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In the floating archipelago of Mareth, apprentice cartographer Liora must mend fraying threads of light that bind islands together. When the Beacon falters and a man named Soren unravels balance for profit, Liora embarks on a dangerous quest to stitch the world whole and find traces of her missing father.
Dawn came to Mareth like a question, thin and persistent. Liora woke to the hollow clink of glass vials and the wet tug of sea-salt air threading under her shutters. Her room smelled of boiled kelp, glue, and the bright citrine tang of lantern oil. A stray ribbon of fog curled through the rafters and traced the fine scars on her palms where cartographers' needles had nicked her over years of practice.
She sat up on the pallet and found Kip already awake on the workbench. The fox’s brass ribs squeaked as it stretched; its single glass eye caught the morning and divided it into slices. Kip’s tail, a delicate set of copper filaments, hummed when it tasted air, like a reed instrument testing a wind. Liora's fingers found the tiny key in Kip's shoulder and wound it; the fox gave a soft, approving click and padded to the table, nose nudging a folded map.
Maps at the Curved Lantern were not only ink and paper. They slept with the building. They exhaled faint patterns of light when you set them to work. Liora unrolled a small chart she'd been stitching through the night: it showed the outer shoals where the fisher-kites nested, and a crooked line that cut through cloud-banks—someone else's handwriting had made it spiraled and neat, the kind of tidy that belonged to the older masters.
She pressed her thumb to the seam where two vellums met and felt the thread vibrate like a plucked string. The map answered her touch with a small, bright ripple, the kind that meant a route had been tested and had learned to remember. Liora spoke aloud without meaning to. “Guide us home,” she said. The map shimmered and the room answered back in the distant clatter of a market bell.
From the street below came the chitter of merchants and the rumble of a sky-sloop being hauled by winches. Children ran between crates smelling of saffron and tar. She could hear Master Calder teaching someone the difference between a tide draft and a true current; his voice was a low gravel, and he always spoke as if counting stitches.
Liora had been Master Calder’s apprentice for three summers. He was all patchwork—a man whose cap was one of his own maps, brim stiff with wax. He’d adopted her the way a lighthouse adopted a gull: patient, practical, uncomplaining. She dressed quickly in a sleeve-stained shirt and layered leather cuisses that had been softened over years into a second skin. Kip hopped to the pouch at her belt and rifled until it found a thimble. He brought it to her as if to say, "There is no perfect plan. There are only prepared hands."