The Breath

A paved square on the vapor with a bowl in the middle over a soul-blue fire and lamp pillars at the corners. Things were brought here to be dissolved, set in the bowl and left. The pits in the paving are where the bowl spilled. Nothing that was brought remains except what would not dissolve.

A ring of fused glass and lightning-glass on an island shard, with three eggs in the bowl. Vapor drakes nest where the storms are thickest. This brood hatched long ago and the eggs stand empty; what the drakes dragged home over the years is still in the nest, and so is what lives in the twigs now.

A shuttle dock of station flooring laid on the vapor, with its diving hut and its tether reel. The vapor held it for one season. Now the east edge is under, the deck slopes, and the tether runs up from the reel into nothing. What the crew left in the hut is still dry, and the diving suit in its bay is still standing. Its visor is lit from the inside.

Every bolt that strikes an island leaves a column of fused glass standing where it went in. Here the lightning comes back to the same ground again and again, and the columns stand in a grove, the oldest taller than a house. Some of them still spark.

The Ringers came to the Breath for its lightning. Nobody can breathe here, and they did not try: they lived in suits, packed island ash into molds and rang their bells until the storm answered. Every bolt the spire caught ran down its glass spine into the molds and baked the ash into fulgurite brick, or settled as charge in jars of glass, and the spire grew a tier for every year of storms: the pier and the stores, the galleries of lattices, the halls of accumulators, the belfry and the crown. But lightning that passes through the vapor leaves glass in it too. Around the crown the glass grew into a backbone, and the dragon's breath gathered on the bones. The Ringers sealed the way up and rang until there was no one left to ring. The wyrm is still coiled on the summit.

The same ring as on Earth, on a dais of the local stone and in the colors of this world: whoever set the gates out did it on every world at once. This one sleeps. It answers only one who has brought down the master of this world and lived through its trial; then lay the master's heart, the dust of the road and what this world gives into the ring, and it will join the other gates that are awake.

A heap of searing glass grown on an island shard, lumpy as coral, with ash settled on its crests and hollows inside that glow with trapped charge. The glass was not quarried and not cast. It grows where the vapor is thickest, a skin a year, around whatever it touched first.

A span of fulgurite seventeen blocks long between two shards, with a kink in the middle like the bolt that made it. Fulgurite is what lightning leaves when it strikes sand, and there is no sand on any island here. The railings still spark.

A brick tower on an island shard, with a lantern in its crown and a rod above it. Most of the time it stands dark. When a storm comes near, the lantern lights by itself, and the closer the lightning, the brighter it burns. It was not built to warn anyone. It was built to call the storm.

A frame of fulgurite with five chimes hanging from it on chains: three bells and two bars of searing glass. There is no wind on the Breath that anyone can feel, and yet the chimes ring, a few notes at a time, always just before the lightning.