The morning in Brimford threaded itself through the alleyways in the ordinary ways of small towns: smoke rose from chimneys like patient questions, a milk cart creaked along the lane, and the calls of shopkeepers arranged themselves into a domestic chorus that made even worry feel manageable. Mara Kestrel opened her shutters with hands that already knew the day's work before her mind caught up, letting light wash over odds and ends on her bench — a strip of brass with a stubborn burr, a bent pin that would not take its proper mate, a coil of tempered wire warmed and waiting. She had the knack for finding fit where things were reluctant to agree, and the habit had grown into the method by which she steadied the small wobblings of her life. Around her neck a pendant rested against her collarbone: a rounded scrap of metal, nicked and smoothed by fingers that once belonged to someone else. It was a thing both awkward and intimate; she had never spoken of how it hummed sometimes when the weather shifted, how its undercut caught a light no one else noticed. The pendant was a private weight, a reminder that some mechanisms in her life were not for public repair and some doors stayed shut because the hinges belonged to memory. That silence had become part of the rhythm of Brimford as much as the clatter of the baker's pans and the rattle of the smith's bell. People moved through their small rituals, and Mara answered the town's requests with a steady hand — a latch reset here, a stubborn bolt eased there, a gate that groaned until she coaxed its anger into a softer noise. The day might have continued that way if not for the thin first breath that came through the square: not a storm, not a shout, but a tremor of air that carried the chill of stone where there should have been only the warmth of hearth smoke. It was barely noticeable at first; a cup shivered on a windowsill, a child's hat rolled into the gutter, a dog gave a confused long note and sat very still. When she felt the hair at the nape of her neck stand, she closed her palm over the pendant as if it were a talisman and stepped outside, because the world had a way of asking the hands that could mend to act.