Skybound Aster

Dawn came slow and pale over the cluster of ledges where Elara had learned to trust rope and timber more than the sky. The hamlet hung like a row of teeth in the mouth of the world, houses nailed to spines of rock and braid. Nets and lines woven by callused hands made a lattice against the drop, a patchwork of survival. From the east the light slid across the topmost roofs, gilding rusted metal and painted planks, and a thin wind carried the sour, salt-smoke tang of the sea far below. It felt ordinary enough, and that ordinary had been all that held her life steady since her father did not come down from the watch the year the ledges shivered.

Elara moved through the morning with the practiced economy of someone who had measured every inch of rope by memory. She checked knots by habit, thumbed at frays, and kept one eye on the gull-sailed skiffs that threaded between islands like slow boats through a fog-laden harbor. She spent her days making harnesses and pulley rigs for fishermen and haulers, tucking tiny secrets of engineering into the leather folds no one bothered to notice unless they failed. Her hands were the small instruments that steadied other people’s chances — and they remembered things the rest of her body would not. There was a kind of grief in those hands, patient and steady, the sort that refuses drama and keeps the work going.

A child laughed somewhere behind a spray of laundry and the sound was ordinary too, until the first note of it came warped. No one paid much attention. The world gave a small, odd tremor, like something shifting in its sleep, and a line of pigeons cleaved the sky in an alarmed chorus. Elara felt the hair on her forearm prickle; that particular twitch had a memory of its own. It had come before, the century-old way things opened where they should not. She let the harness she intended for a trader hang and looked up. The highest ledge, where the ironworks once hoarded its copper, had opened along a seam like a mouth finding a new set of teeth.