Legend XVI – The Tears of Eternity

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It is said that at the end of all paths lies a lake, so still that even the stars dare not tremble within it. There rests a single drop, trapped in a stone of glass that never melts, never breaks. It is called the Tear of Eternity. Whoever sees it recognizes in it all that could have been – and never was. Centuries ago, an alchemist named Orien Mar is said to have found this drop. He was obsessed with the idea of stopping the passage of time. In his workshop – a tangle of gears, mirrors, and flickering oil lamp – he mixed dust from bygone hours with the breath of the dead. Night after night, the ticking of his clocks, the scraping of their springs, the trembling of his heart could be heard. He wanted to grasp the impossible: the missed decision, the unspoken sentence, the path never taken. One evening, as the light filtered through his tools, a figure of mist appeared among the gears. It had no eyes, yet its gaze was palpable, like weight. "You seek that which neither lives nor dies," it said. "But time does not forget. It remembers everything you have not done." Then it placed a small, shimmering drop in his hand—cool as rain, heavy as guilt. Orien looked into it and recognized himself, in a thousand mirrors that never shattered. From that night on, he rarely spoke. He kept the tear in a glass vial, its surface craggy with fine cracks, like lines on an old hand. When he looked at it, he saw lives he could have lived: a son he never had; a wife he never kept; a friend he never saved. Every decision he had missed grew there, like a tree that blossoms in the shade. With time—or perhaps beyond it—the drop began to glow. The tears within whispered, pleaded, cried out. Orien realized they weren't just his. They belonged to everyone who had ever hesitated. All the missed lives, all the possibilities never born. In the silence of his workshop, the glass shimmered like a heart. And he knew: if he shattered it, the world would fill with all those unlived seconds—a storm of memory that would burn away everything that was real. So he carried the drop out into the night, through mist and wind, to the edge of the still lake. There, where no echo ever returns, he dropped it. No sound, no splash, only a tremor in the air—as if the world had briefly held its breath. And then all was still again. The lake absorbed the drop, and at its bottom, a light was born that never went out. Since then, the elders say, on some nights, when the wind is still, a glimmer appears on silent waters. Those who look into it don't see their own reflection, but rather what could have been. Sometimes you see a hand that didn't grasp; a smile that came too late; a path never taken.