Cycles, and cycles within Valthyr the peoples spent in rhythm and only kept in rhythm by little inventions: bells, klepsydra, and such record keepers. I was taught that the tides keep a record of the cycles, bundled together, immutable, if measured to a finer scalar. That the draughts of such a tidal klepsydra could be cut into eighths, and it would be the Keeper’s rhythm.

Such as it is. The number eight in the runic sigils is drawn as a circle. The cycles to follow were considered the end of my education, such as it was, and it drew down with appropriate fanfare as I committed the runic marks of mathematics down to tablet, which was evaluated. I was no prodigy, as it turned out. Something I already knew.

Yuleza was gone now, in her place three new mardens, who helped with repairs on the tide-walls and the net-channels the village kept.

I found myself at a blackcap bonfire, far out down the coral isle. It was mostly those who had passed or would soon pass into a threshold of adulthood: myself and Jaky and Ziveyo and half a dozen others. There was no more ‘education’ and ‘learning’. Kota, who was a little ahead, nonetheless sat with his mate on this occasion.

Overhead the Moonmother’s gull-wisps flapped, purpled against the green ribbons of everbloom further up in the cave sky. We roasted sea spiders speared on coarse calcified fungal spikes in the smoky flame. The conversation turned from gossip. We spoke of what was to come in our lives. Jaky laughed at this.

“Rippled water,” she said. “I’ll be diving again next cycle, and many after, I guess.”

“You’ll settle down someday,” I said.

I suppose I was attempting to tease her, but she quirked her brow at me strangely, turning in the firelight, her hair iridescent and orange-flared.

“Oh really, Klask Pax? What about you then?”

“I—I hope to be made a journeyman in truth soon, and work alongside my father.”

After I said it I saw something out at sea coming, a boat churning out of the dark glisten. I did not listen to what was said after that, but when Jaky saw it beside me she pointed and broke the conversation’s spell.

It was not a boat at all, but a sea aedra, a writhing, cabined beast of burden. We speculated what brought it here. Trade, or perhaps sickness? I did not think it would be me.

“Someone else with fungus,” I observed grimly.

The next cycle I awakened, groggy, sand-crusted, smoothing my hairs, rolling about in a fever dream, when there came a rap at my door. I stirred and grunted. The door creaked, and my father’s voice came hence.

“Son, there is someone here to see you.” My father hesitated, then offered, “from Blackbloom.”

When I was up and ready, clothed, washed, I came down the curved stairs. Peering out the windows herein. Some of the glass warped and bubbled. Ancient, really. We could do better. Paning was a different technique entire, much more focused on craftsmanship for the most part.

The downstairs of the Pax residence was all together, just a few lifted steps separating the kitchen from the living hearth. The home wrought of whitestone bricks, reddish-orange mortar, circular and bulbous. The heady scent of jam pervaded. Seated at our breakfast table was an aedra, brown and fungal, vaguely humanoid, its face a set of bulbs with porous stalks arrayed about them. My father opposite.

Shamara, I heard in my mind.

My father turned to me, and gestured to come. His brow now carried a heavy furrow.

“Klask, this is T’nas. It is a Judicator. There is a…matter of, well, sourcing I take it…”

You will sit, then, rootchild. We must speak.

I did as bade. My heart full of ice.

I am T’nas of Tarsura. The song entrusts me with an acorn of truth to raise. Your vase… in my mind projected a picture of a gallery. My vase one artifact amongst many paintings and weavings and sculpture and artifice.

From whence did it come?

“My vase?” I was incredulous, then I thought back. “Uhh…”

Tama’s Maw. I saw the great shark, my ancestral god of truth, swimming beneath in my mind’s eye, glowing in his judgement.

I admitted then to the Judicator what sand I’d used, in addition to detailing the workshop. I told it of the Maw, and the sand I’d taken from therein. I did not mention the mask, or the blue sparks, or the apparition.

Show me, it demanded, rising suddenly, its appendages quivering.

I thought about it, then shook my head.

“The tides won’t allow it. Only at the lowest tide does the cave surface.”

I am of the root, not of the air as you and your kith of the S’uldra. Take me. I must witness the tide-cave. I will descend.

A long silence followed. I felt like I was rocking back and forth.

“Do as it tells you,” my father said.

“You hear it?” I asked, reeling, as we began to walk, the Judicator trotting behind.

“Aye, it cuts like a hot knife. As loud as I’ve ever heard an aedra.”

I glanced at him, knowing his stories of apprenticeship in Blackbloom, among innumerable aedra and nefra and undine and taroe as well as darklings such as our folk. I had taken, once, a voyage with him to Lheren, and even therein the diversity was startling. I recalled the whispering of aedra then, like a tickle of sound in my mind. Perhaps they had just been speaking further away than the Judicator.

I first showed the aedra the workshop: furnace, firing room and atelier, to which it looked on stoically. Afterward we went to the docks and took my father’s sloop out.

