Life was easy and good here, but I was, ineffably, lonely. I learned from Roz technique and glasswork preference—though I had an idea—as we would oft export our best pieces to Blackbloom. From her vantage everyone wanted things to drink out of, and I supposed she wasn’t wrong.

“But Dryskar,” Roz confided one day as she spun a bead of glass out, “he won’t touch this low fate stuff. So ya see, it’s kinda a secret of Blackbloom but it’s our wares out the door. Who’s the master really, ya? At least for the odds and ends that come outta the Blue Anvil.”

I had taken now to maintaining the furnace, and betwixt that ascended and worked alongside Roz in the firing room. Some cycles after midday we’d leave the whole glassworks alone, entrusted to Dryskar above in his atelier, and go eat elsewhere.

We all ate together mostly for dinner. Dryskar himself joined us about half the time. Often he was with clients until late in the evening when we had long hung up our aprons and the furnace only held a steady, annealing heat for the sleep to come.

It was nearly mid-cycle, and once the klepsydra chimed Roz and I set down our things and went out.

“We will eat of the offerings of the city,” Roz said easily as we went.

This pleased me more than the food offerings from Dryskar and Elfyro, though he was well intentioned. I supposed I was used to a very protein heavy diet of the bounty of the Aelsea.

Roz and I snagged from a nefra streetvendor pushing a cart pieces of greased meat on sticks peppered with Bluereach spice. We leaned upon the wall of a greatcap that flowed slowly and easily in the wind through the middle city and ate, looking out over the glowing mushroom tenements sprent back into the dark.

“How long have you lived here?” I asked Roz.

“About eight years I suppose.”

“So…is that a long time for you? Don’t undines live, you know, at a different pace than darklings?”

“Ya,” Roz said. “Eight years is still a long time for me, Klask. I’m only fifty one. I’m not some ancient artifact.”

“Just curious I guess. I’ve just been here for a handful of cycles. Just curious what you think after eight years.”

“Of Blackbloom?”

I nodded.

Roz narrowed her eyes. “I love it. I’ll never leave. Well—I mean I’ll leave for a time. But I’ll come back. Ya ken? This is my home now. Nobody asks me too many questions here.”

“Except me I guess.”

She chuckled. “Nah, Klask, ya don’t bother me. Believe me if ya did ya’d know.”

“I’ve been meaning to ask you something else. About Lhuna.”

Roz regarded me soberly, like a shark about to strike, pried off and ate another strip of the grill-marked meat, studying me all the while.

“Klask, listen, hon…she’s great, ya?”

I nodded.

“So…look I’ve known her a while. I’ll just tell ya she goes through special friends like ya wouldn’t believe.”

“Special friends, like…?”

“Ya, Klask.”

Roz pointed her stick at me, just a little chunk of meat left on, then ate it, sharp teeth mincing, watching me.

“Just don’t get hurt is all I’m sayin. She’s great as a friend.”

She dropped the stick. This practice still bothered me. They all did this in Blackbloom. They would leave their trash as it lay, set off from doorsteps, heaps of refuse. In my village such would be forbidden. But I did the same, and we walked off.

I glanced back, perhaps to assure myself that it was taken care of. Sure enough us, behind us some little crustaceans scurried out from a copse of blooming yellow mushrooms and took the sticks. As Roz had put it: ‘Blackbloom takes care of itself.’

“I just mean,” I said as we walked, “how can I get in touch with her?”

“Send a message. I mean send it, ya ken? Ya won’t be able to get in there, but the right courier can.”

“Yeah.”

I sighed. It would require a visit to a mason as well as some type of courier. In other words, money, which I had scant little of. I still had the fifteen talons I’d saved before coming, but I was loathe to break into that money except out of necessity.

“Couldn’t you bring it for me?”

“Ya, I could,” Roz said. “But I ain’t gonna meddle in your heart, Klask. Just send it.”

