He'd always thought she was beautiful. Like the legendary romance of the Elders,
she awoke a more emotional side he might otherwise have tried to deny. Something
about the careless elegance of her tumbling copper feathers, the flash of her
viridian eyes, or the restless curl of her wings â€" he could never quite tell.
When she drifted by, he would blush strange colours and his friends would tease
him about illogical relationships. He bore it, however, for he knew his actions
were perfectly logical. She was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen,
and he was in love.

When she began going about with Trey, he did not despair. When she told his
friends that she couldn't understand him, he did not despair. When she slapped
him for all the city to see, he did not despair. When she was accepted to train
with the aeromancers and he was sent to Angkrag as a merchant, he did not
despair. But now â€" this was too much. He could not accept this turn of
events. It was simply impossible.

He paced back and forth, unconsciously as restless as his missing love. It was
not as if she'd never shown him a kind word or a lilting smile. He was not a
fool â€" of course there were signs, portents of goodwill and good fortune.
There had been the time when she hadn't understood Gordwin's Planar Geometry,
and he'd patiently stayed in the library with her, explaining and giving
examples until she smiled that wonderful smile and said she understood. And
watching her that day, listening to her intellect dance around the elegant
mathematics of transversal â€" it was not just her supple dancing that
attracted him then, not just the lush turn of her lips, but the quicksilver
pace of her mind, the intuitive way in which she slid from theory into practice
and from practice into theory. And again, the next time, when she had needed
help with her study of the Ethereal Plane, that same gorgeous intellectual
vitality had been there waiting for his help, ready to be drawn out into
discussion and discovery. He'd become attracted to her because of her beauty,
but he'd been drawn into passion by her mind.

And that day â€" when her brother had been lost in the mountains, and they'd
begun to look for him - it was he who found the boy and helped apply the
arnica to mend the broken wing. Then - she had thrown her arms around his neck
and gave him that briefest, palest, most momentary of kisses on the cheek, and
her blinding smile had been almost a mirage as she rushed to her brother's
side, and he had been in love.

He could still feel her arms, her lips, the razor gaze of her eyes. It was
nearly all he still could feel, save for the driving wind and rain.

The tragedy had been overwhelming when his father told him that the family
could not afford to send him to the Matrix Institute, and that he would need to
bide his time for the next four years working as a merchant. He wanted to shout,
to yell, to scream of the injustice of being torn away from her just as he had
been growing close. He wanted to tear and gouge and bludgeon his way through
the uncaring crowds, to put aside his name and his past and his family just to
pull his way back to her side. But that, he still realised, was illogical, so
he locked himself into his room and spent two days re-articulating Havver's
Theorem. He emerged to see her walk by on her way to the College, proud and
vibrant in her bright white robes. She would do well, he knew. Elementalism and
aeromancy did not require quite the same methodical discipline as the study of
rituals and the cosmic weft, and would reward her well. He was flushed a dark,
awed orange as he saw her walking off into her future. He liked to tell himself
her eyes flicked upward and saw him.

He decided to take out this new-found anger on Angkrag. He showed no mercy
across the negotiating table, pressing the demands of his father's consortium
with an acid tongue and the intimidating power of his calculations â€"
calculations he re-worked every night, a ritual to keep himself under control.
Soon he was the merchant prince of the mines â€" his word controlled
employment, output, productivity, direction. The dwarves whined to the Empire
â€" he didn't care. They could go up against the lawyers of Hallifax, and they
could lose. As far as he was concerned, they were standing between him and his
love.

He had exceeded everyone's expectations. He had raised the money he needed -
and more - in half the time he'd been given. There was talk of him meeting
with the Dean of the Institute to manage their finances while he studied, and
more talk of him being put on the fast track to work with the infamous and
prestigious Ministry of Trade. His family alternately avoided him in fear of
his unpredictable anger and celebrated him as the flower of their ancient tree.

He cared little. He paid as much attention to all of this as he care for any
peripheral concern â€" filed it carefully away in the part of his mind that
cared about something other than her. He'd asked about her, quietly. No one
said she was anything but engulfed in her freshmen studies, an unexpected
prodigy with no mind for anything outside the spires of the College. He was
happy for her â€" she was realising the genius he had noticed while everyone
else focused on her looks and called her a charming dilettante. But he was also
depressed, as she was away from him and showed no sign of knowing his success.

He was ready to return. He was to enroll at the Institute, leaving one of his
keener subordinates to run the mines. He would be across a narrow street from
her, and they could be together again â€" man and woman, lucidian and trill.
Half and half.

And then? Disaster. Some imperial hubris he'd heard of and just as promptly
forgotten, some project, turned to monstrous consequence for all the Basin. The
Taint, and the undead, and Princess Marilynth and Celest and Magnagora and the
forests â€" he could care less. Hallifax was gone. And so was she.

He stared at the great, glassy bubble, the rain beating against his brooding
green skin imperceptibly as thunder roared overhead. The rest of the caravan he
led had long since moved on â€" gone to find refuge, to try to rebuild. He
stayed, standing. Staring. Waiting.

She was inside.

He was outside.

It was some grand cosmic joke, a metaphor of his life blown up into impossible
reality and given a mocking gilding of pain. A simple bubble â€" she within,
him without.

Surely, there was some way in.

Some way out.

Some way.

He'd tried all the ways. No spell, no planar subtlety, no ritual could carry
him through. No crack remained to sight plain or arcane, no wavering revealed
itself under his scrutiny.

He stayed, standing. Watching. Waiting.

He paced.

He took a step.

Another step.

A stride, a lope, a run, and he was rushing through the air, flying towards the
city of his birth, the city of his love, the heart of his hopes and dreams and
ambitions, frozen desire in the middle of a storm. The rain pushed him down,
weighed on him, tried to hold him back, and he twisted wildly as he tried to
shove it aside, screaming, yelling, falling towards his love. It couldn't stop
him. They couldn't stop him. They were meant to be together, and nothing,
nothing at all, not the Soulless Gods themselves could stop a love that was so
intended, that fit so perfectly. His heart flew, his love took flight.

And, abruptly, his body shattered. Broken as thoroughly and totally as his
mind, a thousand emotions and a thousand crystals crashing in a thousand
directions. Lightning seared through the sky, thunder roared, a storm raged,
and he was forgotten.

They say that on a clear day, if you look up at lost Hallifax and squint, you
can see a rainbow. A gentle arc of colour follows the curve of the forsaken
bubble, gleaming and sparkling in the light of the sun or moon or stars. There,
if you look closely, the glassy barrier of time is met with seared gems and
jewels that cling with a tenacious will to the insurmountable wall, looking as
if a crystal rain fell from the sky and the drops froze in place. The jewels are
raging red and bitter yellow, deep orange and brooding green, cool blue and
royal purple. A thousand colors, crisp and pristine in the midst of the air.
Sometimes, they say, they seem to change â€" a few flash green, a few flash red
â€" as if they had a mind of their own, or some unknown shifting of energies or
fates drives them in some strange, mysterious machine. And some day, they say,
the crystal rain will fall into Hallifax.