The Lanternglass of Eirenfall

Kellan Thorne learned the city by sound first, by how Eirenfall breathed. The canals sighed under low keels, carts ratcheted over riverstone with a dry, metallic patience, and from the high terraces the market spilled tinkling voices into narrow alleys. He could tell a lost child's cry from a gull's call without turning, and he could shape a bulb of glass to hold the exact timbre of a laugh. In the back of his shop, where flaring flames cupped the ceiling with orange, the kiln kept a steady human warmth that his hands had memorized.

He turned a pipe between scarred fingers, breathing molten glass into a globe the color of river ice. The metal tong left red crescents on his palms that throbbed like a second heartbeat. Behind him, Sera sang a thin, careless line as she braided a length of copper wire for a lantern. Her voice hooked on a high note and eased off the bar like wind around a mast. Kellan smiled without looking. He had shaped dozens of night-lamps for the conservatory; he had never held Sera's voice in a vessel. He liked that it was free.

Master Bram came in on the smell of pine tar, his coat dusted with old ash. He had taught Kellan to anneal glass so it would remember sound without cracking under nostalgia. Bram's hands were knobby with years of work; his speech carried gravel from decades near the sea. He glanced at the globe Kellan had just formed and tapped one knuckle against the warm surface as if checking a pulse.

"It took you three summers to steady that breath," Bram said. "You will know when it is done because it answers you."

Outside, the city closed and opened like a mouth. Boats settled in at dusk and the fishmongers' bell married the gulls' cry with the scraping of rope. Along the quay, a troupe rehearsed the old lantern-song, a seasonal chorus meant to lift the lamps on the Night of Lanternsongs to float like small moons above the canal. Kellan had been to more Lanternsong evenings than he could count. He could place every instrument by ear; he could name every chorus line from the scrape of bow to the half-breath of a flute.

He set the cooled globe on the workbench and cupped it with a wet rag. When he tapped the glass with a gloved finger, a faint echo trembled inside — the stored residue of a child's laughter from the morning market. He shut his eyes and listened; the sensation was not just sound but weight against the ribcage, a small, precise warmth. In a city where sound was currency of memory and celebration, craft like his was neither simple art nor mere trade. It was preservation.