My brother and I cut out into the shoals beyond Silsern. The air carried a soft pyroclastic glow. I cared not for the warnings of the Lord of Lights which my pearl diver friends had told me not turns ago. The mist stiffened upon my mask.

The isle we sought was on the edge of the S’uldra. It was called in our tongue Tama’s Fin. We pathed around fungal prominences that gaped out of the channel, bloated and eternal. Around them the water frothed and bubbled. If I had not had my mask on the steam could have blanched my face down to blood and bone.

After what seemed like a turn, Kotatarl pointed to something beyond the wreaths of toxic steam laid upon the channel. I saw it then: the coral slope that had given the Fin its name, its bare curving peak. An eyeless crane-olm perched upon it.

“You seeing that?” my brother called back, not waiting for a reply.

We threaded over, avoiding the worst of the yellowy steam-fog. Tama’s Fin came into view. It was smaller than I’d imagined. I could walk across its breadth in a few breaths.

Beyond this last isle the Sea of Flames became endless, waves dappled orange and midnight. Somewhere out there, there was much more to the World Within. I looked, as I’d been taught by my father, for the lighthouse marks beneath the waves, but I saw naught but dancing pyroclasm within the deep sea’s folds.

My brother slammed his kayak sideways, slowing abruptly. We had drawn close to the isle, I realized. I followed suit, dipping my paddle to turn and slow. Ahead the legend waked. Tama’s Maw. A circular, gaping hole in the coral, only half emerged even at the lowest tide.

The cave’s legend was first told to us by an older lad, Teegu, who had been my father’s second apprentice. Kotatarl had been his third. After Kotatarl claimed his journeyman license from the Blackbloom branch of the Guild of Glass I became the fourth and current apprentice. My father does not speak of the first apprentice.

We rocked up then down in an easy motion as a big swell went under us. It hit the little cave’s mouth with a loud slurp. We exchanged glances.

“Let’s get closer.”

Kotatarl grinned. “Yes, little brother! I knew you had the sense to ken this.”

We paddled up at a leisurely pace. Tide caves were uncommon and could be dangerous. We’d not seen this one before. No one had, it seemed, since Teegu had told us his tale secondhand, of his friend Darask’s visit at the low tide. How many years ago had that been? When Kotatarl and I had been small and beady-eyed.

Within the spread of the Maw’s shadow, I sniffed.

“Anything?”

“No…no sulfur, nothing acrid. It smells…cold.”

Kotatarl grinned his wicked mischief. “Shall we take a look?”

He was drifting in. My brother had always sought difficult things. He had made what I had thought was a small fortune in our youth pearl diving, before my father yoked him into apprenticeship. Even that he escaped, where it took everyone at least seven years to become a journeyman, Kotatarl had attained it in five. Now he did not take it seriously. It was no longer a challenge, so it had lost its luster. But this, this Tama’s Maw, named after the great guardian shark. This was what my brother lived for.

“Let’s do it.”

We both gave two quick sweeps of the paddle blade, one to each side, and glided in to the sloshing dark.

The Maw grew calmer as we drifted in. It winnowed down to little more than an olm path.

My kayak clunked as Kotatarl placed his paddle on the shaped wood in front of me before I pushed ahead of him.

“Stay close little brother.”

His voice, little more than a whisper, echoed into hissing static. When his echo faded, I heard very little, save the soft slip of our kayaks through the water. We went one after the other then. I went first. The air had become monstrously cold. We probed the way ahead where needed with our paddle blades. When my kayak scraped on the cave wall ridges, I shivered.

I looked behind me and still saw the dance of light where the Maw opened to the channel.

“Kota. If ever we return to such a cave, we should bring rope.”

When I spoke my voice’s echo hummed like a shrine. There came no answer. I imagined him nodding in the dark. I could still hear him close by.

My kayak sunk into something soft yet firm. With a clatter Kotatarl’s vessel rammed into mine from behind and guided itself into the soft berm beside me. I stepped out into the frigid waters. I had not oft been this close to a colder current.

Beneath my feet the ground slipped about like sand or mud. I kept my paddle and probed out with it, and, finding a good bit of firmament above the waterline, pulled the kayak out of the water entirely. It was sand. I was sure of it. It had give. I set the kayak down and lifted a handful. It was caked with moisture and salt rime, but it was unmistakably sand.

