The first time I saw Mistress Luminara trap a soul in glass, I didn't realize what I was witnessing. I was simply mesmerized by the way she caught the last breath of the dying merchant in a delicate glass orb, twisting it with tools too fine to see, whispering words that made the air shimmer like heat above summer stones.

"A memento for his family," she told me, her voice soft as she smoothed the still-warm surface with fingers impossibly unmarred by her trade. "His essence preserved, so they might speak with him when grief becomes too heavy."

I nodded, nineteen years old and painfully naive, honored to be the first apprentice the famed Glass Sorceress of Vitralis had taken in a decade. I believed I had been chosen for my steady hands and patient nature.

I learned the mundane aspects of glassblowing first—how to gather molten glass on a blowpipe, how to shape it with wooden tools, how to anneal it slowly to prevent shattering. For months, I created only simple objects: cups, vases, beads for wealthy merchants' wives. Mistress Luminara would inspect each piece critically, her pale blue eyes—the color of the clearest beach glass—revealing nothing of her thoughts.

"You understand the glass," she said one evening, after I had completed a particularly challenging goblet. "But you do not yet hear it sing."

I didn't understand then. Glass was silent except when struck or broken. But Luminara spoke of it as something alive, something with voice and intention.

"When will you teach me to make the memorial orbs?" I asked, watching her create another commissioned piece for a grieving family. "The ones that glow from within?"

She paused in her work, studying me with sudden intensity. "When you can hear the difference between the voice of the glass and the voice of what it contains."

It was midwinter when I first noticed the whispering. I'd been working late, experimenting with colored powders mixed into clear glass. The workshop had grown cold as the furnace died down. In that stillness, between the beats of my own heart, I heard it—a tiny chorus of murmurs coming from the locked cabinet where Luminara kept her special commissions.

I convinced myself it was the wind finding gaps in the workshop's stone walls, or perhaps rats in the storage room. But the sound followed me into my dreams—fragments of conversations, pleas, occasional laughter, and, most disturbingly, weeping that seemed to rise and fall with the moon's transit across the night sky.

One night I woke suddenly, certain someone was standing over my bed. The workshop was flooded with moonlight, and in that silver illumination, I saw a figure—translucent as finest glass, edges catching light like a prism. A woman in formal dress, her expression one of confusion.

"This isn't right," she said, her voice distant as if carried across water. "I should be with my children. Why can't I reach them?"

Before I could respond, she dispersed like smoke in wind. But not before I recognized her from a portrait I'd seen—Lady Elaine Vautier, who had died of fever three months prior, and whose "memorial orb" sat in Luminara's locked cabinet, paid for by her grieving husband.

I waited two days before confronting my mentor. Two days in which I observed her more carefully—noting how she visited wealthy homes under the pretext of delivering commissioned works, always choosing times when death had recently visited or seemed imminent. How she would return with her spitioris—the smallest blowing tube used for delicate work—and lock herself in her private chamber for hours.

I searched the town's records, the old stories, the whispered warnings parents gave children about the beautiful Glass Sorceress who could create anything in her furnace, if the price was right.

"You're not creating memorials," I said, when I finally found my courage. "You're taking souls."

Luminara didn't seem surprised by my accusation. She continued polishing a delicate rose-colored bottle, its surface etched with symbols I recognized from her private workroom. "I'm preserving them," she corrected, without looking up. "There's a difference."

"Those people think their loved ones have passed on. But they're trapped, confused. I've heard them. I've seen them."

Now she did look up, and I saw something like pride flicker across her face. "You can see them? Outside their vessels?" She set aside her work, giving me her full attention for perhaps the first time. "Interesting. Perhaps you were the right choice after all."

"Choice for what?" My voice sounded small even to my own ears.

"My successor, of course." She stood and moved to the locked cabinet, removing a key from around her neck. "You think I'm a monster, I can see it in your eyes. But you don't understand the alternative."