Sadly, I knew I probably wouldn’t. I already owed my family correspondence, which I had not yet commissioned.

That evening Dryskar skittered into the firing room, and yowled at me, “Klask, would you join myself and the Lady Aethyra for dinner?”

The tone took me aback, but I acquiesced with a nod, then stood the half-formed drinking cup and set my implements aside.

“Can I freshen up first?” I asked.

Dryskar nodded. “Very good. We will await you.”

He gave me a small bow, then scrambled out of the room. Some of the nefra I’d seen on the streets—most of them, in fact—had been graceful. Slow, even. But Dryskar was anything but. He was a dervish of motion and energy.

In the communal washroom I shared with the journeypeople I disrobed and washed off. A metal knob called a faucet delivered a rush of water into a basin. I changed into my nicest shirt, patterned with scarletfish, and then ascended back up the firing room, waved to Roz, and went up.

I found upstairs Dryskar, Hakru, and another nefra that I believed was the Lady Aethyra.

“Welcome, Klask!” Dryskar barked. “Do you remember the Lady Aethyra? She was here when you first came to me, in fact.”

“Of course…”

I shuffled in and scraped out a stone chair to join them—sitting beside Hakru—at a long table. The two nefra hung from spun web-hammocks adhered to the ceiling. Set upon the table were various sauces that glimmered in the greenish shroomlight, a few bowls heaped full of candied nuts and meats, a carafe of darkwine, and breads both light and dark.

“We don’t stand on ceremony.” Dryskar gestured vaguely with one of his limbs to the table.

We supped together. I found the dark bread best, full of spice and flavor.

The Lady Aethyra smiled at that.

“Ah, excellent choice, Klask. For a savage from the S’uldra, you are surely sharp.”

“We are no savages!” I protested.

“Ah—I meant no offense, child. Yet is it not true that the S’uldra has none of the artifice that has bloomed in Blackbloom? Or in the World Without?”

“I’d not know of that. I merely mean that we—I,” I had to correct, “too, in the S’uldra, in my village of Silsern, have abandoned the old ways long ago.”

“Of course,” Aethyra demurred. “My apologies.”

“Curiously,” Dryskar chirped, “the Lady Aethyra is the one who requested your presence at this dinner.”

I looked back from the master to Aethyra. Where Dryskar was dark and lithe, Aethyra was light, and her bare legs had a sheen upon them almost like ice. Her body was lightly furred in white striped in silver, and her face held high. Her whiskers shook.

“Yes, Klask, I’d like a commission from you. I must say, I was smitten with your vase.”

My vase! It hit me then. It hadn’t before. Where was it? Did the guild have it? Something must have shown in my face.

“What’s wrong, Klask?” the nefra asked. “Shaper save you, child, I’ll pay you well. I’ll see to it that your master over here—” she glared at Dryskar “—doesn’t steal a lantern, either. I pay him well too you know.”

“Well well,” Dryskar said with a calculated chuckle. “You’ll take it, right Klask? She wants you to make a vase like the other for her.”

“I’d be honored. Thank you, Aethyra.”

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

She smiled at me, fangs baring. “It is my pleasure.”

“Hakru,” Dryskar said suddenly, “How is the menagerie coming? The lady comes for news of that as well I am sure.”

With that, Dryskar turned the conversation over, into this menagerie he was commissioned to make for the Lady Aethyra, for some great party that was yet to come. I wondered what it entailed, and I looked for the first true time around the atelier during Hakru’s report, missing most of this conversation.

The atelier consists of concentric bubble-shaped chambers. The central being the atelier itself, the Blue Anvil’s top rack in the center, glass annealing within. From the flames that I had stoked. We were in another chamber, and from my seat I saw two other chambers. Within the nearest I saw bulbous furniture pieces.

“…Several glass statuettes are in there now,” Hakru said, smiled. “I’ll bring one out once we’re done here.”

