The Ones Who Broke and Kept Walking

In the time before time, before the gods built thrones from stars and the seas remembered their names, there was a land called Tharn. It was a place not drawn on any map, where dreams went to rest after the dreamer forgot them. The wind here whispered in dead languages, and the rivers ran backward with stories unspoken.

This is where the broken ones walked.

No one came to Tharn by choice. It was where the sky discarded its fallen constellations, and where mortals wandered after something in them splintered beyond song. They came with hollow chests and blistered memories, dragging behind them the weight of griefs too old for words. But even broken, they walked.

The first to walk Tharn was Eiros, once a warrior with laughter brighter than dawn. He had loved and lost in the wars of the old realms - his beloved burned in a fire lit by his own sword. He tore off his name and flung it into the wind, swearing never to speak again. But silence could not bind him. So, he walked.

Then came Virell, with hair like the dusk and eyes like swallowed storms. She had once painted stars across temples, and people prayed to the gods through her colours. But when the gods betrayed her - when they struck down her son for dreaming too loudly - she snapped her paintbrush in half and smeared her hands with ash. Still, she walked.

There was Kael, the singer whose voice once calmed angry oceans. He had sung peace into a thousand hearts. But one day his lover, possessed by a curse or a god or both, leapt into a chasm as he sang. His melody cracked that day - and so did his soul. Yet his feet moved forward.

Tharn never asked them where they came from. The trees there didn’t pity; they bent in rhythm to the weary. The mountains never asked for names. Even the stars above Tharn were broken - fractured lights too stubborn to fade. But in their shattered glimmer, something pulsed: Keep walking.

The Broken Ones, as they came to be called, began building things - not from stone or wood, but from what they remembered. Eiros planted gardens of battle cries softened into lullabies. Virell carved murals from her grief, each line a vein of love that refused to die. Kael whispered half-songs to sleeping rivers, which hummed back in broken harmony.

One night, under the cracked silver of a three-quarter moon, they found her.

She was a girl with fire in her veins and glass in her voice. Her name was Aiyra, and she had not broken gently. She had shattered all at once.

Aiyra had once been mortal, and not. Her mother was a Dream-Weaver; her father, the Night-Wind. She had lived between the folds of sleep and storm. But one day, her laughter had frightened a god. A god who did not like being made to feel small.

So the god cursed her: You will break, and when you do, it will echo through all you love.

She broke when her twin brother was erased - so thoroughly that no memory, no echo, no whisper of him remained, save in her. No one remembered he had ever existed. Except her. That knowing hollowed her out.

Aiyra fell into Tharn like a shooting star no one wished for. She did not walk, at first. She lay curled in a crater of sorrow, whispering a name no one else remembered.

The Broken Ones found her.

They did not try to fix her.

They gave her silence. They gave her space. They gave her a cloak stitched from starlight and thorn.

She bled. She wept. But slowly, one tremor at a time, she stood.

She asked Virell, “How did you not die of your grief?”

“I did,” said Virell. “I just kept walking afterward.”

She asked Eiros, “Do you not hate yourself for what you caused?”

“Every day,” said Eiros. “But hate is heavy. I only carry what I must.”

She asked Kael, “Will I ever feel whole again?”

“No,” said Kael. “But you’ll learn to love the gaps.”

So Aiyra walked.

She gathered her broken pieces like shards of ice and carried them in a pouch around her neck. Each piece whispered something: a laugh, a lie, a lullaby. She planted one in the soil beside Eiros’s garden. Another she pressed into Kael’s river. The rest she scattered along her path, so others might know they

were not alone.

Years passed - though in Tharn, time moved like a bird with a broken wing: uncertain, circling, slow.

The Broken Ones became the Keepers. They did not guard gold or wisdom, but stories. They did not seek to lead or to be followed. They simply were - the living proof that you could shatter and still sing.

And that was when the gods noticed.

The gods, high in their celestial towers, had grown bored. They peered down at Tharn, this strange land where sorrow did not die but bloomed. It puzzled them. Frightened them.

The gods had always believed breaking was the end.

But here were mortals who walked on, cracked but not collapsed.

One god, young and curious, descended to Tharn, disguised as a wandering bard. He approached Aiyra and said, “I hear this is where the broken walk. But what’s the point, if you’re not whole?”

She looked at him - through him.

“Because walking,” she said, “is a kind of defiance. And we are not broken despite love, but because of it. We carry the proof.”

The god left trembling.

Another god sent fire to the land, hoping to burn Tharn to ash. But the fire wept upon arrival. It saw Kael’s river singing. It saw Virell’s murals glowing with unsaid names. It saw Eiros resting beneath a tree that once grew from a war cry.

The fire chose not to burn. It joined them instead.

The gods stopped interfering. But they never forgot.

Tharn remains hidden from most maps. Some say it’s just a myth, a legend whispered by bards too fond of sadness. But if you listen to the wind on nights when the stars flicker oddly, you might hear a name you’ve forgotten how to miss. If you find your feet aching toward somewhere unknown - toward silence, toward solace - you may be on the road to Tharn.

And if you get there, the Broken Ones will not greet you with fanfare or questions.

They will simply nod.

And walk beside you.

Because breaking is not the end.

Because some of us do not rise.

We walk.

-Reetu Verma