Rating: MA 15+
The Sea of Glass appeared on the third day of their journey.
One moment, sand dunes rolled in their familiar monotony. The next, the landscape transformed—ground becoming reflective surface that stretched to the horizon, perfectly smooth, catching the sky and multiplying it infinitely. Walking on it felt like walking on frozen water, each step producing faint musical notes as boots contacted the glassy surface.
"The Architect mentioned this place," Nahara said, mechanical foot leaving precise impressions that the glass somehow remembered and displayed in rippling patterns. "Created during the Collapse when the desert's heat reached such intensity it fused sand into crystal. But that's the scientific explanation. Locals say something different."
"Which is?" Sabaku asked, studying his reflection below—distorted, multiplied, made strange by the uneven surface.
"That the Sea of Glass is where the desert thinks. Where it processes memory. Where reflections become real if you look too long." Nahara adjusted her pack. "People who cross it report seeing things. Versions of themselves they could have been. Choices they didn't make. Lives they never lived."
Sabaku knelt, touching the glass. It was warm, retaining solar heat even as evening approached. His reflection stared back—white hair, scarred face, eyes carrying too much knowledge for thirteen years. But deeper in the surface, beneath his reflection, other shapes moved. Shadows that weren't his.
"How far across?" he asked.
"Two days. Maybe three if we're careful." Nahara pulled cloth from her pack, wrapping it around her boots. "The glass cuts if you're not careful. Sharp enough to slice through leather. And at night..." She hesitated. "At night, people say the reflections speak."
They walked. The sun descended toward the horizon, painting the glass with impossible colors—golds bleeding into purples, reds that looked like wounds, oranges that suggested fire from below. Each color multiplied by the reflective surface until it felt like walking through light made solid.
Sabaku's reflection followed beneath him, but not quite synchronized. It moved fractionally late, as if processing his movements through some invisible delay. And occasionally, it would stop when he didn't, or turn its head to look at things he wasn't looking at.
"Don't engage with it," Nahara warned, noticing his attention. "The reflections want interaction. Want recognition. Give them that, and they start believing they're real. Start trying to swap places."
But Sabaku couldn't stop watching. Because his reflection wasn't alone anymore. Other figures appeared in the glass around it—shadowy forms that gradually solidified. Children. The orphanage children, their skeletal forms rendered in glass and shadow, walking parallel paths beneath the surface.
We're still with you, their voices whispered up through the glass, words appearing as visible ripples. Still carrying what you left behind.
"Ignore them," Sabaku told himself, but his voice carried no conviction.
They made camp as darkness fell, choosing a spot where the glass was slightly elevated, offering visibility in all directions. Nahara built no fire—nothing to burn, and light would only amplify the reflections. They ate dried rations in near-darkness, the stars above providing minimal illumination.
"Tell me about Tokyo," Nahara said suddenly. "The real Tokyo. Not the ruins from the murals. What it was like when it was alive."
Sabaku considered the question, reaching for memories that felt increasingly distant. "Gray. Everything was gray—buildings, sky, even people's clothes. Not ugly, just... neutral. Safe. Predictable." He gazed at the stars reflecting infinitely in the glass below. "I hated it. The sameness. The way every day felt like a photocopy of the one before. That's why I studied Egypt. The desert seemed like the opposite—endless variation within apparent monotony. Freedom in emptiness."
"And now?"
"Now I understand why people choose gray walls. They're protection. From this." He gestured to the impossible landscape. "From reflections that become real. From deserts that remember everything. From suns that watch and judge."
Nahara's mechanical hand gleamed faintly in starlight. "Would you go back? If you could?"
"To Tokyo?" Sabaku thought about institutional walls and orphanage routines and the hollow feeling that had defined his first life. "I don't know. That child who wanted the desert—I'm not sure he exists anymore. Or maybe he got exactly what he wanted and learned wanting is safer than having."
They slept in shifts, one watching while the other rested. During Sabaku's watch, around what he guessed was midnight, the glass began to glow.
Faint at first—a luminescence that seemed to come from beneath, as if the crystallized sand retained sunlight and released it slowly. But the glow intensified, and shapes began forming in the depths. Not reflections of what existed above, but images from somewhere else. Somewhere inside.
Sabaku leaned closer, knowing he shouldn't but unable to resist.
The glass showed him a throne room. Massive columns carved with hieroglyphs. Golden light streaming through impossibly tall windows. And seated on a throne of lapis and gold: himself. But different. Older—perhaps twenty—wearing the double crown of Upper and Lower Egypt, the crook and flail crossed over his stomach. His face bore ritual markings, eyes lined with kohl, expression carrying the weight of absolute authority.
Pharaoh, the image seemed to whisper. You could have been this. Could still be this. The sun-core grants power beyond mortality. Accept your purpose. Become divine.
Sabaku watched his pharaoh-self stand, gesturing to servants who moved with practiced deference. Watched himself judge disputes, command armies, receive worship from thousands. A life of power. Of meaning. Of mattering in ways that orphan kids never could.
The image was seductive. Terribly so.