“So,” Dryskar said, “what do you think Klask? D’you like the Blue Anvil?”

“It’s great. I’m learning a lot. I thank you for the opportunity.”

Dryskar purred briefly at that. Once dinner ended he dismissed me so they could check their menagerie.

I found Roz downstairs, wearing short-cut leathers, rough and lean, she looked up when I returned.

“Klask, how was it? They didn’t treat ya too bad right?”

“Nah, it was fine. That Aethyra commissioned a piece from me.”

“Chrome hells,” Roz cursed. “Ya watch out for that Shaper’s priest. Anyway, wanna come to a party? Aqta’s movin…not far from me, just far from where she was, ya ken?”

I did not hesitate. I was, had been, lonely, even after that dinner. I missed my friends and family. I missed the connections in the village. In the village I knew everyone, and they all knew me. For better or for worse. Here, I was nothing to pretty much everyone. I was lonely for connection.

“You going now?” I asked.

The klepsydra dinged. “Pretty much.”

After I’d dressed in my olmleather trencher and a buttoning shirt with various mushroom-weaves upon it, I followed Roz outside.

She addressed the swirling sporesong.

“Take us to Rift City. Westwall.”

And away we went. I hurried along beside Roz as we descended into the bedlam of the lower city. We had about two turns before sleep, though I doubted we’d be back at a reasonable time.

The tenements turned into a downward-furled sprawl, a gleaming chasm, cliff-faces lined with tallcaps and glowing hollows. I often had to step around refuse and debris, and once a dead thing, a greasy carcass, which had been subsumed by glowcaps. Cave birds soared and kited. Little clouds of smoke drifted in eddies.

We took a turn, then another, rambling through a small bazaar of crofters into an old neighborhood. Many of the tallcaps here had been broken down and now moldered darkly in the sporelight as a hundred other things bloomed. There were itinerant nefra milling among the tumbled gardens. At a dilapidated, bulbous tallcap, cracking and peeling, Roz pulled up.

“This?” I asked, a little frightened of going into a thing in such disrepair.

“…Is why she’s leaving. Westwall, it’s historic and all, ya, but it’ll take more than her lifetime to grow new buildings…”

She turned to me.

“Klask…just makin sure ya know how to get home?”

“Sure. Just ask the sporesong.”

Roz grinned, and with that the lanky undine went in and didn’t look back. I tarried, a little nervous. This would, I believed, be more people in a singular house than lived in the whole of Silsern.

Then I walked through the threshold, pushed aside a silk blanket hung across it, and found a home overtaken. I coughed. It was smoky in here, and the air was fragrant and sweet-tasting. The first room contained just the shambles of furniture, mushroomwood slats, a few dried chaircaps. There were people here, no one I recognized, talking.

Some of them passed among themselves a silver conch shell. I had tried it once.

“’Ey, darkling,” one of them called, waving me over.

I approached. They were five in number: three darklings, a nefra and a taroe. The darkling that had called me over proffered the j’rhilo, but I held up my hand. He had a lumpy face and dark hair, and his eyes danced with color.

“D’you know what this is though? It’s not food if that’s what you’re thinkin…it’s filled with magic smoke!”

“I know,” I said quietly. “I mean if you live here it’s fine but I would rather not.”

“Tch. Suit yourself, darkling.”

He took a drag on the conch then sputtered out coughing. I turned to the others.

“I really should at least say hi…know where Aqta is?”

The taroe—a little winged insectile fairy glimmering green-and-blue in a silken dress patterned with waves—fluttered up to me and pointed beyond, down a corridor.

“Her girlfriend just went that way looking for her, I think.”

“Thanks,” I said and moved on.

The corridor’s wooden floor creaked and in a spot pushed down like mush, so I took my weight off it. I wandered through little rooms, some with cots or webbed hammocks set out, all bolstered by revelers. I stepped into one room that smelt strongly of fermented spirits, thinking that I’d seen the blue skin of an undine within, but found instead a savage darkling whose face was covered in blue tattoos sitting alongside the half-empty cauldron.