Kota followed, exiting his kayak with a splash, and pulled it up onto land beside me.

“Come here. Look. It’s sand.”

I felt for him, took his arm, turned the palm, and placed a piece of the coarse sand into it. I heard him crush it. I was grinning.

“Better than we hoped, little brother. Best take your fill. I’m not sure when we could return.”

“They won’t believe us.”

“They’ll believe.”

I imagined Kota nodding in the dark. I would have to gather what I could in darkness, without regard for coloration or composition. I would have to hope that the sand could be special. For I, certainly, was not. To call my glassblowing unremarkable was an understatement. I had, as my father put it, a lack of artistry. It could be taught, and my father imparted what he could, but we both agreed I had a long way to go. Nevertheless my seventh year had come and it was expected that I create a journeyman’s piece for judgement by the guildmasters.

It would be a vase, I decided as I scraped what sand I could into a large sealskin pouch. I pushed down past the initial, encrusted layer of sand we’d found into finer material. I shoveled two handfuls of the stuff into my bag. Then suddenly my claw struck something denser. I shifted my hand and felt around within the earth. Whatever it was, it did not feel like a rock, or even coral. It did not even feel like a shell, as I’d seen clams that were that big. It was slightly squishy and spongy.

I dug in and tore up a handful of something. I sniffed at it. Smelled like detritus. Still, I had expected to come away with some stones that I could incorporate into my design. I reached back into the little depression I had furrowed and clawed again, and came up with another handful of stuff.

The furrow began to whistle. Whatever I had in my hand sloughed away into the air. It felt like warm wax as it left, but it did not drip down.

Someone groaned. Blue twisting embers gusted out of the furrow. I saw suddenly the little beach and the furrow illuminated. What detritus thing I had once held in my hand now hung in shadow form midair, unfurling, splayed like a long-cloaked worm or a broken ghost.

“Shadyr,” Kotatarl whispered.

The sand I had gathered was light-colored, but the squishy thing, what I had dug into, was dark. Within it something round and metallic poked out. I hesitated, then reached in and snatched it as the embers rained. It looked like a small mask. The embers did not extinguish. Where they landed they seemed to stick. Ice formed on my hand and the mask, both covered in blue motes.

My brother had wasted no time drawing both of our kayaks back into the Maw’s water.

“Klask! Come on!”

I looked around wildly and found and grabbed my paddle. I tried to tuck the mask away into my cloak, but it stuck to me. My hand began to ache.

I loped out into the water, hauled myself up and into the little waist-sized slit in my kayak. “Let’s go!”

My brother needed no encouragement. With one good hand and a club for the other I paddled, unevenly, away from the beach. The water crackled around us as little pieces of it iced over where the motes rested. They had ceased streaming from the furrow. Kota quickly outdistanced my lame paddlework.

“What’s the matter?” he called back.

“My hand is freezing. Frozen.”

A cold wind breathed upon my shoulders. Our voices echoing. Behind us the eldritch crinkling of water to ice intensified. My blood thrummed in my veins. I pushed myself onward. My hand cast its own light, a sick light-giving mist that streamed from the motes, and fell like crystal breath onto the water in our wake. But as I departed the motes faded.

Exiting the Maw, I met up with Kota floating a little way out in the channel. His eyes grew wide as I pulled up.

“Your hand…”

I held it up. There was no longer much of a blue glow. The ice had begun to change to water. It still throbbed, but less than it did. I shook it, and the remaining ice shattered. The attached mask dropped and clanged off my kayak with a clarion note, then slid into the water.

“No!” I cried out, wrenching forward and trying to snatch it from the waves.

Kota slipped into the water with a quiet splash. I saw his pale form dance down into the deep. Then he was back, wet and clambering into the kayak, the mask in his hand. He studied it, then sighed and tucked it away to paddle over to me. He took it out again and handed it back.

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The mask was of a carnelian-hued metal, more red than gold. It seemed finely wrought, and not much tarnished, I reflected, as other metals I’d hauled from the sea had been. Wavy lines like snakes without heads met in the middle of the mask.

