The morning fog had settled over Harbor city, immersing everything in a thick beige haze. The city was always damp. Mist rose from the sea at dawn, and monsoon rain fell during the rain season, leaving the air heavy and slow to move.

Harbor Press stood as the symbol of the city. I had longed to be a part of it.  But after two years of working there as a columnist and watching my pieces returned again and again for containing “sensitive themes,” I learned to keep the sharper parts of my thoughts tucked away. It was the only way to last here.

Outside the window seagulls cried, their wail stretched thin by the heavy air. Ships docked, moved and departed, horns echoing as faintly as they always did. My ink wells emptied one after another. The pen scraped across the paper in a tired, uneven line before giving up altogether. I set it aside. It was simply part of the routine.

“The new supervisor comes today,” a colleague whispered from the next cubicle, tapping on the divider so I would hear her.

“Oh.”

Supervisors rarely stayed long. Most treated the censorship codes like sacred doctrine and obeyed them by tightening restrictions even beyond the official regulations. By the time these rules reached columnists like us, they had hardened into a wall my voice could no longer pass.

“I heard she was transferred down,” the colleague continued. “Wrote something she shouldn’t have.”

I did not respond. Instead, I slid another page under my approved draft.

It was a story I was not supposed to write, the story of her. We had shared an umbrella in a season of rain. Her eyes had been bright even in the grayness, and for a moment I believed the world held more light than it showed. But soon her father’s look cut through it, and that was the end of it. She was sent away, and I stayed. The rainy seasons have kept coming back. The space under the umbrella has stayed empty.

Five years had passed. She was elsewhere in the world and I remained in Harbor City. Time had not mended my wounds. It only taught me how to store the ache carefully, placing it in a quiet corner of myself where no one else could touch it. At night I still feared even this small private memory might be seen by others.

I exhaled, closed the drawer, and tried to steady myself. As I reached for the next sheet of paper, a hem of soft orange cloth drifted into my view, catching the light in a way that did not belong to this gray city.

The dress was old, satin worn thin over the years, though the cloud-shaped knot at the collar was new. Someone had taken care to mend it. The detail surprised me. It was rare to see anyone wearing something that felt chosen rather than assigned.

“I am the new supervisor,” she said. “My name is Riven.”

A hand extended from the pale orange sleeve. Faint traces of ink darkened the tips of her fingernails.

I hesitated only a moment before shaking it.

White Scratches and Shadow

The manuscript was returned again. This time the note on top read: “Inappropriate sentiment between characters.”

I knocked on Riven’s office door, ready to apologize. “Miss, I promise I can finish a rewrite by this afternoon…”

“Don’t rewrite it,” she said. “We can revise it together.”

Riven looked over my draft, her eyes sharp, as if she were searching for the story behind the story. My thoughts scattered in every direction.

“‘Under the umbrella, the two women laughed together.’” She almost whispered the line. The office was silent enough that I heard her breath stop for a moment, brief enough that even a clock would fail to register it.

Her fingernail slid across the sentence. White scratches appeared on the ink, strangling the black letters.

“It’s too real,” she said. “Someone will notice.” Her voice was tight, like a wire pulled too tight. 

I looked up and met her eyes. Something flickered in her eyes, a faint tremor I knew too well, though she tried to bury it almost as soon as it appeared. In that brief exchange, everything physical dissolved. We were no longer supervisor and subordinate, only two shadows pushed into a corner, trying not to reveal our true shapes to a cruel system that punished even the most beautiful emotion a human could possess—love.

“Don’t write anything like this anymore,” Riven said. “You know how things are these days.” She closed the door. 

I stood there, rooted to the floor. Something strange stirred inside me, difficult to name: I wanted Riven to see the part of myself hidden between the lines, and I wanted to understand the part of her that kept recoiling from the light.

But in Harbor City, impulses like these could only remain inside the mind. They were not allowed to be seen by light.

The Underground Archive and The Glimpse of Light

The lore had it that the underground archive of Harbor Press held forbidden books from the past thirty years. By chance, I was sent there to sort old records.

The air grew heavier as I descended. The archive felt like a graveyard of words and a storage of eternal dampness. The smell of mildew was sharp enough to sting, and the books themselves had curled in on their own dampness, as if trying to hide.

Near the door lay two books that looked almost new. Their covers were smooth, their pages not yet invaded by moisture. I picked one up. The name of the author printed on it was—Riven.

For a moment the air stopped moving. The only thing left was the mildew. It rapidly filled my lungs, forcing a shallow breath out of me.

Fragments of sentences rushed toward me.

“She and she would watch the moon as it thinned and grew full again.”  

“She and she wished to…”  

“She and she……”

Sentences shattered. They had been severed. The black ink covered over the words was like a creature with its limbs cut. My own words rose in my memory, carrying the same phantom ache where meaning had once been whole.

The humidity pressed down harder. It piled everything onto my chest: the pause in her breathing, the scrape of her nail against the page, the flicker in her eyes that she tried to hide. I could almost see her running through the fog as I had, seeking a path out of the fog that existed only in imagination. The kind of love we carried could not survive the world we lived in. All we could do was place it in language, yet even the landscape of thought was not a safe space. Our words were silenced when they were still alive.

When I stepped out of the archive, the morning fog had not lifted. Riven entered from outside, carrying the waterlogged air with her.

“Good morning.”

“Good morning, Miss.”

Harbor City was as damp as ever. But far off at the edge of the sky, a thin circle of pale white that could not even be called light had appeared. From somewhere across the harbor came the wail of a seagull, rough and strained. There must have been another answering it, though the fog soon swallowed the sound. The pain in their voices pierced my heart: our wings were broken by the heavy air.

Riven’s faint orange sleeve brushed the air. For an instant it felt as though the grayness had been parted, though only by a thread.

When the sun comes, we will no longer have to meet through the fog, I thought.

I believed Riven was thinking the same.