The cabinet opened to reveal dozens of glass orbs, bottles, and figurines, each giving off a soft glow in varying colors. She removed one—a paperweight containing what appeared to be a frozen blue flame.

"Before me, there was only darkness for them. Oblivion. Or worse—the Hollow Markets beyond the Veil, where souls are currency." She cradled the paperweight like a beloved pet. "I give them shelter. Preservation. Sometimes even purpose."

"By selling them to their families? Tricking people into thinking these are just... what? Magical mementos?"

"The families get comfort. The souls get protection. I get to continue my work." She placed the paperweight in my hands. "This is the essence of a child who would have been devoured by things you cannot imagine. His parents speak to him every night, tell him about his siblings growing up. Is that so terrible?"

I wanted to drop the glass, to flee, to report her to... to whom? The city guards? The clerics? Who would believe me?

Yet as I held the weight, I felt a curious peace emanating from it—not distress like the specter of Lady Vautier, but something like contentment.

After Luminara left for a commission in the northern estates, I resolved to investigate. I waited until midnight, drawing the heavy indigo cloak she had gifted me close around my shoulders, pulling its deep hood low over my face. The enchanted fabric was supposedly woven with protective spells—"to shield the apprentice from the heat of creation," she had said. I wondered now if it served a different purpose.

The workshop was nearly pitch black. I lit only three taper candles—arranged in a perfect triangle as she had taught me for delicate work. Their amber flames cast long, dancing shadows across the worn workbench where I carefully placed the smallest of her "memorial" pieces—a teardrop pendant that contained what appeared to be swirls of luminous blue mist.

As I stared into its depths, breath held in anticipation, the mist began to move with purpose. No longer random swirls, it coalesced into the unmistakable shape of a woman's face. I nearly dropped the pendant in shock, but instead of falling to the table, it hung suspended in the air between my fingers. The blue mist poured forth like water, forming a translucent figure hovering before me.

She was hauntingly beautiful—a woman composed entirely of what appeared to be liquid blue glass. Her long hair floated as if underwater, her features delicate yet precise, as though carved by the most skilled artisan. Her eyes held no pupils—just wells of deeper blue containing pinpricks of light like distant stars.

"You are not her," the apparition said, her voice resonating with a crystalline quality that made the actual glass in the room vibrate in subtle harmony. "Yet you wear her protections."

I clutched my cloak tighter, pulling the hood further over my face as if it might shield me from her otherworldly gaze. "Who are you?" I managed to whisper.

"I was Lady Elise Morvane, once. Before your mistress... preserved me." She spoke the word with complicated emotion—gratitude and resentment intertwined. "Now I am... less and more than what I was."

The ghostly woman drifted around the table, settling into the chair opposite mine. The blue light of her form illuminated the workshop in an ethereal glow, catching in the facets of nearby glass objects and sending prismatic reflections dancing across the walls.

"She told my husband I would find peace," Elise continued, studying me with those starlit eyes. "That my essence would rest in beauty until natural law took its course. Does this look like peace to you, apprentice?"

I could not lie, not with her gaze piercing through me. "No."

"And yet," she admitted, her form rippling like disturbed water, "nor is it torment. It is... suspension. Neither life nor death. Neither heaven nor hell. Just... waiting."

"Waiting for what?" I asked, finding courage in curiosity.

She spread her translucent arms, and the workshop filled with a subtle chill that frosted the windowpanes. "That is the question we all ask. That is why we whisper, hoping to find the answer in each other's echoes."

I leaned forward, the candlelight flickering between us. "Would you rather she had let you go? To whatever comes after?"

The ghost-woman's expression twisted with fear, her blue form momentarily fracturing like shattered glass before reforming. "You don't understand what waits beyond. She's shown you nothing of the Hollow Markets? The soul-eaters? The collectors?"

"I know nothing," I admitted, "except what I see before me."