This mask was not like the hunting masks I was used to, which covered my face and mouth both from caustic fume. This was a little biscuit of a mask, fashioned possibly for the eyes alone, with a narrow horizontal slit running from one side to the other.

“Brother,” I said, trying to keep the panic from my voice, and likely failing. “What in Umbra’s great gleaming gill was that back there?”

Kota locked eyes with me. “Shadowstuff. Shadyr. You have heard the old tales from the World Without as much as I. But to find such in Tarlanis, well, it is not aught I have ever heard.”

“Nor I,” I reflected.

I cradled my hand. It had reddened where the ice had kissed it, especially my palm, where I had cradled the detritus before it had risen, animate, frozen.

“How about the mask?”

“It’s very intricate. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s not tarnished at all, but it’s very strange. Who would wear such a thing, and why?”

“I suppose,” he said after a breath, “it would have been someone from long ago, with much different concerns than our own.”

We were back in Silsern before the sleep’s water clocks began to chime. We landed at Turtleback Cove, hid our kayaks in a patch of blood mushrooms, and slipped to bed. On this day no one expected anything of me aside from beginning my journeyman’s piece, and at that no one would dare rush me. When I rose I found only my mother still in the house. My father had already retired to the workshop. I would join him there soon enough.

I supped with my mother who had prepared for me dralsa and charred mushroom slices alongside freshly shucked sea tangerines.

“I didn’t hear you come in.”

“I was late.”

I yawned. I gestured vaguely.

“I’ve got a bit on my mind, mother.”

“You’ll do great. Don’t doubt yourself.”

Doubting myself was exactly what I was doing. When I finished breakfast I excused myself and prepared a pack which included some sands I had accumulated, as well as the sand from our expedition earlier. The mask I stowed underneath a pile of shirts in one of my drawers.

I crossed the yard to the workshop in the early ebbing glow of fungi and everbloom, with still a touch of smolder on the brim of the cave sky. Our wall was stacked of mortared coral brickwork, in pink and orange and white and purple tones still clarion from the sea, hewn hundreds of years ago by the first of the Pax clan to take root within Silsern. I walked along and touched the markings of the masons that had done the work. Vocaro. Sorn. Bilnden. Zarves. Then I walked past the purpling glowcap grove and the garden beneath it to the workshop steps.

It was four stories, built into a whorled spiral shell of a giant crustacean that had been hewn and patched and augmented in half a hundred places. The steps ascended to a second-floor door set of good mushroomwood, reinforced with bucks of metal. I opened it.

Within I tugged on my apron, then hurried downstairs and through the hall corridor, intending to stoke the furnace. I found it had already been brought up, perhaps left untended for a turn or two, but it was still burning nearly hot. It did not deter me from my plan. I loaded several shovelfuls of coke until the heat roared against the carapace of my face. Then I ascended up to the second level again.

I found my father there seated at his stool, waiting for me. He wore overalls and a worn shop coat. He grunted in greeting.

“I’ve already put out my sets in the atelier to cool.”

I nodded. I wet my lips. I met his eyes.

“I am to start my journeyman’s piece today.”

“I know you are. I’ve worked plenty for this wake.” He inclined his head. “I’d like to keep the furnace for you, if it pleases you.”

I’d already given myself about a turn of excellent firing time already, maybe more, by frontloading the coke. I shook him off and thanked him anyway.

“Maybe in a turn. I’m not sure exactly what I’m making. Perhaps a vase.”

“Remember, Klask, that the form is less important than the technique.”

A pointed nod, a pat on the shoulder.

“I’ll be in the atelier if you need me. There’s sarveon.”

“Perhaps after a few breaths,” I replied.

While he left I busied myself collecting tools. Once I heard his ponderous steps on the stone above I poured the special sand I had gathered into a crucible. It didn’t look like much. Rough, coarse, brown sand mixed with black pebbles. But in glasswork things were oft not what they seemed before changing. They are transformed. It was what I had to do.

I opened the hatch to the oven and used a long wand to set the crucible inside. Latched the hatch back up briskly. I took up a slender blowpipe and cudgel in hand and considered in my mind’s eye, as my father had taught me, the folds and floes of what I would create.

