The Moonforge smelled of hot glass and old iron, a scent that sat in the throat like a promise. Sparks stitched the air in thin, bright threads as the forges spat and the bellows sighed. Lanterns hung from scaffolds, their light caught and fractured by panes of half-formed glass, turning the workshop into a constellation of shards. Men and women moved through that constellation with the practiced economy of people who had learned to read danger in the way a hammer fell or a seam cracked. Aria moved among them like a hand that knew the shape of the work, but tonight her fingers trembled with a different knowledge.
They had come for parts and for answers. The ledger had led them here: a courier's scrawl, a manifest line, a name that matched a donor trust in the Pale Codex marginalia. The Moonforge was a place that made anchors and repaired sigils, and anchors were the kind of thing that could be used to steady a witness—or to bind a mind. The Loom had no illusions about the Moonforge's neutrality. It was a market of tools and a market of secrets, and both were dangerous.
Rell and Halv were waiting at the edge of the main floor, leaning against a stack of cooling molds. Rell's jaw was a hard line; Halv's hands were stained with flux. They had the look of people who had been up too long and had decided to keep going anyway. Aria nodded to them, then to the apprentices who clustered near the glass presses. Luna stood a little apart, hands folded, eyes closed as if listening to something only she could hear. The jasmine scent that always clung to her was faint tonight, swallowed by the forge smoke.
"Prototype sighting?" Aria asked, keeping her voice low.
Halv spat a line of ash. "Not sighting. Activation. They've been patching a frame in the back. Old schematics, but someone's been grafting new sigils into the joints. It's not supposed to move."
"Not supposed to," Rell echoed. "Until it does."
They moved through the Moonforge like a small tide, slipping between workbenches and past the glass sentinels—those half-formed constructs that refracted light and empathy in equal measure. The sentinels watched with blank, faceted faces. Their presence made the air feel thinner, as if the room itself were holding its breath.
The prototype lay in a recessed bay at the far end of the hall, a hulking thing of metal ribs and glass plates. It had been built to be a guardian, someone had said, and guardians were always a little too close to being gods. Its chest was a lattice of sigil-forged veins; a pale, humming core sat at its center like a heart. Around the core, someone had stitched a dozen small anchors—fruit, carved bone, a scrap of song—each one a promise of control.
A man in a leather apron—one of the forgers—was bent over the core, hands steady as he tightened a clamp. He looked up when Aria and her team stepped into the bay, and for a moment his face was a map of guilt and defiance.
"You shouldn't be here," he said.
"We shouldn't have to be," Aria answered. Her voice was even, but the words carried the weight of the ledger's pages. "Who paid for this?"
The man's eyes flicked to the shadows where a broker's sigil hung like a stain. "Not my business," he said. "I make what they ask."
Luna stepped forward then, and the room seemed to tilt toward her. She didn't speak; she never did when she was about to do something that required the world to be quiet. Her palms opened, and the jasmine scent swelled like a tide. The apprentices around her stilled, as if the scent had a leash on their attention.
She reached for the prototype's hum. It was a thing of sound and pressure, a low, mechanical heartbeat threaded with sigil-song. Luna's gift translated it into a shape she could touch: a thin, bright filament of grief and purpose. The filament thrummed with a memory that was not its own—someone's loss, someone's command, braided into the machine's will.
"Someone bound a witness into it," she said, voice small. "A donor's echo. It's not just a guardian. It's a vessel."
Aria's hand went to the small sigil at her collar, the one that had been stitched into her skin in a field graft years ago. She felt the ledger's pull like a tide under her ribs. If the prototype carried a witness, then the Moonforge was not merely making tools; it was trafficking in people's pasts.
"Shut it down," Aria said.
Halv moved to the control rack, fingers flying over levers and valves. The forger cursed and tried to pull a safety key, but the prototype's core flared, and the anchors along its ribs lit like a constellation. The glass plates along its shoulders flexed, and the thing inhaled.
It moved with the slow, terrible grace of something waking from a long sleep. The first motion was a click of metal, then a shudder that ran through the floor. Sparks leapt from a seam and rained like a brief meteor shower. The apprentices screamed and scattered. One of the glass sentinels tilted its head and emitted a high, refracted note that made the hair on Aria's arms stand up.
The prototype rose to its feet. Where its face should have been there was only a smooth pane of glass, and behind that pane something shifted—images, like memories, flickering across the surface. For a heartbeat Aria thought she saw a child's laugh, a ferry seam, a ledger page turning. Then the images were gone, replaced by a single, bright sigil that pulsed with intent.
"Containment," Rell shouted. He threw a coil of wire toward the prototype's legs, trying to snag the joints. The wire snapped like a twig. The prototype's arm swept, and a gust of air knocked Rell back into a stack of molds.
Aria moved before she thought. She had trained for this—trained to read the cadence of a sigil and to answer it with a counter. She stepped into the prototype's wake, feeling the heat of the forge on her face and the pressure of the thing's attention like a hand on her chest. The prototype's sigils sang at her, a chorus of commands threaded with the stolen witness's echo. It wanted to obey.
She reached for the cadence she had practiced in the dark hours between raids: a redirect, a small, precise inversion that could take a command and fold it back on itself. It was a technique that had cost her before—small memories, a haze that settled like dust in the mind. She knew the ledger's rules now: every rulechanging act had a price.
