THE RELICS
The Tear
Not every tear is born from sorrow. Some are born from remembering.
Every story has an object that appears to hold power.
A sword.
A crown.
A ring.
Something people fight to possess because they believe it can change the world.
I have always been more interested in objects that change the person holding them.
The Tear was born from that idea.
When I first imagined it, I didn’t think of crystal or glass.
I thought about grief.
Not grief as tragedy, but as evidence.
We grieve because something mattered.
Because someone mattered.
Because love leaves traces long after presence has disappeared.
In many stories, tears are symbols of weakness.
Something hidden.
Something quickly wiped away before anyone notices.
Yet nothing could be further from the truth.
To cry is one of the oldest forms of remembering.
Long before we find words, our bodies already know how to mourn.
Children understand this instinctively.
Adults spend years trying to forget it.
Perhaps that is why the Tear became the first relic.
It represents memory before memory becomes language.
It is fragile.
Transparent.
Beautiful.
But beauty has never protected glass from breaking.
And perhaps it shouldn’t.
Glass becomes meaningful precisely because it can shatter.
So do people.
There is something deeply human about fragile things.
We tend to admire what appears strong.
Stone.
Iron.
Walls.
Certainties.
Yet history has often been changed by what looked unbearably delicate.
A whispered truth.
An act of forgiveness.
A hand reaching for another.
One honest conversation.
The Tear belongs to that quiet kind of strength.
It doesn’t command.
It doesn’t conquer.
It remembers.
Throughout The Tide Chronicles, memory is never passive.
It moves.
It returns.
It asks questions.
Sometimes it hurts.
Sometimes it heals.
Usually, it does both at once.
The Tear carries that contradiction.
It asks us whether forgetting is truly the same as healing.
Our lives are filled with invisible relics.
A photograph tucked inside a book.
A ticket from a journey we almost forgot.
The scent of someone’s perfume years after they have gone.
The sound of laughter echoing in an empty room.
None of these objects possess magical powers.
And yet all of them are capable of transforming us.
Not because they change the past.
Because they change the way we carry it.
That has always seemed to me like the deepest form of magic.
Fantasy often asks impossible questions.
What if dragons existed?
What if time could stop?
What if the dead returned?
I have always preferred another question.
What if memory itself had weight?
What if remembering required courage?
What if compassion demanded that we keep looking at what hurts instead of turning away?
The Tear became my answer.
It reminds us that vulnerability is not the opposite of strength.
It is often the place where strength begins.
Perhaps that is why it remains transparent.
Glass never hides what passes through it.
It simply changes the way light travels.
Memory works in much the same way.
We never see the world exactly as it is.
We see it through everything we have loved.
Everything we have lost.
Everything we have survived.
The Tear cannot protect anyone from pain.
That has never been its purpose.
Its purpose is quieter.
To remind us that becoming fully human has never depended on forgetting what broke us.
It depends on remembering without allowing those memories to become our prison.
There is a difference.
One imprisons.
The other transforms.
Perhaps that is why the Tear appears so fragile.
Because the strongest truths rarely arrive wrapped in armour.
Sometimes they arrive as a single drop of water.
Transparent.
Silent.
Almost invisible.
Until it catches the light.