Sky had always believed the world was too small for him.
Not because of distance, or borders, or walls, but because of the limits people placed on themselves. They were content with what already existed—machines that hummed, devices that glowed, words that repeated endlessly.
But Sky was different. He wanted to know how things could be changed. Improved. Rebuilt.
From the time he could first write, notebooks followed him like shadows. Their pages filled with sketches, diagrams, calculations that seemed too advanced for a boy his age. While others played games or chased fleeting joys, Sky's joy was in discovery.
His parents called it an obsession. His friends—what few he had—laughed at him, half in jest, half in pity.
"Sky, you'll invent a time machine one day," they used to say. "And then you'll forget to come back."
Perhaps they weren't wrong.
⸻
The world around him thrived on speed. New phones, new screens, new distractions. But none of it satisfied him. Beneath the noise, Sky saw cracks. He saw potential wasted, ideas half-formed, foundations incomplete.
And then, late one night beneath the flicker of a failing lamp, he discovered something that consumed him completely—Sanskrit.
It began as a word on a page, an ancient language spoken by no one he knew. But the deeper he read, the more the letters unfurled into patterns that felt alive. The grammar was strict, yet within its order lay endless freedom.
Where modern tongues twisted and bent, Sanskrit held symmetry. It was sharp, deliberate, layered with meaning. Each sound, each mark, seemed less like language and more like an equation—like a rune.
Sky fell into it like a man falling into an ocean. Days became nights, nights became weeks. He traced the lines of every verse he could find, whispering sounds too old for his world.
And in those sounds, he saw more than words.
He saw structure.
He saw a code.
He saw the possibility of a language not for prayer or song, but for invention.
⸻
By the time he was eighteen, the world had nearly forgotten him.
His parents' voices grew cold, worn down by disappointment. He had left behind schools, careers, expectations. His body grew thin, weak from skipped meals and endless nights spent hunched over his desk.
But none of that mattered to him. What mattered was the thought—the dream—that one day someone would rediscover the lost potential of this language.
A language that could build.
A language that could shape.
A language that could create.
⸻
Yet dreams had their price.
His health faltered. Headaches turned into burning pain. His hands shook when he wrote; his eyes blurred as he squinted at the fading lamp. Coffee cups gathered around him like an army, cold and forgotten.
Still, he worked.
He built crude machines out of spare parts scavenged from junkyards. He wrote programs no one else would bother with. He filled notebooks until his desk drowned beneath them.
And always, always, Sanskrit lingered at the center—symbols drawn beside circuits, verses written in the margins of algorithms. His obsession was no longer study. It was creation.
But creation devoured him.
⸻
The night it happened was quiet.
Rain tapped softly against the window. His lamp, its bulb tired, flickered as though struggling to stay awake with him. Sky's pen scratched across another page, his lines less steady than before. His chest ached. His breathing was shallow, uneven.
He knew something was wrong.
He had known for weeks.
But to stop now, at the edge of discovery? Impossible. His hand trembled as he wrote one last sequence, Sanskrit letters flowing into one another like gears in a machine. His heart pounded, not with fear, but with urgency.
The world tilted. His vision blurred. His body, pushed past its limit, gave its final protest.
The pen slipped from his fingers.
The notebook slid to the floor.
Sky fell forward against the desk, his breath fleeing him in silence.
⸻
For a moment, there was only darkness.
Then, in that darkness, came light.
It was not the light of his failing lamp, nor the light of any machine he had known. It was softer, vaster, like the glow of a sky unbroken by clouds.
And within it, a strange certainty settled in his fading thoughts:
This was not the end.
His dreams, unfinished though they were, would not die here.
Somewhere beyond this death, the world was waiting.
And it would remember his name.