Saltglass
In the dark of the salvage yard, Sera Voss lingers over a kiln that should have banked hours ago, finding small excuses to stay. She forges saltglass from tide-mined sand, and the trade has taught her patience, but not how to bury a secret that the sea keeps trying to surface. When a body turns up on the glass-strewn shore at low tide, Constable Maren Hall arrives to investigate, and the questions she asks land too close to the cracks in Sera's story. As the official inquiry tightens around Tomás Voss, the brother Sera has spent years shielding from his own worst choices, she is forced to choose between protecting her family and telling the truth about the night the tides took something they should have given back. Across the village, Alderman Rook guards old alliances with the same silence he uses to quiet his enemies. Ewan Blackthorn returns from years abroad carrying debts and a charm that makes the constable uneasy. Dr. Cillian Roe offers quiet expertise from the examination room while watching more than he admits. Ingrid Salt remembers what she was paid to forget, Yara Okafor knows the shoreline's hidden paths, and old Osgar holds the only complete history of who first melted sand on this coast. Even Callum, who sees everything, cannot promise Sera that the answers won't cost her everything she has refused to let go. To walk away now is to let someone else carry the lie. To stay is to watch the kiln burn down to what it was always meant to reveal.