The Glass Rain Apprentice

• Chapter 1 The Season of Blades
• Chapter 2 Dust and Anvils
• Chapter 3 The Out-of-Season Shard
• Chapter 4 Secrets Beneath the Forge
• Chapter 5 The Glassmaker's Code
• Chapter 6 Whispers in the Storm
• Chapter 7 The Sky Guild's Shadow
• Chapter 8 Cold Fire
• Chapter 9 Fractured Runes
• Chapter 10 Into the Bleeding Wastes
• Chapter 11 The Alchemist's Betrayal
• Chapter 12 Silent Tempest
• Chapter 13 The Echoing Sky
• Chapter 14 The Winter Siphon
• Chapter 15 Unraveling the Canopy
• Chapter 16 The Razor Sovereign
• Chapter 17 Fragments of the Old World
• Chapter 18 The Sunlit Vault
• Chapter 19 Blood on the Prism
• Chapter 20 The Falling Horizon
• Chapter 21 Stormbreaker's Vow
• Chapter 22 The Crucible of Glass
• Chapter 23 Skyward Descent
• Chapter 24 The Unbroken Shard
• Chapter 25 When the Sky Clears
• Chapter 26 The Master of Rain

The sky above the Kingdom of Oakhaven did not weep water; it wept daggers.

Twice a year, the clouds turned the color of bruised iron, the air grew thick with the smell of ozone and melted sand, and the Great Calamity of the sky began. The glass rain was coming, and every sensible soul in the valley of Morne was currently boarding up their windows, securing their reinforced lead-glass skylights, and retreating deep into subterranean cellars.

Milo, however, was dangling from a rusted copper drainpipe three stories above the cobblestones, trying to pry a wedged piece of guttering free before the first shard fell.

"Milo! You idiot boy! If you lose your hands to the sky-shear, I am not paying the chirurgeon to sew them back on!"

The voice bellowed from the street below, rich with phlegm and impatience. It belonged to Master Orin, the premier—and arguably the grouchiest—glass-smith in the lower district. Orin stood in the doorway of his workshop, his stout frame clad in thick, layered aprons of boiled drake-hide. He was wearing his heavy brass storm-goggles, which made him look like a disgruntled, giant insect.

"Just one more second, Master Orin!" Milo called back, his fingers straining against the cold copper. "The drainage channel is clogged with last season's glass-dust. If the water-run doesn't clear, the weight of the new shards will collapse the entire eastern eaves!"

"Then let it collapse!" Orin spat, though he knew the boy was right. If the eaves fell, the forge would flood with molten glass-slag, and they’d be bankrupt by morning. "The wind is shifting, Milo! Look at the clouds. They’re turning purple. You have three minutes before the sky starts throwing knives!"

Milo didn't need to look at the clouds to know the danger. The hair on his arms was already standing on end, charged by the static electricity that always preceded a glass storm. The air tasted of copper pennies and dry heat.

With a grunt of exertion, Milo wedged his pry-bar beneath the jammed guttering. He threw his weight into it. The rusted bracket gave way with a screech that sounded like a dying bird. A massive clump of fused, glittering blue glass-rubble—the remnants of the spring harvest—tumbled down, shattering harmlessly against the paved street below. The copper channel popped back into place, perfectly aligned to divert the incoming deluge into the collection bins.

"Done!" Milo yelled, swinging his legs around to catch the rungs of the iron fire escape.

As his boots touched the metal, a sharp, ringing clink echoed from the roof above him. It was a delicate sound, like a fingernail tapping a wine glass. Then came another. Clink. Clink-clink.

"Down! Now!" Orin roared, slamming his heavy wooden door shut, leaving only a tiny viewing slit open.

Milo didn't look up. He scrambled down the ladder, his boots slipping on the slick metal rungs. The clinks turned into a rapid, rhythmic patter, and then, with terrifying speed, into a deafening roar.

A shard of violet-tinted glass, six inches long and sharp enough to shave a wet whisker, zipped past Milo's ear, slicing a neat tear through the shoulder of his canvas tunic. He felt the cold kiss of the air on his skin, followed instantly by the sting of a shallow scrape.

He leaped from the bottom rung, tumbling onto the hard-packed dirt of the alleyway just as a veritable curtain of glass descended upon the city. He scrambled on hands and knees through the heavy cellar door of the forge, which Orin held open by a mere crack. As soon as Milo’s muddy boots cleared the threshold, Orin slammed the oak-and-iron door shut, throwing three massive deadbolts into place.

