There was once a girl who made her living chasing the sky. Her name was Elira, though in the village below the mountains they called her the Cloudcatcher. Each morning, before the bell in the market tower struck dawn, she would sling a wicker pack over her shoulders, filled with glass jars that clinked together like a chorus of little bells, and make her way up the winding paths that vanished into the high ridges. Her boots were worn, her cloak patched, but her eyes were always fixed on the restless heavens above.

The mountains were a world apart from the fields and cottages at their roots. Pine forests whispered in voices older than men, and the stones underfoot shone with mica and quartz, glittering like half-buried stars. The air was always sharp and cool, even in summer, and it carried the taste of rain long before the clouds came drifting. Elira had learned the paths by heart—where the moss grew thickest, where the goat trails cut short across the ridges, where the safest ledges opened to the sky.

She would wait in those places with her jars, watching the weather. A morning mist was easy to catch: it curled lazily, spilling over the rocks like cream from a jug, and she could scoop it into a jar with a quick twist of her wrist. Thunderheads, however, were trickier—they rumbled with temper, and one had to creep close with careful steps, coaxing a sliver of storm into glass without letting it bite with lightning. The most valuable of all were the golden dusk clouds, those wandering sails that drifted low and burned like embers when the sun bent westward. Those, the merchants said, could flavor tea with dreams, or keep a lantern lit for a month without oil.

By midday, Elira’s pack would be heavy with clinking jars—each one fogged, or glowing faintly, or sparking with a hidden storm. She would hum to herself as she descended, a tune carried on the wind that smelled of resin and stone. Sometimes she felt the clouds themselves hummed back, for they pressed curiously against the glass, testing their boundaries like restless cats.

When she returned to the village, the market square was already alive. Stalls of copper pots and bright cloths, baskets of apples, the smell of roasted chestnuts in the air—yet it was always Elira’s little booth that gathered the most crowd. Farmers bought jars of morning mist to cool their milk. Sailors sought stormclouds to speed their ships across the river’s long bend. Children begged their parents for sunset clouds, to keep beside their beds and light the rafters with soft fire.

The people marveled, but Elira only smiled shyly as she handed over each jar. For her, the joy was not in the selling, but in the catching. She loved the feeling of climbing high above the earth, hearing the world fall silent except for the endless breathing of the sky. And though her jars always emptied by nightfall, she knew the mountains would wait for her again tomorrow, their peaks brushing the drifting tides of heaven, where clouds of every kind—soft as lambs, heavy as thunder, golden as dreams—awaited the touch of her patient hands.

So it was that the girl who caught clouds lived lightly, her days measured not by coin or calendar, but by the weight of mist and storm she carried down from the heights, and by the quiet wonder in the eyes of those who opened a jar and found a piece of the sky inside.