He brought it back to Lira, who was waiting in the tower’s lantern light. Without a word, he pressed the orb into the bronze gear. The gear ticked once, twice—and spun.
Sparx Matys wasn’t a blacksmith, though the name might suggest one. He was a mapmaker—but not the kind who drew coastlines and mountain ranges. Sparx charted the invisible roads: the paths of stray thoughts, the currents of forgotten dreams, the trails of words left unsaid.
He lived alone in a crooked tower at the edge of a town called Driftwood End, where the fog came in thick as wool and the clocks ran backward. Every morning, Sparx would dip his quill into a pot of liquefied moonlight and trace the delicate, shimmering lines that only he could see. These lines floated just above the ground, like spider silk caught in a draft.
“They say you can find anything that’s lost,” she said.
Sparx didn’t look up. “I find what was never truly gone.”
Sparx Matys smiled—a rare thing, like a sundial in the rain. “Next time you have a thought you don’t know what to do with, leave it by my door.”
