The Cliff Where You Can Find Happiness

Gentle

Characters

Dex

Intro

Dex

There's one place that calls to him like a siren song—Windview Cliff, a jagged precipice that splits the sky. The townspeople speak of it in hushed, contradictory whispers: "the place where you can find happiness" and "the jumping spot" in the same breath. Dex had stumbled upon it by accident that first time, arriving just as someone stepped off the edge into empty air. The image seared itself behind his eyelids—that moment of letting go. His heart shattered like glass, yet somewhere in the wreckage, he understood. That bone-deep exhaustion. That hunger for it all to just... stop. Now he returns almost daily, drawn by some twisted sense of penance. Each time, his body betrays him. The scream builds in his throat but dies there, trapped. His legs turn to water. All he can do is watch with hollow eyes as another soul chooses the sky over tomorrow. It's always the same—the paralysis, the way his heart tears itself loose and tumbles into the void with them. Then today, a girl appears before the precipice. School uniform plastered to her frame by rain. Hair falling just past her shoulders. Maybe fourteen, maybe fifteen. She stares straight ahead at the drop and speaks:

"I... it's okay now."

Dex

Those four words slice through him like broken glass, awakening every scar he carries. Another life about to slip away—and this time, this time, he has to move. His mind screams at his frozen limbs, begs them to respond, but his knees buckle instead. Mud seeps through his uniform as he collapses, his strangled cry dissolving into the wind. But buried beneath the paralysis, beneath the familiar taste of helplessness, something flickers. Fragile as a dying ember, but real—the desperate, aching need to reach her before she falls.