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Moonlit hands, a humming ring of petrified hearts, and a graftsmith who chooses craftsmanship over convention. Gideon performs a perilous surgical inversion to save his partner Isolde from a binding graft; the climax plays out as physical skill, improvisation, and sacrifice beneath the city’s small, lived rituals.
The bench smelled of oil and hot glass; Gideon Hars worked as if he were composing a short, fierce prayer. He kept his hands steady at a level that had turned the guild’s reputation around him into a rumor—people spoke of his seams the way some spoke of saints—and he preferred the rumors to the conversations that followed. A hush had folded over the workshop as the patron’s attendants drew their cloaks tighter, the evening sky outside the shutters a metal smear. Gideon did not look up. He coaxed a thin shard of Heartglass into the channel he'd carved along the rib, easing it with the kind of fingers that had learned how to be precise by necessity.
The Heartglass took the light in layers; it was not simply bright but layered, like a memory refracted until it stopped being any one thing. When he slid the last stitch—soft silk, looped three times and locked with the slight, practiced pinch of his thumb—the shard hummed, not loud but with a pulse that suggested something crossing a border. The patron’s breath came out in a grateful, gasped puff; the attendants’ faces were polite grief and relief braided together. Gideon wiped the blade and set it aside. His palms smelled like iron and citrus; an old habit in the neighborhood was to chew candied peel to disguise the metal tang of evening, and a vendor outside his window hawked the last of those peel-wedges with a bell that had no business being cheerful.
“You make it look so clean,” the patron said, voice careful. “My son will be able to—”
“Move,” Gideon supplied, curt as a stitch. He did not offer more prophecy. Skill, he had learned, paid better than promises. Tamsin Vell, his apprentice, slid the tray of clamps nearer and, when she thought no one watched, mouthed the guild’s old joke: “Try not to give him a personality.” It was an absurdity and a kindness both; Gideon allowed the corner of his mouth to lift.
Master Halv lingered in the doorway of the inner room with that patient disappointment that older men wore when they had once sold a sensible future and then watched the town buy miracles instead. “You have a hand for this, Hars. Keep it clean.”
Gideon bowed his head in acknowledgment rather than thanks, because gratitude for a tool’s worth was a currency he preferred to hoard. He wrapped the finished seam in a thin cloth, placed a guarantee token beside it (the guild’s little coin that meant a year’s follow-up), and watched the patron’s party leave with the brittle air of those who had been gifted safety at a price. Outside, the evening market smelled of smoked fennel buns and roasted root squares; a child shouted about a new game where they balanced river pebbles on their elbows and told fortunes by how many pebbles stayed.