In the cliffside village of Veyra, where the wind howled like a grieving spirit, there was a glassblower named Harlan Veil who crafted wonders. His workshop jutted over the sea, its furnace burning day and night, fueled not by coal—but by memories.
Harlan’s art was singular: he shaped glass into delicate figurines that held not just light, but echoes of the past. A child’s laughter trapped in a bauble. A lover’s whispered promise suspended in a vase. A dying man’s last breath swirling in a goblet.
The villagers paid him in secrets. A widow would bring the scent of her husband’s pipe smoke, and Harlan would blow it into a sphere of glass, giving her something to hold when the nights grew cold. A guilt-ridden priest once surrendered the confession of a murderer, and Harlan twisted it into a spiraling dagger of blue glass—beautiful, but sharp enough to draw blood.
But Harlan himself was hollow. He had given away too much of his own past to the fire. His hands were scarred from glass that remembered pain. His eyes reflected nothing but the furnace’s glow.
Then came Lira, a woman with no memories at all.
She arrived in a boat with no oars, her mind as blank as untouched snow. She had nothing to trade—no sorrows, no joys—so Harlan, for the first time, worked for free. He blew glass around the absence inside her, shaping a hollow bird so thin it seemed made of frost.
When he placed it in her hands, the glass shattered.
And Lira remembered everything.
Not just her own past—but his. Every memory he’d ever burned away rushed back into him at once. The love he’d forgotten. The child he’d abandoned. The death he’d fled.
Harlan screamed as his own life filled him, the weight of it cracking his bones. The villagers found him the next morning, his body frozen in glass—a perfect statue of a man drowning in air.
Now, travelers say that if you hold a piece of Veyra’s sea glass to your ear, you won’t hear the ocean—you’ll hear Harlan, still whispering the question he asked Lira that night:
"What’s heavier—the thing you lose, or the thing you keep?"
And if you listen too long, the glass might just remember you instead.