WHERE THE SKY BROKE

No one really saw the boy arrive.

He wasn’t born in the village, and none of the old women recalled his mother waddling swollen with him through the market stalls or moaning in the birthing hut. Yet one day, as the sun carved its way across a cloudless sky, he appeared beside the cracked fountain in the square. Barefoot. Dusty. Eating a peach.

He said his name was Lyre. When asked whose son he was, he shrugged. When asked where he came from, he looked up. "Where the sky broke," he said. "Past the line of trees. Beyond the bones."

That summer, no one asked him much. It was too hot to question anything.

***

The village lay pressed like a dried flower between two hills and a stretch of river that no longer moved as it should—its current slow and sullen. Crops yellowed early. Dogs sprawled in the dust. The old men muttered that the stars were burning closer this year—dragging something with them.

Sirius had risen again. The Dog Star—savage and bright. The herald of stories better left buried.

Lyre lived in an abandoned shepherd’s hut at the edge of the southern woods, where the trees thinned into a stony rise locals called the Bones—tall white crags poking through the scrub like broken teeth. No one went up there. The goats avoided it. The birds fell quiet above it.

But Lyre went. Daily.

He climbed barefoot, always alone. “Looking for the break,” he’d say, if anyone asked. “It opened once. I just need to find the right place again.”

And sometimes, just before twilight, you’d see him up there—faint against the ridge—head tipped back like he was waiting for something to fall through the sky.

***

Marla watched him first.

She was fifteen—the beekeeper’s daughter. Too tall for her skirts and too restless to sit still. The fields bored her. The river was low. And the boy who stared at the stars had not yet learned to be afraid of strange places.

One day, near the end of July, she followed him.

He didn’t notice—or pretended not to. Up past the scraggled treeline, to a clearing, where the wind bent low and the air felt thinner than it should. He stopped at a broken stone and spoke without turning.

“You shouldn’t come here,” he said.

“Why not?”

“It remembers people.”

She frowned. “What does?”

He pointed—not quite at the stone, but at the space just beyond it.

Marla stepped closer.

Lyre placed his hand on the rock. “There’s a seam,” he murmured. “You can’t always see it. But it’s there. My father opened it once.”

“Your father?”

He nodded.

“Was he a stonemason?”

Lyre’s lips twitched. “No. He was a god.”

Marla stared at him. Then she laughed.

He didn’t.

***

In the days that followed, he told her things. Not all at once. Never the same way twice. He said the Dog Star was not a star at all, but a sentinel. It had blinked once—long ago—and cracked the heavens. That was where the light had gotten in. Where time had curled. Where they had slipped through.

“Who?”

But he never answered that.

Instead, he showed her where the grass browned in a perfect ring, though no fire had passed. Where the stone hummed when touched, but only when the wind blew west. A place where her shadow didn’t quite match her shape.

He told her he’d fell through, once. “By accident,” he said, “Or perhaps I was pulled.”

And he said he’d come back to wait.

“Wait for what?”

“For the opening. For the moment when the stars forget their order and the seam thins.”

She didn’t know what to make of him. But she kept returning. Not because she believed him—but because part of her feared she might.

One night, as the Dog Star hung low and clear over the ridge, she asked: “Could I go through?”

His gaze settled on her. Quiet. Measuring. “You could,” he said. “But not all of you would come back.”

“Would you?”

He turned back to the sky. “I’ve been waiting a long time.”

***

The night it happened, the village didn’t stir.

Even the crickets were silent. Marla couldn’t sleep. It was too still—like the hush before a storm. She dressed without lighting a lamp and slipped past the low wall behind the hives, up the path she knew by heart.

She found Lyre standing, arms bare, face tilted skyward.

No torch. No blade. No ring of salt or spell-chant.

Just a boy, watching the stars like they owed him something.

“Is it time?” she whispered.

He didn’t answer.

Then: “Close your eyes.”

She did.

And the world inhaled.

***

It wasn’t a sound. Not quite. More like the shadow of one.

The bow drawn before the string sings.

The air pulled tight.

Marla opened her eyes.

The seam was there. Where the earth had worn its memory into a circle—and the grass had never grown back. Glimmering like it bled light from a place no name had ever held.

And through it, things moved. Shapes too tall, too thin. Faces half-remembered from dreams she'd never had. Memory and shadow stitched together like smoke.

Lyre stepped toward them.

“No,” Marla said. “This isn’t—”

He turned back once.

His eyes didn’t glow. His skin didn’t change. But he looked like something that had always been on the edge of belonging.

“I told you,” he said. “I’ve been waiting.”

And then he stepped through.

The seam folded.

The clearing fell still.

The stars clicked back into place.

And Marla stood alone.

***

In the years that followed, the path grew steeper.

Or maybe she just got older.

Some nights, she would wake with the taste of ash in her mouth and the feeling that she’d nearly remembered something important. A name. A peach, sweet and soft at the seam.

She never married. Never left.

Children whispered about the beekeeper’s daughter who spoke to trees and watched the sky. They asked about the boy sometimes. The one who wore no shoes.

She’d smile. And point toward the ridge.

“Past the line of trees,” she’d say. “Beyond the bones. Where the sky broke, once.”

And in the dog days, when the air held its breath and the river stilled, she climbed again—

Just in case.

The End.