The Tearsmith: A Novel

We had many stories at The Grave.

Whispered tales, bedtime stories…legends flickering on our lips in the glow of a candle. The most famous was the one about the Tearsmith.

It told of a distant, far-away place…

A world where no one could cry, and people’s souls were empty, stripped of all emotion. But hidden far from everyone lived a little man cloaked in shadows and boundless solitude. A lonely artisan, pale and hunched, whose eyes were clear like glass and could produce crystal teardrops.

People went to him in order to cry, to feel a shred of emotion – because tears encapsulate love and the most heart-wrenching of farewells. They are the most intimate extension of the soul. More than joy or happiness, it is tears that make us truly human.

And the Tearsmith fulfilled this desire. He slipped his tears and all that they held into people’s eyes. And so it came to be that they learnt to cry: with anger, desperation, pain and anguish.

Excruciating passions, disappointments and tears, tears, tears – the Tearsmith corrupted a world of purity, tainting it with the deepest and darkest of emotions.

‘Remember, you cannot lie to the Tearsmith,’ they would say, to finish the tale.

They told us this story to teach us that every child can be good, must be good, because no one is born evil. It is not in human nature.

But for me…

For me, it wasn’t like that.

For me, it wasn’t just a story.

He was not dressed in shadows. He was not a pale and hunched little man, with eyes as clear as glass.

No. I knew the Tearsmith.