The Keepers

It was exactly six in the morning when I woke up.

I lay there for a few seconds, staring at the ceiling, trying to remember whether there was any real difference between one day and the next. Most mornings felt copied and pasted from the one before, like life had fallen into a lazy routine and forgotten to surprise me. Wake up. Get dressed. Leave the house. Endure people. Come back tired. Sleep. Repeat until death or graduation, whichever comes first.

Still I find myself staring blankly in the mirror as I brush my teeth.

That was the problem with life. No matter how little meaning you found in it some days, it kept demanding participation.

The world had always felt strange to me. Not strange in a dramatic way, not in the way people in films talk about destiny or feeling different. Nothing so grand. It was more than I had ever really managed to take things at face value. Most people did. Most people accepted everything exactly as it was presented to them. School, rules, routines, smiles, lies, religion, success, failure. They swallowed it whole and called that maturity.

I never could.

I always felt as though the world held value by surfaces - everyone somehow pacified by the joy of spending their lives polishing and portraying, instead of facing what was underneath.

That was probably why people irritated me.

Not necessarily because they were bad, most of them were at least decent - just shallow. Predictable. So busy performing versions of themselves that they forgot to stand by their own principles. They stumble around parroting the beliefs of others, unquestioning in their pursuit of betterment - wanting things because they had been told they should.

There is something deeply exhausting about a world full of people who never stop to question but will happily make time to judge.

Music made the world tolerable.

I went through the motions of getting ready and left the house with my MP3 player already in hand. The moment the headphones were on, guitar breaking through the morning silence, everything outside me felt farther away. Rock had a way of making ordinary things feel less dead. Pavements, traffic, cold air, the whole long walk ahead of me, all of it became background noise to something better. Music did not make life meaningful, exactly, but it made it easier to endure.

The journey to school gave me time to think, which was both the best and worst part of the day.

It wasn't loneliness or anything of the sort, but more the lack of direction it all brought up.

Upon arriving at school, I greeted my classmates, entered the classroom, and sat down. Minutes passed like hours, and hours passed like days.

During one of the lessons, I was turning the pages of my history book at random.

I thought about history a lot.

Not dates and names in the boring academic sense, but the larger shape of it. Civilisations rising, rotting, collapsing, rebuilding themselves under new banners while pretending they were something different. People liked to act as though humanity was progressing toward wisdom, but history suggested otherwise. We just found more sophisticated ways to repeat the same mistakes.

Power dressed itself differently every century, but underneath it remained power. Faith changed languages, changed symbols, changed buildings, but underneath it remained the same hunger. Fear. Hope. Control. Belonging. Violence. Meaning.

Religion fascinated me for that reason.

I am agnostic, and maybe that is exactly why I could never leave the subject alone. Belief says a lot about people. Sometimes more than facts do. When you study the history of religion, you stop seeing faith as something glowing and untouchable. You start seeing the machinery inside it. Politics. The comfort. The manipulation. The genuine longing beneath it all. Faith can make people kinder, crueller, stronger, or more easily broken. It can build civilisations and burn them down.

And somehow, buried under all that noise, there are still traces of something real.

That was what fascinated me most.

The possibility that human beings keep ruining things by touching them.

School itself was the usual parade of noise and imitation.

A building full of people pretending to know who they were.

I did well enough. I was never one of those students who studied obsessively for perfect scores. I refused to give that much of myself to a system that valued memory and obedience over intelligence. But I was good at history and science, and good enough at everything else to stay out of trouble.

The only people in that place I truly respected were the teachers who cared.

The rare ones.

The ones who had not yet been hollowed out by repetition.

My history teacher was one of them. She taught like the subject mattered, like the past was not dead at all, only buried. There is something rare and almost sacred about being taught by someone who still loves what they know. People like that remind you that the world has not gone completely numb.

I was not some awkward little academic cliché, though.

Thankfully, I had always been good at sports too. Fast, agile, stronger than I looked. I liked the honesty of physical effort. Your body either could do something or it could not. No pretending. No performance. No polished mask. Just movement, instinct, force, reaction. People tended to underestimate me because of my build. That usually worked in my favour.

While we were waiting for our last teacher to show up so we could head into class, we got a notice that he had a family emergency and would not be coming in. So we could choose to stay and use that time to play ball games around the PE court or go home. I had no interest in staying longer than I had to, so I grabbed my bag and walked towards the exit.

I left school and started the walk home under a darkening sky, my mind quieter now, scraped empty by hours of people. That was another thing I disliked about the world. It was noisy in all the wrong ways. Everyone speaks, very few saying anything worth hearing. Everyone is connected, but there is very little understanding. Everyone rushed, but rarely toward anything that mattered.

The world felt crowded and hollow at the same time.

Sometimes I wondered if that was why I looked up so often.

The sky was the only thing that still felt honest.

I had always been fascinated by it—stars, constellations, planets, anything distant enough to escape human stupidity. The sky never felt empty to me. It felt enormous. Patient. Indifferent in a way I found oddly comforting. It reminded me that whatever mess humanity was making of itself, there was still something larger beyond it.

That night, though, the sky felt different.

Wrong.

Heavy.

Bending.

Not cloudy. Not stormy. Not threatening in any ordinary sense.

As though the darkness above me had mass. As though the air itself had thickened and the night was pressing downward. I stopped walking and stared.

The sky no longer looked like a sky.

It looked like depth.

Like something far above me was bending inward, warping, folding, preparing to open. The stars seemed dimmer around it, as if they too were pulling away from whatever was forming there.

A chill went through me.

Then a shooting star crossed the darkness.

Except it was no ordinary shooting star.

It tore through the sky like a blade, and where it passed, the night split open.

A wound appeared overhead, jagged and impossible, leaking colours that should not have existed. They were too vivid, too alive, too wrong for the human eye to understand properly. No name I knew belonged to them. They were not blue, violet, or gold. They were something beyond colour, something the world had no right to show me.

I did not even have time to shout.

The moment I saw it, I felt myself being pulled upward.

Not pushed. Not lifted.

Taken.

It was as if gravity had changed its mind. As if the force that had kept me on Earth my entire life had suddenly decided I no longer belonged to it.

My feet left the ground.

My whole body jerked violently upward.

My stomach dropped so hard it felt as though it had been torn loose inside me. The street, the houses, the world itself seemed to fall away beneath me, shrinking in a blur of panic and impossible light.

And then I was dragged into the torn sky.

Everything went black.