stormglass

three instruments, no numbers on any of them. the storm glass holds crystals that rest low and pale when nothing is coming, and climb — more of them, larger, gone deep violet — as the glass falls; they never snap from one to the other, they drift, over about half a minute, because a storm glass is a slow instrument by nature. the barometer is a copper dial of twelve unlabelled sectors whose needle walks one sector at a time and never jumps the gap. the fir cone hangs under a beam and goes open, pinched, closed, always through pinched.

none of it ever writes the weather — it only reads it, and it reads the honest counters rather than the obvious ones, so a dry spell somebody committed to is not mistaken for a glass on the way down. what you learn is not a forecast handed to you but a habit: the cone shut two mornings running means something, and you worked it out yourself.

the sky joins in. on a clear day with the glass falling a pale ring gathers around the sun — and around the moon after dark — brightening as the change gets nearer and easing back out again if it does not come. and the thunder arrives late: the crack over your head is vanilla's own, byte for byte, but the roll behind it is delayed by the distance it travelled and quieted by it, seventeen blocks to the tick. this is 0.1.0 and it is exactly what it looks like: three instruments, a ring and a delay, and not one line of weather written by anything but the world.