The Shards of Crestfall

Nara worked with her hands as if memory itself were molten. The workshop smelled of hot sand and iron, of lemon oil and smoke; the air shivered when she put the puncheon to the furnace and the bellows answered like a living thing. Outside the high, lattice windows the city hung on a row of sheer cliffs—Crestfall, a mosaic of towers and terraces, each roof a glinting plate that caught the day's slow breath. Below, the fog lay thick and constant, a pale sea that scrubbed sound until footsteps became hushes.

She shaped a lens by touch more than sight. Her fingers knew the glass's temper: the way it would hold heat a heartbeat too long, the sudden softening, the way the center would stretch into a throat ready to swallow light. Halwen watched from the stool beside the workbench, his face a map of tiny scars, like a map of old roads. "Slow your wrist," he said. "Let it call itself into shape. You are pressing it into a hurried woman. Glass dislikes hurry."

Nara laughed, a small, dry sound. "It is not rushing," she said. "It wants to be right."

Halwen's mouth softened. "Right is expensive. Learn what repair looks like first, then pursuit will not cost you everything." He reached and turned the glowing bead, the tools chiming—tongs, scraper, a wooden paddle worn to a sheen. The bead yielded and sighed under the press of her palm until a bowl of light formed. It cooled with a sound like sea-silk.

From the window came a lighter tapping—Miran's crutches. Nara set the lens to the rack and crossed the plaster floor that smelled of resin and dust. Her brother leaned in the doorway with the thin smile that did more work than his shoulders. The fever had taken pieces of him over the winter: the spring had not loosened them. The Daywell's light helped him breathe when it bled through a practiced lens; without it his nights were sharp as glass.

"They still say the guild will fix the Daywell soon," Miran said, voice a thread. He rested a palm on the curve of an old lens, tracing concentric rings. "The council spoke with Master Solen. He promised—"

Nara saw the promise and the distance in the same look. Promises in Crestfall were like fragile panes; they could hold or shatter on the wind. She remembered the feast year, the way the Daywell had flared a miraculous ribbon of gold across the cliffs, how everyone had leaned into its light as if they might find out what they were for. She touched Miran's sleeve, the linen damp with the night's breath.

Halwen cleared his throat. "Finish the ring for the prism tonight. We'll test it at dawn. You know the pattern by heart." He picked up a small brass instrument—a gauge that measured the silk of a shard's curvature. "And Nara—do not go after the old stories. Keep your hands to steady things."

Outside, a gull's cry threaded the fog. Nara put her hand on the finished lens. The glass took her palm's heat and glowed like a captive star. It hummed with a promise that answered something inside her she had not learned to name.