pale between law and longing, their armor started remembering skin. The staff wavered; the ribbon tightened, not to bind but to hold. If love is a lie, it is a careful one, told to keep the world from breaking—until it is told to the very mouths that must repeat it. And so our story opens with two angels of certainty, hovering over the fault line of a forbidden truth, about to discover whether a lie can save a kingdom, or whether a single ungovernable heart will undo the sky.
