Page 1 of 21
A returning soundwright confronts a civic instrument that altered nights and memories. In a fogged town of quiet faces and a tall listening column, an unearthed recording sets a choice between restoring comfort, exposing truth, or building consent into a tool that once decided what people could remember.
You come back on a slow train that breathes fog through its joints and lets you off at a platform you remember by smell more than by sight: damp timber, coal and wet stone, the cool tang of metal. The town that waits beyond the station is smaller than the one you left, or you have grown larger in the space where grief hollowed you out. Whoever measures towns by cobbles and shopfronts would call Larkfield unchanged; whoever counts the intervals between people's faces would say it has settled into a quiet you cannot name yet.
You carry tools in a leather roll and a reputation you have not yet decided whether to display or to hide. The job is simple enough in the letter: repair the public instrument in the square. The note from Coren Hale, the steward, reads like a familiar key turned; he asks for you by trade and remembers your hands by name. Coren meets you at the edge of the market, his coat turned up against the damp. He has the careful, taut manner of someone who thinks of the town as a tapestry he must keep mended. He greets you with the same steady welcome he offered the day you left, which answers a question about whether this place keeps time in the same way you do.
Jun Calder appears at the fringe of that greeting, sleeves rolled, fingers stained with some bright oil. Jun is young and quick with tools and quicker with questions. He watches you with the intense scrutiny of a person who admires someone who once taught him in stories. When he says your name, there is both relief and accusation in it: relief that the work will be done by familiar hands, accusation because you left before finishing something you were meant to finish.
The Spire stands where the square thins into civic space, a tall, elegant column of metal and wood that has been coaxed into music for decades. It is not monstrous; there are no bristling pennants or wires like a sculptor’s ruin. Instead, it looks as if a handful of careful carpenters and machinists decided to make a thinkable thing of sound. Tiers of receiver flanges fan like open mouths around its waist. Narrow slats, each dulled with the town's weather, wrap upward toward a bell whose face is scored with repairs. Children glide about its base, batting a coin across the stone as if issuing a challenge to the metal. The Spire hums faintly even from a distance, a low vibration you feel before you hear it — a memory of frequencies catching in the bones.
You tell yourself you are here for work and leave the rest of the returning for the hours between tasks.