But as he watched, details emerged that troubled the fantasy. The servants moved with fear. The judged disputes ended in executions—casual, frequent. The worship was compulsory, maintained through threat. And his pharaoh-self's eyes, beneath their kohl and authority, were empty. Going through motions without conviction. Power without purpose.
The image shifted, showing another version. This one wasn't human anymore—or not entirely. His body glowed from within, skin translucent, the sun-core visible as a burning sphere behind his ribs. He floated above the desert, arms outstretched, light radiating from his form. Divine. Transcendent. Exactly what Tefra had promised.
God, the whisper came. Free from flesh. Free from pain. Free from the weight of memory. Let go. Become light.
Sabaku watched this version of himself drift across impossible skies, scattering blessings or curses with equal ease. Watched the desert transform beneath his attention—sand becoming fertile soil, ruins becoming cities. Power not for its own sake but as solution. As salvation.
But this version never landed. Never touched ground. Never spoke to anyone directly. Divinity, Sabaku realized, was isolation perfected. Distance from humanity absolute. To be god was to be forever alone, forever outside the struggles that made life meaningful.
The image shifted again, and this one struck deepest.
Tokyo. The orphanage. But different from memory. In this version, the massacre never happened. The masked gunmen never came. And Sabaku—thirteen-year-old Sabaku with dark hair and unmarked skin—lay on his bed, staring at the ceiling with that familiar hollow expression.
Thirty years old now, the image suggested. Still in the orphanage, never adopted, aging out of the system and into some menial existence. Working meaningless jobs. Living in tiny apartments. The gray walls expanding from institutional childhood into institutional adulthood.
But alive. Safe. Whole.
The child who never died, the whisper came, softer now, almost sad. Was the orphanage really so terrible? Was gray really worse than this?
Sabaku watched his Tokyo-self through forty years, fifty, growing old without ever growing meaningful. Watched the hollow expression never change, the obsession with Egypt becoming just another eccentricity of a lonely figure who collected books he'd read once and forgot. Watched him die quietly in a hospital, no visitors, no legacy, no mark left on a world that had never noticed him.
But no torture. No memory bleeds. No consciousness torn between two traumatized lives.
Just... gray. Forever gray.
"Which would you choose?"
The voice came from the glass, but not whispered. Spoken clearly, as if someone stood beside him. Sabaku looked down and saw his reflection sitting up, staring back with expression matching his own confusion.
"Which would you choose?" the reflection repeated. "Power, divinity, or quiet mediocrity? Because you can't have none. You exist now. You chose, even if you didn't know you were choosing. You wished, and wishes have consequences."
"I didn't know," Sabaku said, hearing the weakness in his voice. "I was dying. I was—"
"Desperate. Selfish. Obsessed." The reflection's voice carried no judgment, just observation. "You wanted escape so badly you pulled yourself across time and space. Hijacked a dead persons body. And now you're surprised there are costs?"
"Aru wanted this too," Sabaku protested. "His wish met mine. We both—"
"Don't hide behind Aru." The reflection stood, and other reflections appeared around it—the pharaoh, the god, the Tokyo-self aging through decades. "You wanted the desert. You got it. Now choose what kind of desert-dweller you'll be. King, deity, or ghost haunting someone else's corpse."
Sabaku's hands clenched. "There are other options. There have to be—"
"Show me." The reflection gestured broadly. "Show me the path where orphan kids get happy endings. Where forgotten children become heroes without cost. Where wishes don't devour the wishers."
And Sabaku couldn't. He looked into the glass, searching for that fourth reflection—the version where he thrived, where Aru's memory brought joy instead of trauma, where the sun-core was gift rather than curse. But the glass showed nothing. That version didn't exist in the desert's memory. Had never existed anywhere.
"You can't fix what was never broken!"
The scream came from deeper in the glass. Sabaku looked down and saw another version of himself—the Tokyo version, but younger, thirteen, dying beneath the orphanage rubble. Blood pooling around him, hand reaching toward the pyramid photograph. His mouth moved, forming words that emerged distorted through layers of crystal:
"You can't fix what was never broken! The orphanage wasn't the problem—YOU were! You hated yourself, hated your normalcy, hated being forgettable! So you invented this obsession, this romance with dead civilizations, because ancient corpses don't judge! They just lie there, safe and distant and perfect because they can't disappoint you!"
The dying Tokyo-self's eyes blazed with accusation. "And when real death came—real escape—you couldn't even accept that! Had to keep going, keep seeking, drag yourself and Aru and everyone else into this nightmare because Sabaku Ō cannot accept that sometimes the story just ENDS!"
The words hit like physical blows. Sabaku staggered back, but the reflection followed him, rising from the glass like liquid becoming solid. The dying version of himself, blood and all, standing on the crystalline surface.
"You wanted the desert?" it screamed, voice raw with dying fury. "This is what you wanted! To be special! To matter! To be the protagonist of some grand narrative instead of just another forgotten kid in a system that grinds children into statistics!"
"Stop," Sabaku whispered.
