The Glass Pen felt cool and impossibly light in Elara’s hand. Its translucent barrel seemed to hold a captive shimmer, and the nib, forged from a single, frozen tear of a Truth-Spinner, was sharper than any thorn. The old Archivist had bequeathed it to her with a warning: "It will not write what you wish, only what is. In others, and in yourself."
Her first test was her brother, Kael. "I'm fine," he'd said, his smile not quite reaching his eyes after a failure at the Mage's Guild. Elara, wanting to help, uncorked a vial of starfall ink. "Show me his truth," she whispered, and touched the pen to a scrap of parchment.
The pen moved on its own, its script elegant and merciless.
I am a disappointment. The weight of their hopes is a stone in my chest. I wish I could vanish.
Elara stared, the words burning. This wasn't the simple frustration she'd expected. This was a deep, private ache she had been too busy to notice. She had sought a fact and found a wound.
Her next test was bolder, foolish. She went to the bustling market and pointed the pen at a politician giving a grand speech about civic duty. The pen, hidden in her sleeve, scratched on a hidden slate.
These people are sheep. Power is the only truth. Let them eat my pretty words.
A cold dread settled in her. The pen was a key to a room full of monsters. She fled, the cacophony of unspoken greed, envy, and fear threatening to overwhelm her.
That night, trembling, she made her gravest error. She decided to write her own truth. She needed something pure, something simple to cleanse the palimpsest of ugly truths she had witnessed. She thought of her love for Liam, the woodcarver's son. She dipped the pen and began to write the words, "I love Liam because..."
The pen seized her hand, moving with a violent will. It did not write her carefully curated reasons—his kindness, his laugh. It scrawled a darker, deeper truth.
I love Liam because his admiration makes me feel less invisible. Because being with him is a shield against my own loneliness. Because I am afraid of who I am without someone to reflect me.
Elara recoiled, knocking the ink over. The black pool spread like a stain on her soul. The pen had held up a mirror, and the face staring back was a stranger—not wicked, but frail, and terribly, terribly human.
She had believed the pen’s lesson was about the dishonesty of others. She was wrong. Its true purpose was to reveal the lies she told herself.
She did not use the pen again. She returned it to its velvet case, a relic too dangerous for mortal hands. But its lesson remained etched into her. She began to listen not for the words people said, but for the silence between them. She learned to ask her brother, "Is it heavy?" and to hold his silence without filling it with platitudes.
The Glass Pen of Truth had taught her that honesty was not a weapon to expose others, but a tool for excavation, meant first and foremost for the landscape of one's own soul. The greatest truth it revealed was that self-awareness is the only ink from which compassion can be written#usmanshaikh#usmanwrites#usm