“Tama’s Maw,” he said, choking the words out, when the Judicator stood as the prow as we were departing. “Klask, what in the chrome hells were you thinking?”

“It needed to be special,” I said quietly.

“You’d better hope it’s not too special…ya ken? Is it, boy?”

Boy. A name he had not called me in years. My heart dropped at the name. It showed how far down in his estimation I had fallen. When he had told me an emissary from Blackbloom had come, I had perhaps hoped for word from the Guild of Glass, though it I usually arrived via tablet.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

We were heading out into the channel, among a fierce wind. The Judicator did not return from the prow where he brooded like a figurehead.

“It’s just a vase.”

Though I wondered if that was really true, remembering the little beach, the blue sparks, the apparition-thing and the slitted mask I’d taken. Shadyr, the term was, for a shadow-thing of the Myr, the lost ice-keepers of Valthyr.

“Way out west you say?”

I nodded. “Past the Brothers. And past Lilladern. You ever hear about this cave?”

“Heard about,” my father grunted. “Maybe. There’s several tide caves around the S’uldra you know Sk’ara. I’ve certainly never been foolish enough to go in one.”

That was how he was. He did not have even the slightest sense of adventure, and never had. I did not begrudge him that. But I knew he did not understand.

We passed the Brothers, lost tidal volcanoes grown over by a tumble of wet fungus and coral, at high tide geysers, that now water sloshed and fumed and bubbled within in its pits. Then next past Lilladern, among a further, less capricious set of fungal towers, where the waters were still and misty.

Here the shapes became indistinct as patches and wafts of mist and smoke hung over the waters. Some tiny forms flew out of the dark overhead, buzzing the sloop. Shimmering iridescent tiny insectiles with rainbow compounded eyes. Taroe. The Judicator’s formal greeting washed over me.

Greetings in the spill of spore. We merely pass through your sanctums.

My heart pounded. The gravity of its pronouncements scared me. I had not told it the truth. Or at least, not the fullness of the truth.

Soon enough we were crossing the final channel to where Tama’s Fin lay in the blur and murk of the low-slung fog. As it came into view the same crane-olm perched at its summit, but the tide-cave was submerged. I pointed out its presumed location to my father, who took us a little closer, ratcheting the sails back and forth like a silent madman to keep us proceeding herein. Then he cut them suddenly.

“Close enough,” he called forward.

The Judicator strode over, both bulbous and slender. Point now to the tide-cave. The Tama’s Maw.

“Here.”

I pointed to the slight ring of dark in the water.

That was all it needed. It wordlessly took up on the prow then dove with a small bubbling sound into the water. I watched its shadow trail away. I sat in silence with my father with just the sound of waves and the clacks of the winged olms.

“Shaper save me.” My father let out a bitter, barking laugh. “What in the chrome hells did ya witch into that vase?”

“It isn’t witched. I don’t know why they’re here. It’s a good piece!”

I said that last part defensively, and too loud. It bounced out over the water so that the winged olms circling and searching for their meal fell silent for a few breaths.

“Perhaps,” my father allowed.

I wished that he sounded otherwise. But he sounded genuinely unsure. The dark beads of his eyes fixed solely on the black portal the Judicator had descended into. We waited many breaths. We spent most of it in nervous silence.

After a long while the Judicator T’nas Tarsura emerged with a weak glurp. I got up, numb and shaking, and tossed down the braided ladder. Then I wondered if it could just scale the wood of the boat, but it used the ladder not much differently than a darkling would have. There it stood, dripping and steaming and inscrutable.

“Well?” my father asked.

There is firmament and soil. Coral and bone. But no trace of a Myr remnant. No trace of shadyr. Such as it was, if it ever lay therein, surely seeped already into the Aelsea in past ages since the Fall.

We sailed back, my father and I speaking now of the future, of my piece.

“Your vase was exhibited,” he marveled. “I am just wondering how quickly your journeyman’s writ will arrive I think. There is no question.”

At the docks the aedra T’nas faced us and intoned a few of the old words. Then swept into a deep bow, and it moved off.

Thereafter and redeemed I went about the rest of the cycle. My father spoke to me of when he was young, how his first piece was rejected, and it was the second journeyman’s piece which got him in.

A cold ember curled in me when I realized even Kota’s journeyman piece had not been exhibited.

I heard voices downstairs. I rose from slumber and readied myself. I found Yuleza waiting for me downstairs with my family attendant. Everyone seemed rather jovial at first glance. She had taken sarveon, and a vessel had been set for me, which still steamed.

“Just the one we’ve been waiting for.” Yuleza greeted with me with her bared-teeth smile.

“Thanks, Yuleza, by the way.”

“Seems your vase drew quite an interest Sk’ara.”

She used my familiar name Sk’ara, which she’d never done before. I was surprised she knew it, but in all likelihood my parents had been speaking to her about me as they waited.