The noise inside the cellar was immediate and absolute. It sounded as if a million tiny hammers were beating a relentless rhythm against the reinforced stone ceiling. This was the Season of Blades, the autumn glass rain, and for the next three days, the sky would belong to the storm.

Milo lay on the dirt floor, chest heaving, listening to the roar of the glass. He reached up to touch his shoulder. His fingers came away with a smear of bright red.

"Stupid," Orin muttered, though his rough hands were surprisingly gentle as he grabbed Milo by the collar and hauled him to his feet. The master smith grabbed a rag from his belt and pressed it against Milo's cut. "A fraction of an inch to the left, boy, and you'd have been bleeding out on my doorstep. I've told you a thousand times, the sky doesn't care about our gutters."

"If the gutters broke, we wouldn't have any raw material for the winter," Milo said, wincing as the rough fabric bit into the wound. "We need this harvest, Master. The Sky Guild raised their taxes again. If we don't produce fifty high-grade panes of sky-glass by mid-winter, they’ll revoke your license."

Orin’s face darkened under the soot of his trade. He let go of the rag, grunting as he walked over to the great bellows of his primary forge. "The Guild can take their taxes and stuff them down a furnace. But... you're not wrong. The margins are thin this year. The sky is getting stingy."

Milo stood up, stretching his limbs to make sure everything was still attached and functional. He was seventeen, lean and wiry from years of hauling heavy crates of sand and coal, with dark hair that always seemed to have a dusting of glass-powder in it. He had spent his entire life in the lower district of Morne, a place defined by the rhythmic cycles of the glass rain.

In Oakhaven, the rain was both a curse and a livelihood. Twice a year, atmospheric magic condensed in the upper stratosphere, crystallizing the vapor into razor-sharp shards of glass that plummeted to the earth. The type of glass changed with the season. The spring rain brought Aero-glass, light and buoyant, used for optical instruments and the delicate windows of the nobility. The autumn rain brought Chrono-glass, dense, dark violet, and highly resistant to heat, making it the perfect material for industrial machinery, lanterns, and protective structures.

To the common folk, the rain was a hazard to be survived behind shuttered doors. To the glass-smiths, it was a harvest of pure gold falling from the heavens.

"Go wash that cut," Orin ordered, gesturing toward a bucket of clean water in the corner. "Then start the fire in the secondary crucible. We can't afford to waste the heat of the storm. The heat from the falling glass outside warms the flue-pipes; we'll save half our coal if we start melting now."

Milo nodded. He walked over to the water bucket, splashing the cold liquid over his face and neck to wash away the sweat and grit. He cleaned the cut on his shoulder, which was already stopping its bleeding. It was a minor wound, a mere scratch by the standards of a glass-smith's apprentice. Most men in his trade bore a map of white scars across their hands and faces—the "sky’s signature," as they called it.

As Milo worked on the fire, pumping the heavy leather bellows until the coals glowed a deep, cherry red, the storm outside raged on. The sound was hypnotic. It was a chaotic symphony of shattering, scraping, and sliding. Millions of razor-sharp fragments were piling up in the streets, filling the specially designed collection hoppers that lined the roofs of the city's smithies.

Through the heavy copper pipes that ran from the roof gutters directly into the holding bins of the workshop, Milo could hear the satisfying hiss-shuck of falling shards sliding down the chutes.

"Sounds like a heavy harvest," Milo remarked, squinting through the spy-hole of the furnace. "The purple tint in the clouds was deep. We should get some high-purity Chrono-glass from this run."

"Aye," Orin said, pulling a long iron rod from the rack. "But high-purity means high danger. The purer the magic in the glass, the more volatile it is when you melt it. If you get a pocket of unrefined sky-essence trapped in the crucible, it’ll blow the stone right off the hearth. Keep your eyes on the color of the melt. If it turns yellow, drop the dampers and run."

"Understood," Milo said.

He loved this part of the work, despite the danger. There was a strange magic in taking the violent, destructive scrapings of the sky and turning them into things of utility and beauty. A window that could withstand a catapult stone; a lens that could see the moons of other worlds; a vial that could hold the most corrosive acids without dissolving. All of it came from the sky, and all of it required the precise, dangerous art of the glass-smith to tame.

