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A gentle bedtime adventure about Tove, a nine-year-old apprentice who mends a Dream Lantern when a thread of sleep goes missing. With small gifts, quiet courage, and unlikely friends, she faces the Hollow of Quiet and brings a new light back to her town.
A hush lived in the cracks between the cobbles of the harbor town, as if the walls themselves kept small secrets to share only with the night. Tove learned that hush from childhood. She could tell the difference between a good hush and a worried hush by the way it warmed the palms of her hands when she cupped them. The house at the very top of Willow Hill sat with its back to the sea, a squat, comfortable thing with a round window like an eye, and in that round window burned the Dream Lantern.
The Dream Lantern was not a simple lamp. It was a glass globe threaded with thin ribbons of light and stitched songs. Old Kiri, the keeper who taught Tove the slow work of mending lullabies, called the ribbons "threads of sleep" and taught her how to comb each one with a small bone comb so it wouldn't tangle into nightmares. Every evening, the town would hush a little more as the lantern breathed out its first blue sigh and sent a softened color down the hill. Children swaddled their small worries beneath blankets, cats uncurled, and even the gulls seemed to speak in round, sleepy phrases.
Tove was nine and short for her age, with knees that always wore the faint dust of the lane and hair that caught the wind in quick, nervous tangles. She climbed the last stair to the lantern room barefoot because Old Kiri said it was kinder to the wood, and because the cool boards helped her think. He smelled of lemon oil and wool and a memory that had forgotten the sound of many things. He taught her the names of songs one at a time: the tide-song, the cradle-hum, the soft-stone lullaby. He never rushed when she made mistakes. He would only say, "Breathe it again, Tove. Let the thread remember you."
On ordinary nights, Tove wound the lantern's tiny mechanism with a key made of brass and patience. She would sit with her feet tucked under her and hum a small, private hum she had learned from her mother. The lantern would answer like a patient friend: a faint click, a warm pulse of glass, a shimmer of a ribbon remembering its color. Around them, the town became a stitched quilt of sleep. The air tasted faintly of sea-salt and pastry, the gulls argued like old grandfathers, and the lamp made sure the town's dreams were soft enough to wear.