It would be a simple and elegantly lined vessel, I decided. I would not paint or stain the glass. I considered it a different art entire. It would be in this next step, the shaping, where my destiny rested. This would be the technique the guild was looking for.

I watched through a pane as the sand in the crucible began to shimmer. It would soon liquefy. I went up to the atelier for the early sarveon. My father’s twisted glass goblet emptied upon the shell tray. He sat nearby at a set of hard chairs. I took mine up and took a few quick, greedy sips of the heady, frothed green liquid, the effervescent steam moistening my face, then turned to leave.

“There’s no rush, you know,” my father said. “If you don’t finish your piece—or even, if you don’t like it, well, there’s nothing stopping you from setting it aside and beginning anew the next cycle.”

“Thanks,” I said, trying to be cheery. But my stomach churned.

I felt suddenly glum and uncertain. I shuddered and, taking my steaming goblet back down to the second level, I sipped at the heady stuff and pondered the slag which was forming. A simple design. An elegant vase in quiet, quick line. The room was baked with warmth. Then I remembered my blowpipe. I would have to warm it. Glancing around for it I found it had been set in a heating tray by the furnace. So there was no procrastinating.

I popped the furnace door and pulled the crucible forth. I stuck the blowpipe into the gather from the crucible and once it had adhered I pulled it forth. I closed the furnace. This resultant substance was pale and milky with flecks of vermillion. I set out with short, turned puffs to create a decently sized bubble and rolled it out to lengthen it. I imagined in my mind the ghastly elegance of the blind crane-olm that had risen above us from its perch on the Fin, then I lengthened it again.

I took up a steel dowel, cold, in my free hand, and still gripping the blowpipe and glass used the dowel to press two sides of the bubble together. I pulled it apart, gently, and soon enough had the makings of a handle. I discarded the cold dowel to work out the bottom, shaped and flattened it. Once that was complete I took up a heated dowel and used it to pry the cooling vase from the blowpipe. Then I set the blowpipe aside.

On that last dowel I worked off some of the rim, but the glass had begun to firm, so I heated it again briefly with the furnace flaring against my face, then worked a wide fold upon the rim and used a round tool to open it up into a flared mouth. Lastly I dipped it upon a mark, the Pax flame-sigil.

Just as that, it had taken shape. I couldn’t help but smile at its subtle spiral blow which carried unexpected milk and color. But my work was not done. I took it upstairs and placed it in the finishing oven while my father beamed. He’d cleared a whole section for me.

“You’ve done well,” he said quietly after I’d closed the oven door.

I just nodded, and bid him goodbye for now. I would leave the work to anneal for a few turns before I finished it. On the way out I hung my apron on the spindle by the door. I passed the house whose glass flickered darkly with the bounce of a candle within.

I went out of the courtyard and headed into the village. I hoped I wasn’t too early to find some of the pearl divers returning. They would go at the start of the cycle, hoping to rest on the back end. It was only a minute’s walk down a path set out with flattened coral cobble to Silsern.

The houses here, crafted from shell and stone and coral, as circumstance allowed, grew more crowded than I was used to at the Pax villa. My destination Mezle’s, beachside. I walked by Crofter’s Square and down past the monger Urchembalax, who still had the last cycle’s catch. Beyond that a small reef of shanties and rigadoos had been built onto a scree of broken air-blanched coral boulders.

Mezle’s, her house really, had a tall shroom-lit klepsydra mounted prominently upon a ramshackle second floor steeple, easily visible over the rest of the bungalows.

What was it to lose everything you loved, I wondered, as I peeled back double-layered beads to get in. I smelt then smoke and cider, steamed sea spider and bisque, and heard the purr of a game of cloqune. Inside I found a handful of people. I knew most of them.

Seated on withered caps I saw Kota conversing intensely with Ziveyo, glowering darkly over his cup, a lock of his white hair draped across his cheek. Before I could approach, Jaktha saw me.

“Klask! How are you doin?”

She had an easy manner with me. Always had. We went back to sand school times together.

“Pretty well,” I admitted.

She and Ziveyo still wore their sealskin diving skivvies. I gestured to the satchel clumped beside her.

