In the city of Meridion, built entirely on floating isles, people carried their emotions in delicate, glass wings on their backs. Transparent, weightless, and beautiful, the wings shimmered with color when love bloomed, dulled when sadness struck, and shattered when hearts broke. It was a world where no feeling could be hidden.

  Auren, a clockmaker with silver-threaded hair and a heart stitched from silence, lived in the quiet isle of Virelle. His wings had lost their color long ago—just pale glass, like forgotten windows. He had once loved. Deeply. Recklessly. Her name was Elira.

  Elira had been everything Auren wasn't: loud laughter, wild dances, skies full of sunlight. She was a painter of dreams who believed love could fix anything. They fell together like stars do—brilliant and doomed. When she left, his wings shattered. Not completely. Just enough that he couldn't fly anymore. So he stayed grounded, fixing time while his heart stood still.

  One winter-blue morning, a girl appeared at Auren’s doorstep. Barely twenty, wrapped in a red scarf, with a box of shattered wings in her hands.

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  "You're the only one who can fix them," she said.

  Auren looked at her: wind-chapped cheeks, bruised eyes, and wings cracked like ice under pressure. Something inside him stirred. Not love. Not yet. But the echo of something warm.

  He took the wings and began to work.

  Days passed. She returned again and again—not for repairs, but for stories, tea, silence shared like old friends. Her name was Kael. She had loved someone who made her laugh and cry in equal measure. He had promised forever, then vanished into the fog with another girl and an apology carved in a letter.

  Auren never spoke of Elira. Kael never asked. Yet, their pain recognized each other like mirrors do.

  One day, a letter came. From Elira.

  She was dying. "Come see me before the sky takes me. Please."

  Auren’s wings shimmered faintly, a flicker of violet—a memory of love unburied.

  Kael helped him fix his wings. They flew together to the Isle of Everhollow, where Elira lay under silver trees, her wings translucent and crumbling.

  "I never stopped loving you," she whispered.

  "I did," Auren replied. Gently. "But I still thank you for breaking me. Because you gave me the cracks where light got in."

  Elira smiled, and the last shard of her wings fluttered away like dust in wind.

  Auren flew back with Kael. Not to escape the past, but to walk beside it.

  They never called it love. But their wings grew brighter with each day spent in each other's quiet company. And in a city of floating hearts and fragile glass, sometimes, that was enough.

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