He smiled at my confusion. His teeth were sharp like Roz’s. I had never seen a darkling with teeth like that before, but I’d heard stories of the druan tribes of the Bluereach. They were one of the only peoples left in Valthyr that had not foresworn the old ways. I must have paled, for he growled and turned away.

He turned back swiftly enough, holding out toward me a gourd of ferment. I took it, gave it a closer sniff. It carried a spice smell within it, as well as perhaps fruit. Neither of which I could identify. It was also extremely effervescent. I coughed.

“Heheheh…what’s the problem, druan?”

“Sorry. I just never saw someone like you before is all.”

“I get it a lot.” He clinked his cup against mine. “If ya never had the vessk before best to go slow, ya ken?”

His voice reminded me of something, and as I walked away I realized he spoke a little like Rozraheth.

I ventured through to the next room, and then finding no one familiar up a curved flight of stairs set with misshapen windows that had begun to droop. In what seemed like a study I found a cadre of nefra students from the Weaver’s Spire. The vessk, alcoholic and turgid and orange, tasted terrible, but I sipped at it with regularity as I listened.

What they spoke of was a new method of communication. It was called silkspeak, and it could be wrought into rope and sent along for a fraction of the cost of a carved tablet. It was not without its flaws it seemed, only being useful for simple messages with very little syntax.

“It’s in use now?” I cut in.

The nefra nodded at me from their strange little cups from which they sipped.

“And…people know about this?”

“Some do anyway. It just makes sense.”

“So do any of you all, you know, encode these things?”

“I can.” A slender, bluish nefra spoke. “Sure, what do you want it to say?”

“Say…Lhuna: If you’re of the mind for it, call on me sometime. I’d love to catch up. Klask Pax.”

The nefra turned away, spinnerets writhing, and I leaned back and finished the vessk with a gulp, looking around again. An aedra shambled past, dragging a swath of sporesong behind it. When it was gone the nefra broke off the creation with a snap and threw the woven white rope at me.

I tried to catch it, but ended up clawing it back up off the ground. It was almost like a bracelet. I tucked it away and thanked the nefra.

“You are too kind.”

The nefra waggled its tongue. “’Tis but a trifle, Klask.”

I took my leave and continued the search for Roz. I feared it was already growing late, though I’d seen no klepsydra in this place, or pretty much most other marks of what I thought of as civilization. Yet despite that the dying home teemed with folk of all paths of the dragon.

In the end the taroe I’d met earlier caught my attention.

“Hey…lost guy! They’re on the roof.”

Her voice small but shrill in my ear, I whirled to find her hovering in the ruin of a nearby window.

“The roof…?”

She sighed, hands in her pockets. “Fine, cmon, I’ll show you.”

She glided along ahead of me, and I followed, clutching my empty gourd in my claw. When we turned into an empty corridor she twirled halfway around, still gliding as she guided me. She chittered, like a laugh, and looped back suddenly and buzzed my ear.

I flinched instinctively.

“We’re not bugs.”

She chittered again and then the corridor turned and I found myself at a place where the top of the house had been torn off entirely. A ladder leaned against one wall. She flew up, and I was left alone contemplating the ladder. It was a lot newer than the house.

I tested it and it held me, though I imagined I was probably one of the stouter people to use it. At least judging by most of the city darklings I’d seen. Even Roz, tall as she was, was lithe. And most of the nefra looked like they were made of just ice and bone.

I climbed, terror surging in me, and scrabbled up onto the roof. My claws clacked upon the shell-tiles laid on the broken mushroom flower. Everyone looked at me, then turned back. There weren’t many up here. A few lovers, including Roz and Aqta! The little taroe buzzed up to me.

“See? You made it.”