"You wished for this!" The dying-self advanced, leaving bloody footprints on glass. "You BEGGED for this! And now you have it—prophecy, power, purpose—and you're STILL not satisfied! Still searching for the gentle path, the kind alternative, the way where Sabaku Ō gets to be hero without sacrifice!"
"STOP!" Sabaku's hand found a rock—one of the few breaking the glass surface—and he threw it with all his strength.
The rock struck his dying-self's reflection. The glass spider-webbed. Cracks spread outward in geometric patterns, and the reflection shattered—fragments falling into darkness beneath, taking the accusation with them.
But the cracks continued spreading. Faster. Wider. Racing across the Sea of Glass in all directions. The surface beneath Sabaku's feet lurched, and he heard something deep below—grinding, shifting, as if the desert's foundation itself was adjusting to accommodate damage.
Nahara jolted awake. "What did you do?"
"I—" Sabaku looked at his hand, still raised from throwing the rock. "It was attacking me. Saying—"
The glass heaved. A crack opened between them, impossibly wide, dropping into darkness that had no visible bottom. More cracks followed, the entire Sea of Glass fracturing like a windshield after impact.
And from the cracks, things emerged. Not reflections anymore. Something else. The shadows that had moved beneath the surface, now given freedom by the breaking barrier between surface and depth.
They climbed from the cracks—figures composed of glass shards held together by nothing visible. Each one different: adults in business attire, children in institutional pajamas, priests in solar vestments, soldiers in scarab armor. All the people Sabaku had encountered, real and imagined, given form by the desert's shattered memory.
"Run!" Nahara grabbed his arm, mechanical strength hauling him away from the nearest crack. "The glass is releasing everything it's been holding! Every reflection, every image, every nightmare anyone's ever seen here!"
They ran across fracturing surface, leaping cracks that opened like hungry mouths. Behind them, the glass-shard figures pursued—moving with crystalline grace, making sounds like wind chimes in a hurricane.
Sabaku looked back and saw his reflections among the pursuers. The pharaoh. The god. The dying Tokyo-self. All given horrible independence, chasing him with expressions of fury and longing, wanting to merge, to reclaim, to become the dominant version.
"What will this do?" Sabaku shouted over the sound of breaking glass. "What happens if the whole thing shatters?"
"I don't know! No one's ever broken the Sea before! You might have just destabilized the entire—"
The ground beneath them dropped. Not a crack, but a complete collapse. They fell through glass into the darkness below, and Sabaku had one moment to wonder if this was death, if he'd killed himself trying to escape his own reflection.
Then they hit water.
Actual water. Cold and shocking and impossible. They'd fallen into an underground reservoir—an ocean beneath the desert that the glass had covered and concealed. Sabaku surfaced, gasping, looking up to see the shattered glass above, starlight streaming through cracks.
Nahara surfaced beside him. "Can you swim?"
"Yes, but—"
"Then swim! Find the edge! There has to be—"
A shape rose from the water between them. Massive. Ancient. Composed of liquid and memory and something older than both. It had no definite form—sometimes serpent, sometimes human, sometimes just a presence that bent the water around it.
When it spoke, its voice was the ocean's voice, deep and patient and containing multitudes:
"YOU BREAK WHAT IS NOT YOURS TO BREAK. YOU SHATTER MEMORY. YOU REJECT REFLECTION. THE DESERT KEEPS WHAT IT CLAIMS. YOU CANNOT ESCAPE WHAT YOU ARE BY DESTROYING MIRRORS."
The entity's presence pressed against Sabaku's consciousness, and he felt it searching, reading, evaluating. Felt it touch the sun-core, the merged memories, the crystalline sphere containing the First Scientist's knowledge.
"I won't be what you want me to be!" Sabaku screamed at it. "I won't be sacrifice or symbol or prophecy! I'm just—"
"NOTHING," the entity completed. "YOU ARE NOTHING. ORPHAN TWICE OVER. FORGOTTEN CHILD WEARING FORGOTTEN CHILD. BUT NOTHING CAN BECOME SOMETHING. ABSENCE CAN BECOME PRESENCE. THE QUESTION IS: WHAT WILL YOU CHOOSE TO BECOME WHEN FORCED TO DECIDE?"
The water began to drain—pulling down through invisible channels, lowering them rapidly. The entity dissolved as water level dropped, its voice fading: "ONE WEEK REMAINS. TEFRA COMES. THE CHOICE COMES. DECIDE WHAT NOTHING BECOMES, CHILD OF TWO LIVES. DECIDE BEFORE THE DESERT DECIDES FOR YOU."
Then they were on stone—an underground chamber revealed by the water's recession. Ancient machinery lined the walls, still humming with residual power. And at the chamber's center, a door carved with equations and hieroglyphs intertwined.
Nahara stared at it. "This is... this is one of the First Scientist's laboratories. Hidden beneath the Sea of Glass. Preserved perfectly."
Sabaku approached the door, feeling the sun-core pulse in his heart, responding to proximity. The crystalline sphere in his pack grew warm. He'd broken the mirror. Shattered the reflection. And in doing so, found something the desert had been hiding. Perhaps destruction was its own form of creation.
TO BE CONTINUED…