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Under a crystalline spire, glass artisan Mira senses a pulse that answers to human feeling. Accidentally linked to Soren, the spire’s keeper, she uncovers Foundry secrets and a Council’s suppression. Their fragile bond forces a dangerous retuning beneath the city’s ordered surface.
The city smelled of kiln-ash and rain. Mira had learned to tell the weather by the way the glass in her hands sang—thin and high when a storm chased heat away, low and honeyed on dry mornings when the spire pulsed softer. She lived a few alleys from the river at the bend where the trade barges braided ropes and the market stalls folded like origami in the afternoon wind. Above everything rose the spire: a tower of woven crystal and brass so tall that its summit lost itself in a permanent shimmer. The elders said the Heart inside it was an engine; the children called it a clock and a kindly god. The truth lived somewhere between both, locked behind the Mechanist Council’s brass doors and the keepers’ vows.
Mira's hands were small but steady, shaped by years in the Glassworks. She apprenticed under Etta Dray, who had taught her how to coax a pane to hold color like a remembered mood and how to read the micro-fractures that spelled a window’s failing. Today the Glassworks had sent her to the lower conduits: the slender veins of crystal that fed the spire’s light into the city’s arteries. The conduits looped above alleys and threaded inside market roofs, carrying pulses of tempered energy that made clocks keep, ovens maintain gentle warmth, and the seasonal mists prompt the river barges to drift their bellies full of fish. It was an unromantic job—patching seams, reheating jagged edges, fitting tiny crystalline rivets—but it put food on the table and quiet music in her palms.
She arrived at the conduit under the cider-house awning, where vendors were already arranging their fruit. A fissure ribboned along the underside of the conduit, and clear dust fell like frost onto the stacked crates. Mira set her satchel down and inspected the crack. The glass there was old and sighed with age; hairline fractures spidered away like small constellations. “Careful,” Etta had told her. “You don’t so much fix the Heart’s line as persuade it to forgive you.” She smiled at her own aphorism now and began, hands steady, fingers eased in a practiced ritual of heat and breath.