For hours, the two worked in silence, a well-rehearsed dance of muscles and heat. Orin handled the heavy iron ladles, skimming the dross and impurities off the top of the molten purple liquid, while Milo managed the draft-gates, fed the coal, and prepared the iron casting molds.

The temperature in the cellar rose until both men were slick with sweat, their skin reflecting the orange glow of the furnace. Outside, the storm showed no signs of abating. The wind howled, driving the glass blades against the stone walls of the shop with a sound like a thousand grinding wheels.

It was nearing midnight when the first anomaly occurred.

Milo was preparing to clear the intake grate of the primary hopper. Occasionally, larger clumps of glass would fuse together in the chute, blocking the flow of the smaller shards. He took a long, hook-ended iron rod and inserted it into the inspection port of the copper intake pipe.

He poked at the blockage, expecting to feel the familiar, crunchy resistance of clustered violet shards.

Instead, the rod hit something remarkably solid. It didn't crunch. It didn't give. It felt like he was poking a solid block of iron.

"Master Orin," Milo called out, his voice strained over the roar of the furnace. "The intake is jammed bad. I can't break it loose with the hook."

Orin didn't look up from his ladle. "Use the breaker-bar. Give it a hard strike. It’s probably just a cold-weld from the moisture in the pipe."

Milo fetched the heavy iron breaker-bar, a thick rod with a flat, hardened tip. He threaded it into the inspection port, aligned it with the blockage, and brought his palm down hard on the end of the bar.

Clang.

The vibration traveled up the metal rod, stinging Milo's hands and rattling his teeth. That was not the sound of Chrono-glass breaking. Chrono-glass shattered with a high-pitched, musical snap. This sound was dull, dense, and resonance-heavy.

"Something's wrong," Milo muttered.

He pulled the breaker-bar out and grabbed a pair of long-nosed iron tongs. He reached up into the port, groping blindly through the narrow chute, trying to get a grip on whatever was clogging the pipe. The metal of the chute was hot, radiating the friction-heat of thousands of falling shards.

His tongs clamped onto something thick and irregular. He twisted, pulling backward. The object resisted, wedged tight against the copper throat of the hopper.

"Orin, I need a hand," Milo called, his tone shifting from casual annoyance to genuine concern. "It's stuck. And... it feels heavy. Too heavy."

Orin sighed, setting his ladle down on the fire-brick rest. He wiped his brow with his sleeve and walked over to the intake pipe. "If you've managed to wedge a piece of structural slate in my hopper, boy, you'll be cleaning the flues with a toothbrush."

The master smith gripped the handle of the tongs along with Milo. Together, they gave a coordinated, powerful heave.

With a sound like tearing metal, the object broke free. It slipped down the chute, followed by a sudden, violent hiss of pent-up violet glass-dust that poured out of the inspection port like dry sand.

Milo stumbled backward, dropping his side of the tongs as the heavy object fell onto the dirt floor of the workshop with a heavy, metallic thud.

Both men stared down at the floor.

It was a shard, but like nothing Milo had ever seen.

The autumn rain produced Chrono-glass—a material characterized by its deep violet hue, its translucent clarity, and its orderly, crystalline structure.

The object lying on the floor was nearly a foot long, thick as a man's wrist, and shaped like a jagged tear in the fabric of reality. It was not violet. It was a deep, hypnotic, shimmering crimson—the color of fresh arterial blood or a dying star.

But it wasn't just the color that made Milo's breath hitch. It was the temperature.

The air around the crimson shard was visibly warping, shimmering with a dry, intense heat that made the surrounding dirt floor hiss and turn to black ash. Yet, as Milo stared closer, he saw that the core of the red glass was frozen over with a delicate, impossible frost. Pale blue veins of ice seemed to pulse beneath the fiery red surface, spider-webbing through the center of the stone like frozen lightning.

"What in the name of the Seven Suns is that?" Milo whispered, leaning forward.

Orin didn't answer. For the first time since Milo had known him, the old master smith looked genuinely terrified. He took a step back, his hand instinctively reaching for the heavy iron mallet he kept at his hip.

"Don't touch it, Milo," Orin whispered, his voice suddenly hoarse. "Don't you dare go near it."

"But Master, it came from the sky," Milo said, his eyes locked on the pulsing red light. "It fell with the rain."

"No," Orin said, his eyes wide behind his brass goggles. "The sky doesn't make red glass. Not in autumn. Not ever. That's... that's not a shard of this season."

