He walked for what felt like hours, or perhaps seconds, through a gallery of his own life. He saw the first archway he ever built, the stones shimmering in the mist. He saw the face of his wife as a young girl, her laughter rendered in a flurry of ice crystals.
As he moved further from the cliff, the world grew impossibly quiet. The sound of his own heartbeat became a rhythmic drum. Then, the clouds began to change. They didn't just swirl; they sculpted. A Walk In The Clouds
Elias was a man of the earth—a stonemason whose hands were mapped with the scars of granite and flint. He believed in things that had weight. But his daughter, Clara, was different. Before the fever took her, she used to sit on the edge of the precipice, swinging her legs over a drop of four thousand feet, and whisper, "The clouds aren’t just steam, Papa. They’re memories that forgot who they belonged to." He walked for what felt like hours, or