Featured in The Copper Press, 8 July, 2158 A.M.

Seattle is a city that lives beneath roofs of sighs. The Shardfall of centuries past left Cascadia shrouded in permanent drizzle—water so fine it coats the air like blown glass dust. Locals call it angel’s dandruff. Angels deny ownership, demons laugh, and alchemists charge five crowns a vial to scrape the stuff off skylights.

I arrived in that damp womb on assignment for Aurora Sound, a broadsheet catering to readers who want their horrors annotated. My quarry: Professor Elias Crane, Wizard Royal of the Cascadian Commonwealth, lecturer in Applied Thaumaturgy at the University of Puget Arcanum.

Rumor claimed Crane had cracked a cipher hidden in the meteor scars ringing Mount Rainier—sigils that might predict Shard surges decades in advance. The Crown wanted an interview; the pen in my pocket wanted a legend.

The university sits on Pill Hill, overlooking docks clogged with leviathan-harpooners and steam trams. From its highest observatory you can watch The Black Pacific beat against ghost-net pylons—miles of iron mesh meant to keep out Krakenlords. Crane’s laboratory occupied a converted bell tower above the old First Methodist basilica, now repurposed as library. Locals joked the wizard moved up there because no staircase on ground level could contain his ego.

When I climbed the spiral—eighty-three steps slick with perpetual moss—I found a door of barred cedar, no handle. Before I could knock, it opened inward with a sigh like velvet ripping.

Professor Crane resembled a heron: tall, angular, hair white despite his forty-odd years. Goggles with fractured lenses hung round his neck; each lens bore a different rune etched into the glass. His hands shook—not from age, rather from caffeine brewed strong enough to clean engine pistons.

He greeted me warmly, almost too warmly, ushering me past stacks of schematics. Charts mapped thunder patterns as if they were migratory birds. Others depicted Shardisite concentration gradients across Cascadia, inked in greens that glowed faintly when the room darkened.

“You’re late,” he chided, smile never quite reaching his pupils. “The rain keeps strict appointments.”

We spoke for two hours under ringing chimes of distant foghorns. Crane’s theory: every droplet of Cascadian drizzle contained micro-shards—powdered meteor fragments acting like tuning forks for ambient magic.

“Seattle is a cauldron lid,” he declared, tapping a brass diagram. “Pressure builds beneath until someone lifts the lid an inch. I intend to lift it by measure, collect the steam, and set it to work.”

His latest experiment used a Resonance Dynamo—a turbine of silver mirrors spinning in opposite directions. Rain filtered through would release its latent Shard charge in controlled pulses, enough to illuminate Cascadia for a century—or vaporize half the state if his math erred.

I asked what precautions he’d taken. He laughed, poured more coffee, and produced a diary bound in translucent leather. The pages were blank until he whispered a cantrip; then symbols crawled like ants across vellum: tidal glyphs, angelic shorthand, equations written backward. My eyes watered trying to track them.

“Safety,” he said, “is an equation where all unknowns sum to faith.”

I left uneasy. The rain felt heavier, each drop stinging my scalp.

Later, interviewing port mechanics, I discovered Crane had ordered fifteen tons of refined Shard-dust imported from Murmansk—a fortune, even for a Crown-funded scholar. Dust that volatile dissolves flesh on contact.

Next morning I returned unannounced. The cedar door did not open. A janitor below shouted that Crane was inside—he’d heard pacing all night, voices arguing with themselves. Voices plural.

I bribed him for access to service ladders and climbed onto the roof. Through a skylight I saw Crane scribbling equations in chalk that glowed like star paths. He spoke each line aloud, adopting a different accent—as though a panel of scholars debated inside one throat.

The Dynamo towered at room’s center—a pillar of whirling mirrors lit by argent arcs. Rain from an overhead gutter fed funnels into the core. With every rotation, shard dust leapt into coils of static, hovering like constellations.

I saw figures beside him then: a younger Crane whispering into his ear; an elderly Crane pointing a cane at the dynamo. The images flickered with the spin of mirrors, visible only in reflection.