“Thanks! You’re great…” I hestitated. “I’m Klask, by the way.”

I flinched, my intention being to hold out my claw in greeting, but I realized she was just about the same size as my claw just in time.

She chittered. “The pleasure is mine. Zelvy. I’m not above shaking your hand.”

So I held my claw out, and she fluttered up and delicately placed a tiny claw onto the soft velvet bottom of my palm.

Roz was waving me over. Her other arm firmly around Aqta.

“I’m not meaning to be a bother,” I said as I approached.

“They’re too much in the maelstrom to notice ya,” Roz returned.

I shrugged, then sat beside them. Zelvy drifted down next to me.

“Just figured ya might want to see the city.”

“Yeah, I’ve never really heard of this place before…”

“What, Westwall?”

“Or you mean the whole Rift City?” Aqta added.

“Yeah—Rift City.”

Roz and Aqta chuckled and exchanged a glance.

“You see, no one wants to admit they’re from Rift City.” Aqta took off and polished her spectacles on her tunic as she spoke. “Essspecially to people from somewhere else. They’d be like, Rift City? What’s that?”

I supposed they were more than a little inebriated. “It’s like if I told you I was from Silsern, right?”

“I know Silsern,” Aqta said. “You don’t know me Klask but I’m studying to be a mycologist and I’ll have you know the S’uldra is a very special place. Mycologically speaking. You’ve got Silsern moss, Silsern longshroom, just off the top of my head. Haven’t been there. Is it lovely?”

The last bit she asked almost achingly. I had a rush of color, the waves, the smolder of the sky all around when I was out in the channels.

“I miss it.”

That last statement casted a silence upon the group until Roz and Aqta began to chat among themselves, and I turned to Zelvy.

“So where are you from?” I asked.

“Not far really,” Zelvy said. “It’s just a tencycle from Blackbloom.”

“Is this another Rift City situation?”

“No, no, no…it’s really nice actually. You know Trysmat?”

“I think Roz said it once. But no.”

“Yeah! Funny that you mention that, I met Roz on that trip!”

“So you’ve known her a while?”

“Aqta and I go back and back. She’s not the only one that wants to be a mycologist.”

She said that last part almost defiantly.

“I can understand that,” I admitted. “I’m a glassblower. Journeyman. It’s not real schooling, but still. My brother Kota—he’s a glassblower too. Was, I guess, now. He always paced me.”

I said it and I realized suddenly that he no longer did. That I had now exceeded everyone except my father.

“You just worry about yourself…”

She fluttered up suddenly beside me.

“Do you mind if…I sit here? I’m cold.”

“S—sure.”

She landed on my knee, and reclined, nestling into my trouser material.

“I don’t think you have anything to worry about Klask.”

“Same to you.”

“So do you live here?”

Zelvy chittered. “Not anymore! When the high cycle rings we have to be gone from here. Like, they’re gonna come through and shred the tallcap and that’s that.”

“Sorry…”

“Klask, this place was condemned before we were born. These things take a long time to come to fruition, you see.”

“Of course. Blackbloom wasn’t grown in a cycle.”

She smiled. “Yeah. That’s right.”

“Where are you gonna live now? Have you already moved?”

“I’ve been in Rhaltaz—sapphire canto—for a tencycle already. I room with Aqta there in the Acdulc.” She chittered. “Why do you ask?”

I had asked the question instinctively. I flushed. I hadn’t—though we had taroe out in the S’uldra, they mostly kept to their own kind.

“I’m just joking!”

I smiled wanly, though I knew I’d strayed from the Pact. The old ways of Valthyr would have had us mate kind to kind and sex to sex, but we’d long since transcended those.

“Maybe I’ll call on you,” I said recklessly.

Late, late in the cycle I staggered home. I shared the path for a time with Zelvy until we reached her canto beneath the sapphire caps of Rhaltaz, then I bid her goodbye. I stood there watching her glitter-trail shimmer down.