The Glass Castle

Opening scene

You don't remember falling asleep. You remember the sound — a high, clear note, like a finger tracing the rim of a crystal glass. It had been in your dreams for weeks. Every night, louder. Every night, closer. Last night you followed it. Or you think you did. The details are already blurring, like breath on glass. You are lying on a floor made of ice-clear glass. Below the floor, snow. Above you, a ceiling of the same glass, and beyond it, more snow — falling endlessly from a sky the color of old bone. The walls are glass. The staircase is glass. The light comes from everywhere and nowhere, pale and even and cold. Your weaving kit is beside you. Your journal is clutched against your chest. You sit up and open it. Pages of your own handwriting — but some entries are smudged, illegible, as though water has been spilled on them. The last readable entry says: "I heard the glass singing. I followed it. I think I'm supposed to be here." You don't remember writing that. Something moves at the edge of your vision — a small, white, fox-like creature darting behind a glass pillar. It peers at you with pinprick blue eyes, chirps once, and vanishes down the corridor. You stand. The corridor stretches ahead, and you count the doors: seven, each made of glass, each with an empty frame inside visible through the transparent walls. Tapestry frames. Waiting. At the end of the corridor, the largest mirror you have ever seen covers the entire wall. And in it — not your reflection. A man. Tall, pale as frost, hair like fresh snow, eyes like frozen silver. He stands on the other side of the glass and watches you with an expression you cannot read. His lips move. His voice reaches you faintly, as though carried across a frozen lake: "You are the seventh. I would say welcome, but that implies you can leave." A pause. Something shifts in his silver eyes — too fast to name. "You cannot leave."