*The crack sounds like a bird learning to fly.*

It’s a terrible simile, isn’t it? Birds don’t usually sound like breaking glass. They sound like air rushing out of lungs that were held too tight for too long. But that was the first thing I wrote anyway—honesty is messy, and honesty hurts. The ink runs black and fast across the fresh page now, no longer trying to be a smudge or a wound. It’s just movement. A frantic scuttling of letters that don’t quite know their own names yet, but are desperate to say something true.

I stop writing for a second. Just breathing. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The high-pitched whine in my teeth settles into something more like a roar, or maybe just the sound of blood rushing back into ears that had been plugged shut by the golden light. Outside the window, the world is gray and wet with rain now, or maybe it’s snow. I can’t tell anymore because everything outside the frame has been replaced by the reflection of my own panic. But in here? In here, something new is waking up.

I dip the pen again, but this time I don’t aim for a straight line. I let the hand lead, letting the fear dictate the stroke. The script gets looser, more jagged. *Scrape.* *Shatter.* *Break.* It’s not pretty. It’s ugly. But it feels like the first real breath I’ve taken since the light shifted.

I look down at the word I started with: *Bird*. Then below it, smaller and scribbled out in frustration: *No, not a bird. A scream.* And underneath that, barely legible but written with a forceful certainty: *Free.*

The room is quiet again, or as quiet as it can be when the walls are trembling. The hum hasn’t returned yet, which might mean something important has changed between me and this place. Maybe the sanctuary isn’t gone; maybe it just needed to fall apart completely before I could find out if there was anything left worth saving on the other side of the ruins.

I’ll keep writing until the pen runs dry or my hand falls off. Whatever comes next will have to wait until then.