Lady Elise's spectral hand extended across the table, hovering just above my forehead. "Then I will show you. Before your mistress returns and seals me away again. Before she decides whether you are worthy to inherit her terrible mercy."

When her fingers made contact with my skin, my mind exploded with visions of ravenous shadow-beings that existed in the spaces between worlds, of marketplaces where immortal collectors traded in human essence, of the terrifying fate that awaited unprotected souls. I understood then what Luminara had been fighting against for centuries—the commodification of human consciousness, the predation upon the vulnerable dead.

When the visions subsided, I found myself slumped in my chair, gasping for breath, the hood of my cloak thrown back. Across the table, Elise watched me with something akin to sympathy in her starlit eyes.

"Now you understand," she said softly. "We are not victims. We are refugees."

We talked through the night, the spectral woman and I, as the candles burned low. She told me of her life, her death, her strange half-existence in glass. I shared my concerns, my confusion, my growing suspicion that I had been chosen for more than my steady hands.

As dawn approached, Elise's form began to fade, drawn back to the pendant that served as her anchor.

"She will return tomorrow," the apparition warned, her voice growing distant. "She will know we've spoken. She always knows." Her form was now little more than a blue outline against the candlelight. "You must decide, apprentice—will you continue her work? Will you improve upon it? Or will you shatter us all and let the collectors claim what remains?"

With those words, she collapsed back into the teardrop pendant, now just a swirl of blue mist once more.

When Luminara returned the next evening, she found me waiting in my indigo cloak, hood pulled low, three fresh candles burning on the workbench between us. The teardrop pendant lay exactly where she had left it, betraying nothing of our conversation.

"You've been busy in my absence," she said, setting down her traveling case. It wasn't a question.

"I've been learning," I corrected. "As you wished."

A smile touched her lips—the first genuine one I'd seen. "And what have you learned, my apprentice?"

"That I can hear the difference now," I said quietly. "Between the voice of the glass and the voice of what it contains."

Luminara nodded, removing her traveling cloak. "Then you are ready for your true education to begin."

What followed was five years of learning not only to shape glass, but to hear its song, to understand its affinity for human essence, to whisper the words that bind the leaving to the remaining. I learned of the Hollow Markets and the collectors. I learned why souls are drawn to glass—its paradoxical nature, solid yet flowing, containing yet revealing, a perfect halfway house between states of being.

Luminara has been gone these past three years. Her own glass prison—a magnificent chandelier hanging in the workshop's center—holds the faintest pink glow now. She speaks to me sometimes, guiding my work, though her voice grows fainter with each passing season.

I am more selective than my mentor was. I take only those who would be most vulnerable to the things beyond—children taken too soon, souls too gentle for what awaits, those whose unfinished business would make them easy prey for entities that feed on regret and longing.

I have improved the process as well. My vessels are more comfortable, my bindings more flexible. The souls in my keeping can visit their families in dreams if they wish, though never for long.

If you find yourself in Vitralis, you may see a slender figure in an indigo hooded cloak making her way through the twilight streets, carrying a case of delicate tools. They call me the new Glass Sorceress, said to create works of such beauty and life that they seem to contain worlds within them.

They're not wrong.

And if death approaches someone you love, you might seek my services. I will come with my tools and my quiet words of comfort. Three candles will be lit. Across the table, in the dancing light, you may catch a glimpse of blue reflections that have no source, hear whispers that seem to come from the glass itself.

Just know that what I offer is not what you think. It's both more and less. A postponement, not a solution. A shelter, not a release.

But in a world where what waits beyond the last breath is hungrier and crueler than any human religion has dared imagine—perhaps a beautiful glass cage is the kindest gift I can offer.

• From the private journal of Iris Calaver, known in Vitralis as the Glass Sorceress, discovered after the mysterious explosion that destroyed her workshop. Among the debris, authorities recovered dozens of intact glass objects that glowed with a distinctive blue light. Those who handle them report hearing whispers and occasionally seeing a woman's face reflected in their depths, even when no one stands nearby.