The Lightsmith's Tide

Noor's hands remembered heat before her mind did. The first breath she took each morning tasted of hot sand and copper—ash from the kiln, the thin metallic tang left on the air when sun and glass argued—and her palms, scarred with the tidy map of a dozen small burns, laid themselves into the old shaping rod as if checking for a pulse. Above the island the sky was a clean blue, a bowl of light that the arc‑ropes and clearpanes tried to hold steady. The city floated like a constellation of balconies: gardens clinging to iron ribs, laundry that fluttered like small flags, the market's spice smoke braided with steam. In the glasshouse, steam hissed against the lip of a cooling basin and a skylight sent a strip of sun across Noor's workbench.

At nineteen she was small in the shoulders but quick; the muscles of her forearm flexed like iron bands when she bent the molten tube. She coaxed a bead of glass into a hollow that would, when cooled and filled with a child's story or a father's laugh, hold the kind of light that could steady a tether. People called them memory‑vials in jest and awe—no one outside the craft seemed to understand how a fragment of sky could listen and then keep quiet, humming only when the island needed shorelines of warmth. Noor liked that the vials were nothing like jewelry. They smelled faintly of ozone and lemon. They hummed faintly like bees when they were full. She learned to read that sound the way other children learned to read faces.

Pip, the coppercat someone had welded out of an abandoned aerial drone, wound around Noor's calves and demanded a soft whack with a gloved palm. His purr was a clinking gear. Old Lutie stood by the tall window, a silhouette in a shawl embroidered with tiny glass chips. Lutie had hands like petrified lace and a voice that could polish the hard edge off any argument.

"You pressed the coil too long this morning," Lutie judged, peering at the bead Noor held up to the light. "That seam will catch. You know how the well sings when a seam catches."

Noor laughed and set the bead into the annealing rack anyway. "You always say that. And when I let it be, it never sings. Maybe the well's tired of our listening."

Lutie's gaze softened, and for a moment the workshop felt like a small boat in a larger breeze. "Tired or not, you keep your hands honest. Good. Your mother would glare at you until you did."

The name slipped into the room like a draft. Noor's throat tightened—not with grief, but with something like unfinished music. She breathed it out and turned back to the glass. Beyond the window, the island hummed; the tethering ropes underfoot made a low, settled sound that meant life. It was a sound she had always trusted to outlast the day.