Featured in The Copper Press, 11 November, 2158 A.M.

The hamlet of Willowmere boasted nothing but apple rows, wind chimes, and a sky so clear the stars looked close enough to harvest. On the night of the annual meteor showers, a fragment of that sky fell. An incandescent spear screaming across the firmament, it buried itself on the northern ridgeline.

Ten-year-old Imogen heard the impact from her attic bunk. While her brothers quaked under their blankets and her mother hurriedly barred the shutters, Imogen pressed her nose to the soot-stained window. The entire ridgeline glowed lurid green, as though a shard-lantern burned beneath the soil.

By dawn, half of the hamlet’s adults marched uphill in wary knots. They returned muttering of radiance and ruin, promising a proper excavation once a formal survey team could be brought in from Svalbard. Meanwhile, children were forbidden to roam north of the orchards.

Imogen, who viewed the word *forbidden* as synonymous to *please investigate*, waited two days for her curiosity to outrun her fear of repercussion. Armed with a tin lunchbox and her steadfast companion Trevor; a wooden hobby horse, she crossed the rows of apple trees before dawn could reveal her mission to the entire village.

The crater was half the size of the Willowmere Chapel to Felicity and at its center grew a raw viridian crystal bigger than her shrine. It was faceted, translucent, and thrumming like a heartbeat. Shardisite: the miracle mineral academy primers spoke of. Books said such stones powered the greatest cities in the world. They did not mention how they smelled like rain on copper or that they hummed like a lullaby inside your head.

Imogen reached out. Where fingers met crystal, radiant warmth flushed up her arm. Her mind was set ablaze with memories and she gravitated to the image of her favorite marble that she’d lost last spring. Indigo with a metallic-silver swirl. Her heart called for it and she instinctively wished for it back. The thrumming-crystal shard answered. Light burst forth from it as it condensed into the exact marble resting gently in her palm. Cool, glassy, real.

The slightest gasp escaped her lips. She imagined her chipped porcelain doll back home. She imagined it mended, and once again the shards fused its warm green radiance together on the ground before her feet and she watched as the chips and stitches started vanishing like they were never there. She imagined a slice of blackberry pie, still warm—and there it sat in her lunch pail, steam curling fragrant and sweet.

The stone, it seemed, carved thought into thing.

For weeks Imogen returned at dawn, shaping wonders no grown eye witnessed. Wooden toy soldiers marched in perfect drill; paper kites grew dragon wings and circled the treeline; a half-imagined cat purred rainbows and chased viridian moths that never blinked into existence around it. She hid each miracle in the loft until the stable burst with life no farmer could explain.

Inevitably her brother followed to the crater. Astonished by clockwork birds singing symphonies, he told a friend; the friend told a merchant; rumors sprouted like dandelions. When Willowmere’s Harvest Fair opened, Imogen’s *Impossible Toys* stole every gaze. Only a handful sold, but a traveling peddler bought three with a promise to show them in distant markets.

Within a month, knock-offs appeared in bazaars leagues away: tin soldiers that never rusted, kites that flew without wind. None matched the sparkle of Imogen’s originals, yet demand skyrocketed. Letters arrived offering fortunes for *whatever magic engine your father owns.* Imogen, bewildered, answered none.

Snowfall found Willowmere blanketed not only in white but in strangers. All foreign traders seeking the mysterious toywright. The most persistent was a velvet-gloved man calling himself Mr. Pallor. He wore spectacles that reflected lamps regardless of angle and spoke in a voice too smooth for winter air.

“Fortunes change hands on the whims of playthings,” he told Imogen’s mother. “Your daughter’s artistry could furnish schools, hospitals…” He trailed off, eyeing the humble farmhouse walls. “…or at least patch that roof.”

Mother, tempted by snow through shingles, asked Imogen to reveal her workshop. The girl hesitated, then led them to the loft. At sight of living toys Mr. Pallor’s glasses fogged with greed. He demanded to see the source stone. Imogen lied and said she had carved each toy by ordinary knife work.

Pallor obviously did not believe her. That dawn he shadowed her to the crater.

Imogen reached the crater and found the shard dimmer than before, pulsing slower. Perhaps strained by her daily conjuring. She laid a mittened hand on its flank and wished for the roof fixed, her mother smiling, supper plates full. Light struggled forth—splinters coalesced into a single silver coin, then guttered out.

“Running thin, is it?” Pallor stepped from the trees. “It is such a pity for this kind of potential to wilt in your small care.” He produced iron shears etched with runes. “Even a sliver of this stone can power your entire village. Imagine what this whole corona could do.”

Imogen backed away. In panic she wished for help—pictured her wooden soldiers rallying. The stone flared and her soldiers emerged from the stone, full-sized, pikes gleaming. Yet their eyes were painted, their joints mere dowels. Pallor laughed, snapped fingers. The soldiers froze mid-step—lifeless props once more.

“Childish fantasies,” he sneered, raising the shears.

Imogen thought then not of toys or money but of safety. She wished for a wall between her and the man. The shard replied with violent literalism as green crystal burst upward from the frozen ground, forming jagged spikes that encircled the crater rim. One spike skewered Pallor’s foot to the soil; another tore the shears from his grip. He howled, but found himself trapped in a crystalline cage.

Terrified by her own power, Imogen willed the stone to stop. Light dimmed and the growth halted but not before the crystal cracked, thin fractures racing across its surface like lightning frozen in glass.

Pallor, bleeding and maniacal, raged threats of lawsuits and witch-hunters to the heavens. Imogen, sobbing, fled home. That night when the sky was completely dark, an explosion was heard from the ridge. An immense bloom of silent emerald aurora streaked across the sky over the valley. The next morning only a pit of fused glass remained, and within it the stranger, alive but boxed inside a seamless coffin of translucent quartz. Rescuers attempted shatter it and free the man but metal bucked and gunfire rang out and spells glanced off to no avail. At the end of the day they said their sorrys to the stranger as they watched him slowly drifted away. Sealed for eternity inside the impenetrable display. The town dubbed the crystalline prison “Pallor’s Folly”.

Without the corona, Imogen’s toys dulled. The clockwork birds went mute, her dragon kites lost their flight. Her porcelain doll found its cracks once again. Merchants cancelled orders and whispered in taverns about being hoodwinked by a child. Lawmen interviewed Imogen about the accident, but she spoke only of wishing for safety.

Winter wore on. The leaky roof in her house persisted as her family's cupboards once again grew lean. Yet the orchard along the ridge, once modest, now bore fruit all year—round, bright and plump fruit slightly larger than one would expect for the season and the soil. When turned to just the right light one could just make out the slightest reflection of green. Townsfolk harvesting the fruit reported dreams of toy soldiers guarding them in their sleep. Children who ate the fruit spoke of clouds that delivered visions from distant lands over the mountains. The town baker started selling pies and pastries that never cooled and kept fresh for far longer than they should.

Once the town realized the miracle they were a part of they began selling apples by the bushel. Word spread of their properties and once again Willowmere prospered. Travelers from the big cities like Svalbard, Hartemple, and even the capitol Atlantis itself came for the miracle bounty. And the vanished Toywright of Willowmere was forgotten like a bad dream. By a twist of irony, Imogen’s wish for comfort and safety was fulfilled. Not by her vibrant toys, or her tin soldiers but by the shard corona’s dying breath.

Imogen found her way in this new town of markets and traders, but to her each bite of these green-hued fruit tasted of copper and tears. She knew why: inside every seed wept a memory of the shattered stone, humming softly, waiting for the imagination of the next child brave enough, or foolish enough to hear it.