Echoes of potential futures—or hallucinations seeded by dust.

Fear crept cold between my shoulder blades. I left before he noticed.

The following week the weather bureau reported anomalies: rain falling upward over Union Bay, lightning spiraling horizontally. Fishermen swore the Sound’s waves hummed in an unheard key that rattled fillings loose. At night, an aurora the color of bone flared above Pill Hill.

Crown officials dismissed it as minor turbulence. The University chancellor put the bell tower under guard. Guards posted at the stairs emerged hours later with bleeding ears, muttering fractal numbers until sedated.

Through slurred lips one guard told me corridors bent like paper, voices chanting:

Round and round the rain shall grind until the mind is smooth.

I wrote an exposé. Editors refused—too outlandish, too libelous against a Crown mage. One agreed on condition of proof.

Photograph the Dynamo in operation.

So I packed a phlogiston flash-camera, salt cartridges, and climbed Pill Hill under moonless sky. The cedar door hung ajar.

Inside smelled of ozone and burnt coffee. The Dynamo spun slow, waiting.

Rain streamed upward into its throat, defying gravity. The floor was carpeted with graphite sigils—complex adaptations of Choir glyphs inverted mirror-wise. Such inversions court Legion resonance. Crane had to know.

He stood beside the pillar wearing a coat stitched with metallic threads. No goggles. His eyes bled faint light, alternating green then white in pulse with the Dynamo.

“The Crown will shut this down,” I said.

“The Crown is a barnacle upon history,” he replied. “I am prying it free.”

Rain reversed again, slamming downward like glass blades. A shard-laden drop sliced my cheek. Blood hissed on contact, turning to red steam that joined the vortex.

“Elias, you’re hurt.”

“Sleep is rehearsal for death,” he answered serenely. “I prefer premieres.”

He touched the Dynamo. Mirrors accelerated. Each reflected slice of his face looked further removed from sanity.

“Witness,” he commanded.

Lightning without thunder burst inside the chamber. My flash-camera fired on reflex. Darkness followed—thick, suffocating.

When vision returned, the mirrors had shattered yet remained whirling, jagged edges locked in orbit. At the center floated Crane, legs crossed, coat billowing like ink in water. Shard dust spiraled into him, threads weaving through pores, eyes, ears. He whispered formulae that wrote themselves in midair before being devoured.

Then silence.

Shards froze. One by one they embedded in his flesh, forming a stained-glass cocoon. A pulse of white light flared.

When it faded, Crane was gone.

In his place hovered a crystal silhouette shaped like an hourglass, facets dripping rain that never struck the floor.

“Equation balanced,” it said. “Input: one mind. Output: pure resonance.”

I fired a salt round. The pellet vaporized before contact.

“Avoid interfering,” it warned. “Interference inversely proportional to continued life.”

I ran.

Witnesses say Pill Hill glowed emerald at dawn. The bell tower inverted like crumpled tin, collapsing inward without rubble—folded into a point of white before winking out. In its place hovered a sphere of mist refracting the city upside-down, raindrops orbiting like moons.

For three days it remained. Equipment sent inside returned fused into sculptures of quartz and copper. Choir priests declared it a Temporal Harmonic Singularity—a wound where thought and matter trade places. Crown engineers called it Crane’s Folly and erected fences.

On the fourth dawn the sphere rose into overcast and vanished, leaving scorched grass shaped like the Dynamo’s mirror pattern.

Rain resumed its proper gravity. But forever after it tinkled faintly on rooftops, as though skimming hollow glass.

Seattle carries on. Coffee brews. Trams clatter. A plaque lists Elias Crane among faculty lost in revolutionary inquiry.

I keep the photograph my camera captured: fractured light centered on a pale face stretched too thin to belong to any sane man. Some nights the print hums when the drizzle thickens.

The Crown offered hush money. I declined.

Read this and remember: knowledge is a coin with edges. File one too sharp and sooner or later it cuts the hand that spends it.

And should you climb a tower on Pill Hill seeking genius—listen first to the rain.

If it rings like cracking mirrors, walk back down.