When the Horizon Sings

Dusk takes the cliffs in a slow, indulgent hand. Where the land falls away and the sky presses its first cool breath, Liora moves with the ease of someone who knows how to listen to light. Her fingers are callused at the knuckles from weaving—threads of silver and human grief—but they have learned other work as well: the precise, almost reverent way of lifting a fallen shard from the grass without bruising what it remembers. People in her town buy what she makes because the things she mends do not lie; a remembrance cloth will take the edges off a loss, will warm a face in memory until it holds like a real thing. The cloths do not return the dead, but they make absence an inhabitable room rather than a constant, unbearable wind.

Tonight, the sea is a black glass and the sky is a bruise of purple that blooms with points of light. Liora walks the ridge alone, an oilskin cloak around her shoulders and a leather satchel at her hip. She listens for the small, metallic breath that a fresh shard will give when it cools. The trade of her town depends on those breaths: the market on the quay, the Guild agent with his ledger of orders, Guildmistress Rowan with her clipped, efficient smile. The city’s repairers and comfort-sellers travel to here when seams of sorrow must be stitched; they need her hands and the glass she can coax from the cliffs. If she stops, incomes tighten. Her younger brother will not have bread. Her neighbor will go un-repaired. The stakes settle over her like fog.

A floss of white unrolls across the sky—an ordinary meteor at first glance, quick as thought. But this one takes an odd, ribboned path, a slow silver curl that looks almost deliberate. Liora follows it with a practiced eye. Where it hits grass it hums with warmth, like a small animal newly born. She kneels without thinking, breathing the sharp scent of ozone. The shard is not yet cool enough to hold; it throbs faintly, throwing off a light that trembles with color like a held memory. Liora glances at the emptiness beyond the cliff, then very carefully slides her palm beneath the shard and lifts. It answers her touch with a note low and bright, vibrating against bone. She tucks it into the near pocket of her cloak, not sliding it into her satchel—afraid of the abruptness of closing space around something that might still sing.