The crimson glass pulsed again, a slow, rhythmic throb of light that seemed to match the distant beat of the thunder outside. And in that moment, Milo realized that the deafening roar of the glass rain above them had suddenly gone dead silent.

The silence within the cellar was far heavier than the deafening roar that had preceded it. For seventeen years, Milo had measured his life by the acoustic rhythm of the sky. The rain was a constant companion, a chaotic background noise that defined the boundary between safety and peril. To have that noise severed so abruptly, as if a giant hand had smothered the heavens, felt like a physical blow. The sudden absence of sound made his ears ring with a high, thin frequency that vibrated deep within his chest.

"Master Orin?" Milo spoke, his voice sounding thin and muffled in the damp, static-charged air of the workshop. "Did the storm stop? All at once?"

Orin didn’t answer immediately. His heavy brass goggles reflected the crimson pulse of the strange shard resting on the packed dirt between them. The old smith’s hand remained clamped on the handle of his heavy iron mallet, his knuckles white and strained. He slowly pulled the goggles down around his neck, revealing eyes that were wide, bloodshot, and fixed on the glowing anomaly. The heat radiating from the object was dry and suffocating, yet the thin rind of frost clinging to its jagged edges did not melt. Instead, the ice seemed to drink the ambient warmth of the forge, crackling with a faint, crystalline hiss.

"The storm didn’t stop, boy," Orin said, his voice dropping to a gravelly whisper. He reached out with his boot and nudged a stray piece of violet Chrono-glass that lay near the crimson stone. The moment the violet shard made contact with the red glass, it didn’t shatter; it simply dissolved into a fine, grey powder that smelled of burnt sulfur and old dust. "The sky is waiting. It’s holding its breath."

Milo took a cautious half-step forward, his curiosity momentarily overriding the cold knot of dread in his stomach. He was an apprentice, and apprentices were taught to inspect every unique piece of sky-slag for potential value. He bent at the waist, squinting to analyze the structural matrix of the stone. "Look at the fracturing, Master. Chrono-glass always shears at sixty-degree angles. This piece has nine-sided fractures. And the core... it’s not just cold. Those blue veins are moving."

"I told you not to look too closely at it!" Orin snapped, grabbing Milo’s leather collar and hauling him back with a strength that belied his age. "This isn't just a bad batch of melt, Milo. This is high-resonance sky-glass. The kind the Sky Guild executes people for possessing without a license. The kind that shouldn't exist in this hemisphere, let alone in the middle of an autumn harvest."

"The Sky Guild?" Milo rubbed his neck where the rough leather collar had pinched his skin. "What would they want with a piece of out-of-season scrap? They control the high-altitude collectors. If this fell from the upper air, they must have millions of pieces like it."

"They don't," Orin said grimly. He walked over to the heavy timber workbench, his boots crunching on the accumulated glass-dust of decades. He picked up a pair of long-handled, lead-lined crucible tongs—the kind used for handling highly volatile materials that had been contaminated by sulfur-leaks. "The Guild spends half their treasury making sure the seasons remain distinct. Spring is for Aero-glass. Autumn is for Chrono-glass. The two are never supposed to mix. If they do, the physical laws of the valley start to drift. You saw what happened to that violet shard. It didn't break. It turned to ash. If a whole storm of this stuff hit the city, Morne would crumble to dust in an afternoon."

He approached the crimson shard with the lead-lined tongs extended, his movements deliberate and tense. The air between the tongs and the stone shimmered with heat waves, bending the light of the nearby furnace into strange, greasy rainbows. When the lead tips of the tongs clamped onto the glass, a loud, metallic ping echoed through the room, followed by a puff of white steam that smelled of winter frost and hot iron.

Orin grunted, his muscles straining as he lifted the foot-long fragment. "It’s twice as heavy as lead," he muttered, his breath hitching as he carried it toward the secondary anvil—the cold-work anvil made of solid, low-impurity pig iron. "Get the dampening box, Milo. The iron one with the salt-liner in the corner. Quick now, before the heat cracks the stone floor."

Milo scrambled across the cluttered workshop, his boots slipping on the slick, violet dust. He kicked aside a pile of discarded iron casting molds, searching for the heavy, rusted iron chest that Orin used to store raw, unrefined sky-essence. The box was tucked beneath a shelf loaded with jars of cobalt, manganese, and copper oxides. He dragged it out by its thick rope handles, the salt inside shifting with a dry, scraping sound.