She tossed her hair, watching me. “I told someone I’d wait for you to open this so I can send an answer. You ken?”

I nodded, looking toward my father and mother. They were both staring at three wrapped tablets on the long plank table. Little things, standard letter sized. I took up the first, wrapped in brown package-cloth, and tied with a coarse rope. I undid the rope, unfurled and set aside the cloth like I’d shuck a shellfish.

The tablet was of pale stone and etched firmly.

To Klask Pax, of Silsern,

We do hereby bestow upon you the rank of Journeyperson of Glass, and the duties and privileges associated.

By the writ of the Grandmasters of Glass, Guild of Glass, Blackbloom Branch

The note was ended with the clan sigils of a half-dozen grandmasters. A moon, a wave, a mushroom fruit, a running animal that reminded me of a jackal, and a few others.

I grinned.

“I’m a journeyperson!”

My family and I celebrated briefly, then I turned back to the packages, as Yuleza waited.

The second was wrapped in sleek gray cloth and bound in black thread, which I removed and read from, written in a similar and firm etching style to the other.

To the interest of Klask Pax, whose talents continue to intrigue—

I offer you a position of Journeyman in the Blue Anvil Atelier in Blackbloom. My specialty is glasswork for the Upper Fate. I was impressed with the form you showed in your journeypreson’s vessel.

Dryskar Kheneprel, Master of Glass

The note was ended with his sigil. An anvil. I sat there, reading it and thinking, and not thinking. My world had suddenly opened up. I could be here, or anywhere, even a thousand leagues away in Blackbloom.

“Well?” my mother asked.

“A job offer,” I explained, and put the tablet down beside me.

I opened the next and final package next. It was wrapped in ruby velvet packaging. The tablet itself dark and heavier than the others. The writing herein flourished and flowing. It contained the following, cryptic, words:

You are a brave artisan, and you can count at least myself among your admirers. If you find yourself in Blackbloom, I would love to meet you. 41 Acdulc—that’s all—just a friend.

I knew then I would go to Blackbloom.

“I’ll take it,” I told Yuleza solemnly. “The job, I mean, in the Blue Anvil Atelier.”

“Now, wait—” my parents cut in, but I shook them off.

“I’ll regret this if I don’t do it,” I said. “I’ve no doubt.”

Yuleza stood, chair creaking back. “Thanks for the sarveon, Paxes.” Lifted her cup, toasted them, then me, then drained it. “In that case you can take the news yourself Klask.”

In the cycles that followed my life flew around me in circles. I said hello and goodbye to just about everyone in the village. I packed away much of my childhood room, said goodbye to the jutsa paddles and dreamcatchers, and packed several pairs of what my mother would refer to as ‘good clothes’ into an old shell-and-leather suitcase my father had.

“It will be a sea voyage, son, much longer than when we went to Lheren. In truth, I always wished to take you to Blackbloom. We shall certainly visit.”

My father patted the suitcase.

“It’ll keep your stuff pretty dry from the spray. Probably not waterproof.”

I thanked him. In truth it seemed I was more crestfallen than he was. I had thought that perhaps I would learn as a journeyperson in truth under his guidance. He, too, was a Master of Glass, just as Dryskar. But my father’s studio was a pale shadow of the Blue Anvil Atelier, I was sure. We lived a simpler life here in Silsern, making glassware and window-works for the village. We grew our own tubers and got along just fine.

I had always wished to go. Or at least, I had always wished I could go. Now that it was before me it was incredibly sad. I said my goodbyes, with hugs and kind words, with responses that varied between ‘I’ll be back’ and ‘Come visit me someday’, depending on who I was talking to.

I packed, in the end: five shirts, five pairs of trousers, various undergarments and socks, two pairs of gloves, my glassworking tools which my father insisted I take, a pouch containing fifteen talons, toiletry supplies, and the little, forbidden slitted mask. I certainly couldn’t leave it here. Indeed, I had half a notion to feed it back to the Aelsea whilst on the voyage, and never think of it again.

On the last cycle, Jaky strode up to me as I walked along the beach, looking out among the shoals.

“Klask! I feel like you’ve been avoiding me…”

“No,” I said, plucking my hands into my pockets. “It just feels really strange is all.”

In my head I thought that perhaps she did not understand, since she had never had chance to leave, but I did not say it. I shrugged.

“I’ll miss you.”

Jaky smiled at that, though her eyes were sad. “You’ll write once in a while, right! Hey, Klask, I made you this.”

She pulled from her trencher a coarse red-and-yellow kerchief and opened it, revealing a crystalline figure inside. Pearl, I corrected myself, studying it closer.

“It’s a shark charm,” she explained. “Out of greatpearl. Take it, it’s for good luck and safe travels.”

It reminded me of Tama and I smiled and closed my hand on the figurine.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.