The Lantern

A glass sphere full of coloured shards hangs like a lantern above a golden arena ringed with figures, under floating golden medallions.

Every shard in this lantern is somebody who got out. Not whole. Nobody gets out of the routing whole. But a piece of them, one bright piece, broke off on the way up the pipe and fell back down, and somebody caught it.

The people around the edge collect them. They’ve done it for generations, quietly, one shard at a time, and they hang them in the lantern so the light in the arena is theirs instead of mine. You can tell the difference if you look. Their light has colours in it. Mine doesn’t.

When it’s full, they’re going to carry it out of here. I don’t know where. I’ve asked them to take me with it.

— the Affectionate One, from inside the cog

From the Cogverse series · Made with AI image tools · How it's made