The salt-liner was crucial. Common rock salt was one of the few materials that could ground the residual magical static of raw sky-glass, preventing it from discharging into the surrounding metalwork or setting fire to the wooden support beams of the shop.

"Here," Milo said, hoisting the box onto the small wooden stool beside the secondary anvil. He flipped open the heavy iron lid, revealing the greyish-white bed of coarse salt.

Orin lowered the crimson shard into the box. The moment the stone touched the salt, a sharp, crackling sound erupted, like dry pine throwing sparks in a campfire. The salt around the shard instantly blackened, turning into hard, glassy clinkers that fused to the sides of the iron container. The crimson glow dimmed slightly, retreating into the frozen core of the stone, though the blue veins of ice continued to pulse with a slow, hypnotic rhythm.

Orin slammed the lid shut and threw the heavy brass latch. He leaned his weight against the iron box, chest heaving, sweat dripping from the tip of his nose onto the rusted metal.

"We need to get rid of it," the old smith said, his voice flat and hard.

"Get rid of it?" Milo looked at the box, then at the furnace, where the molten violet Chrono-glass was still bubbling in the primary crucible, waiting to be cast into the winter lanterns. "Master, that shard is worth more than our entire winter quota. If we can refine even a fraction of that red glass, we could pay off the Sky Guild's taxes for the next five years. We wouldn't have to live in the cellar every autumn. We could buy a real shop in the upper tier."

"And we'd be dead before the contract was signed," Orin said, turning his bloodshot eyes to Milo. "You don't understand what you're looking at, boy. That isn't just different colored glass. That’s a fragment of the Old Canopy. The stuff that existed before the Great Calamity, before the Sky Guild put up the barriers to regulate the rains. If the Guild find out we have this, they won't just revoke our license. They’ll dismantle this shop stone by stone, and they’ll throw us into the deep mines of the Bleeding Wastes to breathe glass-dust until our lungs turn to stone."

Milo stared at his master, the intensity of Orin's fear striking him more than the danger of the shard itself. Orin was a man who had worked the forge through three major storm-shears, who had once lost two fingers to a boiling slag-burst and simply cauterized the stumps against the furnace door before finishing his shift. To see him trembling over a single piece of glass was deeply unsettling.

"The Old Canopy?" Milo repeated the term, one he had only heard in tavern tales told by half-drunk prospectors who searched the high ridges for pre-Calamity relics. "I thought those were just stories. The sky has always rained glass."

"The sky rained water once, Milo," Orin said softly, walking over to the water bucket and dipping a dirty rag into the cool liquid. He pressed it to his forehead, closing his eyes. "A long time ago, before the sky broke. When the glass started falling, it wasn't organized into seasons. It was chaos. Fire and ice falling together, shredding everything in their path. The Guild built the siphon-towers to sort the elements, to give us a sky we could predict, a sky we could harvest. This red shard... it’s a piece of the raw, unsorted sky. If it fell here, in the middle of a controlled Chrono-storm, it means the siphons are failing."

As if to emphasize his words, a low, rumbling vibration shook the stone foundations of the smithy. It wasn't the sharp, rattling thunder of a localized lightning strike, but a deep, tectonic groan that seemed to rise from the earth itself. The tools hanging on the wooden racks clattered against one another, and a shelf of ceramic storage jars rattled perilously, sending a small vial of green iron-oxide tumbling to the dirt floor, where it shattered and spilled its emerald contents.

Milo ran to the small inspection slit in the heavy oak door. He pressed his face against the cool iron, squinting out into the dark, narrow alleyway.

The silence outside was absolute, but the air was no longer dark. A strange, violet-red aurora was twisting through the clouds above the city, casting long, distorted shadows across the empty streets. The mounds of purple Chrono-glass that had accumulated in the gutters were glowing with a pale, phosphorescent light, their sharp edges smoking with a faint, white vapor.

"The wind has stopped entirely," Milo whispered, his hand resting on the iron latch of the viewing port. "The air... it looks like it's boiling."

"Don't look at it directly," Orin warned, though he too was drawn toward the door, his eyes fixed on the eerie light creeping beneath the threshold. "The high-purity storms can blind a man if the light catches the eye just right. Help me secure the secondary draft-gates. If the atmospheric pressure drops too fast, the furnace will back-draft and fill this cellar with carbon monoxide."

