0:00 The highest clouds in our atmosphere, the noctilucent ones, are made of ice crystals formed around meteor dust.0:10 In our last story, we followed the weaver at her loom, watching threads of midnight become worlds of sleep.0:20 Tonight, the threads are different.0:23 Not wool, but water vapor and moonlight.0:27 The air is cool against Elias’s skin.0:31 Three stories up, on the flat tar roof of his building, the city’s hum is a distant, sleeping beast.0:40 Above him, the sky is a deep, endless velvet, and scattered across it are the slow, patient ships of the night… the clouds.0:52 He waits.0:52 He watches them drift, gauging their weight, their moisture, their willingness.1:00 He finds one he likes.1:02 A plump, meandering wisp, just starting its journey overhead.1:08 He lifts a hand, not hurried, not demanding.1:12 His fingers don't quite touch it—they don't have to.1:17 It's more like a suggestion.1:19 A gentle pull in the space between him and the cloud.1:24 He coaxes a trailing edge, teasing it downward, stretching it into the foundation of a wall.1:33 The work is quiet.1:35 It is mind and breath and a subtle, knowing pressure on the air itself.1:41 He breathes out, and a wisp thickens, solidifying into a parapet.1:48 He draws a finger through the air, and a long, elegant archway forms in the vaporous stone.1:56 He works for what feels like an hour, or maybe just a minute.2:02 Time is different up here.2:04 He’s building a castle he remembers from a dream.2:09 Turrets rise from the misty ramparts, their peaks catching the moonlight and shimmering with a soft, internal glow.2:20 He carves out windows, dark and deep, that seem to look into the heart of the night sky itself.2:29 Another cloud drifts near, and he borrows from it, spinning its edges into delicate, floating buttresses that connect one tower to another.2:42 It is vast.2:43 Silent.2:43 A fortress of forgotten light hanging in the heavens, seen by no one but him.2:51 He sits back on the cool tar, his work complete.2:55 He doesn’t feel tired.2:57 He feels… settled.2:59 He watches his ephemeral kingdom drift slowly, majestically, across the field of stars.3:07 A testament to a single, quiet moment of creation.3:12 Then, he sees it.3:14 A faint line of palest pink on the eastern horizon.3:18 The first whisper of the dawn.3:21 The light creeps up the sky, touching the lowest edges of his castle first.3:28 And where it touches, the structure begins to dissolve.3:33 The solid walls thin into mere suggestions.3:37 The sharp edges of the towers soften, bleeding back into shapeless mist.3:44 The gold and rose light climbs higher, and the great hall evaporates.3:51 The turrets sigh and release their form, becoming simple puffs of white again.3:58 Elias watches it all go.4:00 There is no sadness.4:02 No sense of loss.4:04 The beauty wasn't in its permanence, but in its making.4:09 By the time the sun clears the horizon, the sky is a brilliant, empty blue.4:16 Nothing remains but the memory, and the cool, clean feeling of the morning air.
