Glass realms, Iron lies

"The truth is what breaks us. The lie is what keeps us whole."


The Glass Realms were once said to be unbreakable.

Seven floating kingdoms, each sculpted from starlit quartz and singing crystal, hovered above a shattered world. They gleamed in the sunlight, refracting myths and mercy down upon the scarred lands below.

But beauty, as always, is a story someone wants you to believe.


Lira was born on the edge of Shardmere, the lowest of the Realms.

She knew two things by the age of ten:

The sky above her was a lie.

Her mother was never coming back.


Her mother, Serel, had once been a Singer of Iron—one of the few permitted to descend to the surface to repair the fractured seals that held the lower world in place.

But Serel had vanished. And when Lira asked the High Voices what had happened, they gave her silence.

So Lira grew up with questions and anger braided into her hair.


The Realms ran on magic, but not the kind you could see.

Iron lied. That was its power.

It could hold stories in place like steel bars, warp truth into obedience, and smooth over memory until even grief forgot what it was mourning.

But glass—glass remembered. It shimmered with what was real.

That was why only the High Voices could speak through it.

And why Lira—born of forbidden blood—was never allowed near it.


Until the day the towers cracked.


Lira was seventeen when the sky above Shardmere fractured like a broken mirror. The shimmer-paths went dark. The floating citadels drifted, off-balance.

And the High Voices began to panic.

They summoned the oldest Singers. They whispered of rebellion. They reinforced the Iron Thrones.

And that was when Lira did the unthinkable.

She entered the Glass Library—a place no one from her caste was allowed.


She expected to be stopped. Killed, even.

But no one came.

Only silence and memory.


Inside, the walls weren’t shelves but living panes—each one capturing a piece of truth the Iron had buried.

And in the center of it all, in a prism that pulsed like a heartbeat, was her mother.

Not dead. Not lost.

Imprisoned.


The truth split her in half.

Serel had discovered that the Realms floated not by magic, but by stealing weight from the world below—draining its life, its color, its future.

She had tried to free the surface from that burden.

And for that, they shattered her name into silence and locked her inside living glass.


Lira touched the pane. It burned her fingers. But her mother’s voice came through like wind in a storm:

“Child. Don’t weep. I made my choice.”

“Why?” Lira sobbed.

“Because the lie was too heavy to carry.”


The Glass Realms began to fall that night.

Each crack in the sky was a crack in the story. People began to remember. To question. To see.

The Iron Voices fought back with silence and illusion—but the truth had already begun to sing.


Lira fled with her mother’s memory imprinted on her skin—glass-shards glowing beneath her veins.

She could hear songs now, in the wind, in stone. They told her of hidden truths buried beneath mountains and rivers. Of those who remembered before forgetting was enforced.

She was not alone.


She traveled to the surface—what was left of it.

It wasn’t lifeless.

It was waiting.

Roots curled like sleeping serpents beneath ash-covered soil. Cracked statues whispered forgotten names. A tree grew upside down from a cliff and dropped silver leaves into the clouds.

Everything had been lied into silence.

And Lira began to sing it awake.


But every song took a price.

To sing the truth was to bleed. To burn. To remember everything the Iron made the world forget—including your own grief.

She lost her voice. She lost her sight.

And still she sang.


On the last day, Lira stood atop the ruins of Shardmere, now shattered glass scattered in the wind like stars. She held the final shard of her mother’s prison.

She pressed it to her heart.

And she whispered:

“Break me, if it means the world wakes up.”

And it did.


Years passed.

The Glass Realms were no more.

But in the new villages rising from ash and wildflower, children told stories of a girl with glass veins and a voice like morning.

They said she died beneath a weeping sky, smiling.

They said her mother’s voice was the wind now.

They said her lie was that she had ever been just a girl at all.


In the end, no statue was raised for her.

But in every place where someone dares to ask, “What is the truth?”…

A flower blooms through stone.


Because even broken glass remembers the light.


End.