Threadwright: Asterloom Rising

Kade Rowan's hands smelled of oil and boiled linen. The smell had a way of nesting under everything else in the workshop: under the sweet iron tang of dye, under the sour sweat of the apprentices who slept on the loft, under the sharper citrus of the thread-wash that Master Harrow insisted on. He moved his fingers against the shuttle like someone stroking a living thing, thumb catching the weft and letting it snick into place. The great wheel behind him sighed, a tired whale-breath of wood and cog. Outside, Shardwick's bannered alleys glimmered with strips of cloth flapping like bright fish—vendors advertising heirloom textiles, weathered signboards nailed by hands that still remembered how to sew.

Master Harrow watched without looking away from the pattern he'd been fiddling with for hours. Harrow's beard had the color of cut flax; his eyes were small and always measuring. 'Don't rush the selvedge, boy,' he said. His voice scraped like an old bobbin. 'You can fix crooked, but you can't fix haste.'

Kade laughed without heat. He was twenty-two, lean in the way of men who rose before dawn and whose joints remembered the rhythm of repetitive labor. His fingers were callused in crescents where the cord bit. He had a scar running along the left knuckle, a white seam where a rogue shuttle had bitten him the summer his sister Juno was born. Juno slept on the narrow pallet beneath the rafters, a blanket of patched tapestries covering her legs. Sometimes in the quiet hours Kade cupped his hand over her small face and listened to the way her breath smoothed. Keeping that steady breath was the shape of his mornings.

Outside, the city hummed: delivery drones ticking along rope-guides, the low murmur of a tram, the clip of sandals on wet cobbles. The world smelled of rain and boiled cotton. A boy from the alley leaned into the doorway and called, 'Harrow's accepting sample for the Weaver's Guild again. Word is the new tenders will buy whole bolts.' He grinned as if the idea were a coin already in his mouth.

Master Harrow only nodded. The guild's contracts were small mercy in hard months. Kade folded a strip of blue around a warp and felt the fabric's memory; it remembered the hand that had set it. Memory was what the city traded in—old stitches that refused to come apart, patterns that had comforted a generation. Kade wanted to buy more than he could afford: enough medicine to keep Juno's coughing from swallowing her sleep, a ticket for urgent consultation, a bolt of warm cloth for winter. For now he had the loom and the knot of things he could do with patience.