“Find much?”

“Ya bet. Some nice orbs.”

“Untrue!” Ziveyo’s voice rang from behind me. “Jaky found a whole shelf of greatclam. Couldn’t get most of em open but we’ll bring some big druan next time. Like Kota.”

“Thanks,” Kota grumbled, then smiled wryly. “I’d be honored.”

“He’ll need a lever,” I quipped.

That was the start, but not the end, of the rest of my time in the cycle. Mezle, an effervescent little taroe, poured us shots of moon dragon milk. Kota and I did not speak of our expedition to Tama’s Maw among our friends. Perhaps he had told Ziveyo. I liked to think that if I had acted on my feelings for Jaky, instead of travelling on to Blackbloom to live under the Moonmother, and see what lay beyond, perhaps I would have told her. But I did not even tell my father.

The next cycle I awakened to the klepsydra’s empty ding, cycled it, and returned to the drear of this waking life. With my father in the atelier I fed coke into the furnace then sat around while it flared. He called me up soon thereafter with two short thumps: our code to come here. Two thumps of a broomstick upon the ceiling would have garnered the same response.

I found him in his chair up there. He nodded to the rack, raised a wispy brow. “Eh? Are you going to move that…or?”

I realized he referred to my work, which I’d left annealing, cooling and smoldering, as I’d went about my chores. I nodded.

“I was just getting around to it.”

I took the vase out. It was cool to the touch. When I pressed it into my hand it still had the heat of the flame within it. And a flash of ice, perhaps it was my memory, but I shivered. It surely had an elegance. Its exterior glossed, sleek, darkling.

“Here it is.”

“May I?”

I handed it. He marveled at the vase, traced the delicate stem. “This technique, the handle. I didn’t show you this—did I?”

“Oh, that,” I said. “I’ve seen em this way a few places.”

I didn’t say Mezle’s, though perhaps he would understand if I did. On some cycles he would chide me for such wanton behavior. But it was a nice, familiar vase, that I had studied plenty. When I’d studied it I’d had plenty on my mind to be fair, but its utility was practically assured. At least I thought.

“In the village, eh? You sure it’s a vase? It reminds me of a sparkcap stem. It’s very good. It’s truly an astonishing piece, Klask.”

And that was that about it. He gave me the vase back. I stuffed it into a padded sack.

When the bell tolled in the village for cycle’s close I went down and saw the marden as she returned. Yuleza. Older than me, salt-sworn, in rimed leathers stiffened by dragonmetal.

I did not really know her. I ran in circles close to the pearl divers, whereas she often accompanied the fishers. As the only marden of the village, it was her prerogative. Once, recently, there had been three mardens here, who lived together in the tallcap, but not long ago a boat had come and two had left, leaving only the former apprentice Yuleza.

I leaned on the dockwork while I introduced myself. I said I needed this package, a vase with my journeywork brought to the Guild of Glass in Blackbloom. She grinned wide.

“Three more come. I think, seven more cycles. Soon.”

I peered at her, her tawdry hair. “How’s Lunath?”

She shrugged and bared her teeth. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll pray for him,” I offered hollowly.

“Ain’t no Mender,” Yuleza scoffed. She lowered her voice. “Godglass won’t save him. He needs the Conservancy, ya ken?”

I showed no comprehension. I knew the Conservancy, a bit, but failed to see how it mattered. What would they want to conserve?

“Umbra’s great gleaming gill! It’s fungus, Klask, it’s a weird fungus that’s choking the life from him. All right?”

With that outburst she straightened, and seemed prepared to accept the package.

“You’ll—”

“I’ll take it.”

She snatched it, tottered a few sarcastic steps on the dock, then snatched a rope and swung herself up onto the ship’s prow. Made of stout mushroomwood plied together with dragonmetal. It cut through the water on clothen sails. A small, single-person vessel, that the local mardens had maintained since I remember. I had seen Baraskal work it as a youngling, when my parents had time not for myself or my brother, and we roamed the village.

I walked back from the docks, the long stretch across the coral beach to Silsern proper, past Mezle’s lit from within. I did not go there this cycle. Instead I kept my hands in my pockets and moved on. The world turned into a gray corridor around me.