For the next hour, the two worked in a state of quiet, tense urgency. The routine of the forge became their anchor against the unnatural stillness outside. They adjusted the iron dampers, checked the integrity of the crucible seals, and stacked the reserve firewood and coal away from the walls in case the vibrations from the sky caused a collapse. Every movement was mechanical, born of years of habit, but the silence hung over them like a heavy wet blanket.

Milo couldn't keep his eyes off the iron dampening box.

Even through the thick metal lid and the bed of salt, he could feel a faint, rhythmic throb. It was a sensation that didn't travel through his ears, but through the soles of his boots and the fillings of his teeth. It felt like a heartbeat—slow, heavy, and incredibly old. It was as if the shard was trying to communicate with the surrounding iron, searching for a path to ground its ancient, dormant energy.

"We can't keep it here, Master," Milo said, breaking the silence as he polished a set of casting tongs. "Even if we don't touch it, the Guild inspectors will be here after the storm to check our harvest. They always do an audit of the lower district smithies to make sure we aren't hoarding high-purity Chrono-glass. They’ll have their resonance-rods with them. They’ll find the box in seconds."

Orin paused, his hand resting on the handle of the bellows. He looked at the iron chest, his face lined with deep, dark shadows in the orange light of the dying forge. "I know," he said quietly. "We have to hide it where their rods can't reach. Somewhere deep. Somewhere with enough lead and iron to mask the signal."

"The old cellars?" Milo suggested. "The ones beneath the old foundry on the canal? They've been flooded and abandoned since the great flood ten years ago. No one goes down there."

"No, the water would carry the current," Orin shook his head, his brow furrowing as he calculated the risks. "If the shard discharges into the canal water, it’ll turn the entire harbor into a boiling cauldron of glass-slag. It has to be dry. It has to be insulated."

He turned his gaze down toward the floor, right beneath the primary anvil.

The main anvil of the shop was a massive block of solid, star-iron—a rare, incredibly dense alloy that had been salvaged from a fallen celestial fragment a century ago. It was the heart of the forge, weighing over half a ton, anchored deep into the stone bedrock of the valley by four massive copper pylons. The star-iron was highly resistant to magic, which was why Orin used it to shape the most volatile pieces of sky-glass without the metal warping or absorbing the residual charges.

"Under the anvil block," Orin said, his voice returning to its normal, decisive tone. "The anchor well is dry, and the star-iron will mask any resonance the shard puts out. The Guild's rods won't be able to penetrate the star-iron core."

"But that anchor well hasn't been opened since your father ran the shop," Milo said, his eyes widening. "It took six men and three block-and-tackles just to set the anvil in place. How are we going to lift it?"

"We aren't going to lift the whole thing," Orin said, a faint, grim smile touching his lips. "The anvil is set on a pivot-pin. My father was a paranoid man, Milo. He always said a smith should have a place to keep his private stock where neither the tax collectors nor the thieves could find it. There's a release lever hidden in the draft-flue. But we have to wait until the primary crucible cools. If we shift the anvil while the hearth is hot, we risk cracking the fire-brick."

Milo looked at the primary furnace. The molten violet glass was still glowing deep within the clay crucible, though the fire had been dampened down to a low, smoldering heat. It would take hours for the mass of molten silica to cool down to a solid, stable state.

"We have time," Milo said, looking back toward the ceiling. The silence outside was still absolute, a suffocating dome of quiet that seemed to isolate their small cellar from the rest of the world. "The storm isn't going to break anytime soon. The sky is still waiting."

Orin nodded, though his expression remained grim. He sat down on a three-legged stool, pulling his pipe from his apron pocket and filling it with dry, pungent tobacco. He didn't light it; instead, he simply held it between his teeth, staring at the iron box that held the crimson secret of the sky.

"Get some rest, boy," Orin said, pointing his pipe toward a pile of clean straw in the corner of the cellar. "If that sky decides to break before morning, we're going to need every ounce of strength we have. Whether it rains glass or fire, we'll have to be ready to run."

Milo knew he wouldn't be able to sleep, but he didn't argue. He walked over to the straw bed, his limbs suddenly feeling incredibly heavy, exhausted by the physical exertion of the day and the mental strain of the strange shard. He lay down, his eyes fixed on the iron box across the room.

In the dim, flickering light of the dying furnace, the iron box seemed to shift, the shadows around it stretching and twisting into unfamiliar shapes. Milo closed his eyes, but the image of the crimson shard remained burned into his retinas—a jagged, pulsing wound of blood and ice, waiting to be unleashed upon the world below.