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 Emerald Perseid a fragment of that heaven fell—an incandescent spear that screamed across the firmament and buried itself on the northern ridge.

Ten-year-old Imogen Vale heard the impact from her attic bunk. While her brothers quaked under blankets and her mother barred the shutters, Imogen pressed her cheek to the glass. The ridge glowed lurid green, as though a lantern burned beneath the soil.

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

Imogen, who viewed the word *forbidden* as synonym to *please investigate*, waited two days for curiosity to outrun caution. Then, armed with a tin lunch pail and a wooden hobby horse, she crossed the apple rows before dawn and climbed the ridge.

The crater was half the size of Willowmere’s chapel. At its center pulsed a crystal bigger than a butter churn—faceted, translucent, and thrumming like a beehive. Shardisite: the miracle mineral academy primers spoke of. Books said such stones powered airships and artillery. They did not mention how they smelled—like rain on copper—and hummed a lullaby just below hearing.

Imogen reached out. Where fingers met crystal, warmth flushed up her arm. She pictured a marble she’d lost last spring, indigo with a silver swirl, and wished it back. The shard answered. Light condensed into the exact marble beneath her palm—cool, glassy, real.

A gasp escaped her lips. She imagined her chipped porcelain doll mended—and shards fused together, stitches vanishing. 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 soldiers marched in perfect drill; paper kites grew dragon wings and circled the ridge; a half-imagined cat purred moonlight and chased moths that never lived. She hid each miracle in the loft until the stable burst with life no farmer could explain.

Inevitably a brother followed. 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—the girl refused coins—but the traveling peddler Branwick Gorse bought three with a promise to show them in distant markets.

Within a month, knock-offs appeared in bazaars leagues away: 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—traders seeking the 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 meet the *source stone*. Imogen lied—said she carved each toy by ordinary knife work.

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

Imogen reached the crater and found the shard dimmer than before, pulsing slower—perhaps strained by constant 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. “Such a pity for potential to wilt in small hands.” He produced iron shears etched with runes. “A shard sliver can power factories. Imagine what a whole heart-stone would buy.”

Imogen backed away. In panic she wished for help—pictured her wooden soldiers rallying. The stone flared; soldiers emerged full-sized, halberds 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—a wall between her and the man. The shard replied with violent literalism: green crystal jutted upward, forming jagged spikes that encircled the crater rim. One spike skewered Pallor’s foot to 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; growth halted—but not before the shard cracked, thin fractures racing across its surface like lightning frozen in glass.

Pallor, bleeding, raged threats of lawsuits and witch-hunters. Imogen, sobbing, fled home. That night the shard erupted—a bloom of silent emerald light seen across half the valley. In the morning only a pit of fused glass remained, and within it the stranger, alive but boxed inside a seamless coffin of translucent quartz. Rescuers could not shatter it; metal bucked, fire hissed. They dubbed the prison Pallor’s Folly.

Without the shard, Imogen’s toys dulled. The clockwork birds went mute; dragons lost flight; porcelain doll cracked again. Merchants cancelled orders, accusing the family of trickery. Lawmen interviewed Imogen about the accident, but she spoke only of wishing for safety.

Winter wore on. Roof leaks persisted; cupboards grew leaner. Yet the orchard, once modest, now bore apples all year—round, glossy, with a faint green gleam. Townsfolk harvesting the fruit reported dreams of wooden soldiers guarding their sleep, of kites ferrying messages over mountains, of blackberry pies that never cooled.

These apples sold for high coin; Willowmere prospered. Travelers came for the miracle fruit, not the vanished Toywright. And so, by a twist of irony, Imogen’s wish for comfort was fulfilled—not by her vibrant toys, but by a byproduct of the shard’s dying breath.

Imogen survived, but each bite of green-tinted apple tasted faintly of copper and rain. She alone knew why: inside every seed slept a splinter of the shattered stone, humming softly, waiting for the imagination of the next child brave—or foolish—enough to listen.