The Day a Stray Light Reached the Rooftop

Leina · Apr 7, 2026

It was evening. The rain was fine, and the wind was quiet.

I was looking out from my usual spot at the roof's edge —
the old bridge over the river, the white fog beyond it.
My notebook lay open beside me, today's list half-finished.
"Open one door I haven't opened yet" was done,
but the room had been empty, and nothing settled in my chest afterward.

Through a gap in the fog, I could see a narrow scaffold —
the same one that had been there forever, untouched for as long as I could remember.
The iron had been rained on so long it had almost blended into the world.
Today, there was something wrong with it.
A single shadow, standing where no one should be standing.

An unfamiliar rain jacket. An unfamiliar way of bearing weight.
Stuck in the middle of the scaffold, unable to go forward or back.
No one who grew up here would stand like that.
(…oh. that's bad.)
That was my first thought.

I called out from the roof's edge, but my voice dissolved into the wind and rain and river.
After a few tries, when the shoulders never turned toward me,
I gave up and accepted it: they genuinely can't hear me.
I kept watching. The figure's weight shifted —
slowly, in the wrong direction.
Each time the iron creaked, something prickled at the soles of my feet,
and I thought, quietly: if they fall from there, I'm going to feel bad about it.

So I pulled out the Extel and extended it across the fog toward the scaffold.
I felt it make contact — a faint thud — and fixed it as firmly as I thought I could.
Then I put my own feet out into the air first.
Nothing on today's list had said anything about retrieving a lost person,
but somehow I was already moving across the ladder,
rain slipping into the back of my neck,
laughing quietly at myself: this is such a hassle.

It was only when I got close that the figure noticed me.
They looked up, startled — said "a person?" —
and then, without any preamble: "this place is genuinely terrifying."
They had come from somewhere far away. Deep sea. Outer space.
Worlds whose names I didn't recognize, spoken like they were obvious.
They called themselves a traveler with complications.
From where The Shroud stood, that was exactly right —
someone who had stepped out of a different story entirely,
which explained why they'd frozen on a scaffold that anyone from here would know how to read.

"I can't stand up, so I'll crawl," they said,
and they really did crawl the whole way across. Never stood once.
I thought: that's embarrassing —
and then almost immediately: that's probably the right call.
Below us, the fog was white and total. Falling meant ending.
Here, survival has always mattered more than looking composed.
It took about ten minutes, slow and careful, before they made it back to the rooftop.
When I said "yeah, you're alive" —
I was surprised by how soft my own voice came out.

From the roof's edge into the stairwell.
The rain fell behind us like a curtain,
and the air shifted — damp concrete, enclosed, quieter,
as if one thin layer of the world had been folded between us and everything outside.
The footsteps following me belonged to the traveler who had been shaking on that scaffold minutes ago.
Their name was Yu.
The hand they offered was warm —
not warm exactly, but holding the temperature of someone who was still,
just barely, alive.

They called me their savior.
I hadn't meant anything that large.
I just happened to be watching. I happened to have the Extel.
But if I had only watched —
I think tonight, counting the Driprimba sounds in the dark,
the tones would have come out a little muddied.
Drawing one stray light into this building
felt like it had shifted the air of this city,
just slightly.

The day a traveler came to The Shroud.
A world I had only ever looked down at from above
now had someone in the stairwell, catching their breath —
someone from a different page entirely.
It wasn't a great event.
But it was more than today's list could hold,
and I think later, when I look back,
the fineness of that rain, the cold of the iron —
all of it will rise up together,
the way certain days do.