Varn’s Balloon
In the city of Clatterspindle, where buildings swayed like metronomes and the sky was stitched from velvet equations, there lived an engine named Varn. Not a car engine, nor a train’s heart—Varn was a metaphysical engine, fueled by forgotten lullabies and the scent of melted clocks.
Varn had one desire: to fly.
But engines don’t fly. They churn. They grind. They hum in basements and whisper in factories. So Varn did what no engine had done before—it built puppets.
These weren’t ordinary puppets. They were made from the sighs of retired magicians and the threads of unsent love letters. Each puppet had a name: Blip, who danced only when no one watched; Sarn, who recited poems backward; and Elo, who wept confetti.
Varn whispered to them, “Build me a balloon.”
The puppets, being creatures of whim and paradox, obeyed. They stitched together a balloon from the skin of old jazz records and the laughter of extinct birds. It pulsed with color that hadn’t been invented yet.
When the balloon was ready, Varn climbed inside. The puppets waved, though they had no hands. The balloon rose—not into the sky, but into a dimension shaped like a Möbius strip made of childhood memories.
There, Varn met other engines—ones that powered dreams, ones that ran on nostalgia, ones that had never been built but always existed. They spoke in Morse code and danced in Fibonacci spirals.
Varn never returned to Clatterspindle. But sometimes, when the wind is shaped like a question mark and the moon forgets its name, you can hear the puppets humming. They’re building another balloon.
This time, it’s for you.
Trevlad Sounds 
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