"Luna," she said, and the name was a tether. "Hold the apprentices back. Don't let them touch the anchors."
Luna's eyes opened. She nodded once, and the apprentices obeyed as if pulled by strings. Her hands rose, and she began a low, steady hum—the kind of hum that made the air taste like jasmine and salt. It was a teacher's cadence, a stabilizing thread. It would buy Aria the seconds she needed, but it would cost Luna something. Aria felt the cost like a shadow at the edge of her hearing.
Aria stepped closer to the prototype. The sigils on its chest flared, and the stolen echo—someone's grief—washed over her like cold water. For a moment she staggered, the memory of a ferry seam and a child's small hand filling her head. It was not her memory, but the cadence made it feel like one. The world narrowed to the sound of the prototype's heartbeat and the hum of Luna's cadence.
She began the redirect.
It was not a shout or a spell so much as a careful, surgical unweaving. Aria took the prototype's command and threaded it through a mirror of her own cadence, folding the instruction inward until it became a question. The prototype's sigils hesitated, then tried to answer the question with the only thing they had: the witness's echo. Aria pushed harder, shaping the echo into a loop that fed back into the core.
For a breath, the prototype stilled. The glass face showed nothing but the reflection of the forge lights. Then the core shuddered, and the anchors along its ribs began to smoke. The prototype's shoulders slumped as if a great weight had been lifted.
Aria felt the cost like a stone dropped into her chest. A small, bright memory—her mother's voice calling her name on a morning when the tide was low—faded like a photograph left in the sun. The edges of it blurred. She could still reach for the feeling, but the words were gone. Her knees went weak. The world tilted.
She stumbled, and Halv caught her arm. "Aria—"
"Keep it down," she said, voice thin. "Now."
Luna's hum faltered. The jasmine scent thinned. Aria saw the teacher's face, pale and drawn, and knew the cost had taken its toll. Luna's eyes were wet, not with tears but with the residue of memory—small things she could not quite name. The apprentices clustered closer, their faces tight with fear and awe.
The prototype's core dimmed to a dull ember. The stolen echo unspooled like a thread and pooled at Aria's feet, a small, shimmering thing that looked almost like a child curled in sleep. Rell moved to it with gloved hands and wrapped it in a cloth. "We can't leave it here," he said. "It's a witness."
Aria nodded, though the nod felt heavy. "We take it. We catalog it. We find who it belongs to."
They worked with the practiced speed of people who had rehearsed this choreography a hundred times: securing the prototype, isolating the anchors, binding the core with sigil-ropes that hummed with a borrowed calm. The forger who had been working on the prototype watched them with a face that had gone from defiance to something like shame. He tried to speak, but the words stuck in his throat.
Outside, the Moonforge's shutters had been thrown open. The coastal wind pushed through the hall, carrying with it the taste of salt and the distant sound of waves. The prototype's presence had been a stone dropped in a pond; the ripples would reach the harbor and the market and the ledger's margins.
Aria sat on a low crate while Rell and Halv wrapped the witness-echo for transport. Her hands trembled, not from the aftershocks of the redirect but from the hollowness that had opened where a memory had been. She tried to call the lost memory back—her mother's voice, the low laugh—but the edges were gone, like a song remembered only in the bones.
Luna came to her then, moving with the careful gentleness of someone who had just given something away. She crouched and took Aria's hands in hers. "You did what you had to," she said. Her voice was steady, but Aria could see the strain in the teacher's jaw.
"What did it cost you?" Aria asked.
Luna's fingers tightened. "A name," she said. "A small one. A child's name from a lullaby. It will come back in time, if we give it the right anchors. But it will be different."
Aria swallowed. The ledger had taught her to count costs like currency, but the arithmetic never made the losses lighter. "We'll fix it," she said, because that was what they did—fix, bind, protect. It was a promise and a command.
They moved the prototype onto a wheeled cradle, the witness-echo wrapped and labeled with a sigil that marked it as evidence. The forger watched them go, hands empty. The apprentices gathered at the doorway, eyes wide, and one of them—young, with soot on her cheek—stepped forward.
"Will it remember?" she asked, voice small.
Aria looked at the wrapped echo, at the way the cloth seemed to breathe with a life that was not quite human. "We'll make sure it has a chance," she said. "We'll find its people."
Outside, the Moonforge's bell tolled once, a sound that rolled over the harbor and into the market. Lanterns winked on. The ledger's lines had moved another step. The prototype's awakening had been contained, but the cost had been paid in the currency the world understood least: memory.
As they pushed the cradle toward the Loom's waiting cart, Aria felt the absence in her chest like a new scar. It would ache in the quiet hours, in the small moments when a name should have come and did not. She would learn to live with the gap. She would teach her child to read the ledger's margins and to count the costs. That, too, was part of the work.
Behind them, the Moonforge's forges cooled and the glass sentinels returned to their silent watch. The prototype's core glowed faintly beneath its wrappings, a small ember of a life that had been interrupted and saved. The ledger had led them here; the Pale Codex's marginalia had been confirmed. The path forward was a road of ash and light, and they would walk it together, one costly step at a time.