The Glass of What Remains

More about The Glass of What Remains

They gathered in that luminous nowhere the way families do—without knowing how they arrived, only that they were meant to sit, to listen, to remember. Everything shone with a strange, fragile radiance: the clouds looked blown from crystal breath, the floor shimmered like a frozen lake, and every skull hanging in the air reflected the glow of forgotten voices.

The smallest figure sat on a glass stool, her translucent hands folded quietly in her lap. She had the careful stillness of someone who understood that silence could be an offering. Across from her crouched a tall, uranium-lit guardian, a being carved of soft green fire, like gentle radioactivity humming a lullaby. His skull-face did not frown or smile, yet his posture was kindness itself—bent close, attentive, tender as a parent who never learned how to speak love aloud.

Standing to the side was the one who remembered the rituals. She held a floating skull as though it were both a lantern and a question. Robin’s-egg blues and dreamy pinks pulsed through her dress, like constellations learning to breathe. She spoke softly—not with sound, but with light—letting hues flicker in patterns of meaning the others could feel more than comprehend.

Above them, skull-clouds drifted like weather made from the memories of the world. They were not threatening. They were witnesses. They remembered laughter. They remembered arguments. They remembered walks to nowhere in particular, the weight of warm hands once held, the taste of sunlight that once fell on living skin.

The seated child lifted her head. Inside her hollow glass shape, a quiet glow stirred. She did not ask why they were skulls, nor what had happened to the softness of their former selves. That answer had burned away somewhere long ago. Instead, she asked a better question—the kind children always find without trying.

“What do we keep?”

The guardian leaned closer, green light deepening with sorrow and wonder.
“This,” he said without words. “This sitting together. This noticing. This not turning away.”

The ritual-keeper raised the skull in her hands and it brightened like a lantern, lighting the skull-clouds above. They did not vanish; they softened. The world did not turn back to flesh; it turned more honestly to glass—fragile, transparent, impossibly beautiful, and always on the verge of shattering.

In that luminous nowhere, they understood: the end is not emptiness. The end is clarity. The end is the seeing-through.

And still, they stayed together.