Lump of Glass

Lump of Glass sits heavy in your hand, a palm-sized shard of pale sea-green translucence. Its surface is slick and cool, and light slides through it in thin ribbons, as if a captured dawn stirs inside. Fine hairline fissures run through the interior, a map of the furnace’s old work, and the edges bite if you hold it too long, reminding you that this is not mere ornament but a thing tempered by fire. In the right angle it seems to breathe, a quiet, patient glow waiting to be coaxed into shape. Old legends say it comes from the glassworks of a sunken city, where desert sands and sunlit heat learned to talk. Some storytellers swear a Lump of Glass carries a fragment of dawn, a memory that can be coaxed into light again by careful hands and the right patience. Most traders shrug at lore, but the best crafters listen for that memory in the texture and treat it with reverence. In practice, the lump is a starting point for many glass-based recipes: refined into crisp prisms for lanterns, ground into a fine dust for decorative filigree, or heated and tempered to create a gleam on jewelry. It’s a rare piece of memory you can shape, a way to bind light to metal and cloth. It is not merely a resource; it is a story that can be told again in glass—lantern accents that scatter rainbows, amulets that catch a thief’s reflection, or a ceremonial blade that glints when the sun strikes a hillside. To artisans, a Lump of Glass is a keystone—a link between craft and legend, a reminder that light travels through roughness as surely as through air. On the market, the street life breathes with it. I paused at Saddlebag Exchange, the market’s caravan ring where vendors hawk wares in sun or rain. The Lump of Glass rested in a wooden cradle, its glow brightening when the crowd drew near. Prices drift with the day’s supply, rising when crater-mines yield a heavy harvest, falling when caravans arrive with fresh glass and old stories to tell. A trader told me a Lump could fetch a handful of copper coins in calm weather and a touch more when the winds flip the exchange into a fever pitch. I walked away with a single lump tucked into my belt, the weight of ink and page looming in my mind as the city woke around the stalls. If you ever spot one, held up to the wary morning light, you’ll hear the story before you see the shine: memory, heat, patience, and light all waiting to be remade.