The Loom of Lost Places

The glassblower's breath tasted of iron and sugar as Lina leaned over the furnace. Heat licked the inside of her elbows; the leather of her forearm guard steamed where sweat met ash. She turned the punty, watching a bead of molten glass stretch like a living tongue beneath her fingers. Outside, Vaelir breathed in a different rhythm — a city slung from the ribs of the world by stitched ropes and wind-cables, its alleys hung on balconies of woven tar and painted driftwood. People moved along the skyways like tides: traders with sacks of salt and lanterns, children chasing the speech of gulls that had learned names, old women balancing cages of light.

Lina had been seventeen the first time she shaped a time-lantern. The glass had cooled into a bright blue memory that smelled faintly of rain and the sea her mother had said she could not remember. Work at the workshop had a sound all its own — the hiss of molten breath, the clink of metal tools, Kest's low humming. Kest never called himself master. He called himself a keeper; he kept things that others were too quick to let go.

"Stop watching the flame like it can tell you what comes next," Kest said from the doorway, his voice carrying over the forge. His hair was a handful of wire and soot; his fingers smelled of cedar. He moved with the careful slowness of someone who had once mended a glass heart.

Lina laughed and prodded a cooling lantern with a metal rod. "You said the same three years ago. Now I'm seventeen, and the flame still won't tell me." Her hands shook with the ordinary excitement of someone learning the rules that would later decide how to mend a city. The lantern in her palm pulsed; inside it a stitch of light rewound and showed the brief flicker of an old man's face — a memory-lamp was meant to hold one safe moment.

Kest stepped closer, his shadow falling like an old map across the workbench. "Keep them small. Keep them true. The city depends on people knowing where they've been, Lina. We sew places into people with these." He tapped the lantern like a thumb to a drum; the light hiccuped and then smoothed.

Beyond the workshop, a bell sounded from the memory-well at the center of Vaelir. The bell's tone had once been calm as a sea-shell. Today it vibrated oddly, like a string pulled too tight. On the high bridge a boy dropped his wooden boat and stared at the well's surface; the water did not show his mother's boat, though he had sailed it every summer. Lina felt the color go out of the workshop for the space of a breath. When people began to forget how a place sat in their bones, the stitches loosened, and roads could be missed forever.