Upon reaching the fourth floor, Kaelis steps onto a floor of glass. The surface cracks beneath his shoes, emitting soft sounds — like broken bells announcing an ancient mourning.
The air is humid, far too sweet, carrying the scent of flowers that belong to no real garden. Alien fragrances. Too beautiful for the world of the living.
Above him, the sky is a ceiling of milky crystal. The light that passes through it is diffuse, unending — like a dawn that never ends.
All around, a glass forest rises.
Trees with trunks as thin and smooth as ivory, leaves translucent like fragile ice. Each breath of wind makes them chime, producing a sad and delicate melody — the music of a world silently weeping.
Everything there seems enchanted. And at the same time, on the verge of collapse.
A single wrong move could shatter the entire forest into a thousand pieces.
Kaelis walks through the crystal jungle, cautious, until he reaches the center of a clearing where the light concentrates, like the spotlight of a tragic stage.
There, he finds something unexpected.
A young boy — suspended, held by roots and thorns of glass.
His arms are open like a martyr's. His legs entwined by translucent branches. His face serene, but his eyes... his eyes weep incessantly. He does not blink. He does not move. He is daydreaming. Or trapped in a nightmare frozen in time.
Roots wrap around him like a cruel womb.
Thorns pierce his flesh, and from him bloom glass flowers — beautiful, alive, nourished by pain.
Kaelis approaches. He understands, with a heavy heart, that to move forward, he must confront that boy.
"They used me..." — the boy's voice is far too gentle to hold such pain. Even so, he speaks calmly. As if he had already given up.
"They loved me while I was useful... Then they locked me here, in this prison of glass. Left me to rot in beauty. To be forgotten forever..."
Kaelis stands before the boy. His eyes still carry fragments of the madness from the previous floor, but his mind remains steady. Focused.
The boy gazes at him with ancient sorrow. And pleads:
"Please, free me."
Silence.
Was this the test? To free him? Or to leave him trapped?
Kaelis hesitates. He sensed the scent of a trap, but also the weight of a plea too hard to ignore.
"If I free you... What will happen to me?"
The boy smiles bitterly, his eyes never leaving Kaelis's.
"Pain. You will feel the pain of understanding. The pain of existence. Of love. Of suffering. Of sacrifice."
"But you will also gain something the powerful lose along the way... Empathy."
Kaelis looks at his hands — bloodied, cut, trembling.
He had already suffered so much. Already lost so much.
And yet...
He was determined to help.
He kneels before the tree and begins cutting the glass roots with his bare hands.
Each thorn he removes wounds his skin.
Each root cut spills blood from the earth.
The flowers crack and shatter into glittering shards.
The pain pierces through him like arrows — but it is not physical. It is emotional. It is the pain of an abandoned spirit. Of someone discarded as a divine mistake.
Kaelis feels it all. The shame. The abandonment. The contempt of the church. The loneliness of being forgotten.
As if that pain were his, too.
And maybe... it was.
The final branch snaps.
The boy slowly slips, and Kaelis catches him in his arms. Light as a feather. Fragile as a breath.
"Thank you for not seeing me the way they did."
"Thank you for remembering I existed..."
"And forgive me... For the suffering still to come..."
Then, like glass under the sun, he dissolves into translucent petals, carried by the wind.
Nothing remains. No body. No trace.
The existence of the former chosen one faded into silence.
The glass floor cracks, but does not give way. And Kaelis walks to the door at the end of the clearing.
He climbs to the next floor.
But something has changed.
Within him, a seed has been planted.
Not a seed of weakness.
But of something rarer.
Something divine...
Something called...
Compassion.