Mara stepped off the bus, her boots crunching on gravel as the salt-tinged wind tugged at her coat. The town of Seabrook stretched before her, its weathered cottages huddled like secrets against the cliffs. She hadn’t set foot here since…
The first time Leo saw Clara, she was kneading dough in the dim light of The Crust, her sleeves rolled to her elbows, flour dusting her forearms like snow. The bell above the door jingled as he stepped inside, and…
The lighthouse stood like a skeletal finger against the storm-churned sea, its white paint peeling in strips that fluttered in the wind. Mira tightened her grip on the rusted railing, her boots squelching in the mud as she climbed the…
Clara’s brush moved in deliberate strokes, the bristles catching the slanting afternoon light as she mixed a new shade of blue. The studio smelled of linseed oil and aged wood, the air thick with the musk of pigment and the…
The salt air stank of diesel and decay when Maren stepped off the rusted ferry, her boots crunching over gravel as the tide gnawed at the dock’s splintered planks. The lighthouse loomed behind her, its white paint peeling like dead…
Mara stepped out of the rusted sedan, her boots sinking into the damp gravel of the harbor. The air tasted of salt and diesel, sharp against her tongue. Three years had not softened the ache of this place—the way the…
## The Chroma Inheritance The scent of aged paper and leather always clung to Eleanor Vance. It permeated her clothes, settled in the deep valleys of her face, and seemed woven into the very air surrounding her. As chief librarian…
## The Static Between The salt spray tasted like regret on Old Man Hemlock’s lips. He adjusted the focusing lens of the fresnel, the beam slicing through the November gloom like a hot knife. Three decades at North Sentinel Rock…
The rain tasted like metal and salt, slick on Elisse’s skin. It hammered against the corrugated iron roofs of Ossa Bay’s marketplace, a rhythmic percussion that blended with the creak of wooden carts and the guttural calls of merchants hawking…
The salt spray tasted of regret. Old Man Tiber, they called the lighthouse, though no one remembered a man ever tending it. Just the mechanism, grinding gears and a lens the size of a carriage wheel. It sat on Widow’s…