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In a riverside city that wards itself with living recollections, a memory-weaver and the Nightward who channels his life into the beacons confront a bid by officials to centralize memory into guarded stores. Their improvised tapestry — a public mirror, not a vault — becomes both rescue and reckoning when the cost of anchoring it is offered freely.
The attic above the market smelled of warm silk and lemon oil, of time thatched into fabric and the faint metallic cool of old memory. Elara Thorne kept her small shop with the precise economy of someone who paid to protect what she owned by giving pieces of herself away. Lamps were unnecessary; the strips of lumensilk she wove hummed like captured stars, casting a soft, mobile light that slid across the rafters and made the dust look like a scattering of private constellations.
Her loom was old and honest—a skeleton of oak polished by decades of hands, its heddles braided with ribbons of silver-glossed fiber. The magic was not in the tool so much as in the manner of use. Memory-weaving asked for a bargain: to bind a recollection was to remove its shape from the mind that had held it. Clients came with griefs too loud to live beside or joys they could not keep because holding them tore something else apart; Elara could gather a single thread of feeling and stitch it into cloth that would whisper the moment back when unfurled, but the price was sharp and private. The image, taste, or voice would live within the weave and leave her like a grain of sand through a sieve.
People preferred to pay coins. Some preferred anonymity. A few, who trusted her hands more than the city, paid with scraps of memory clever enough to hide in her stash. She kept a small tin where she collected trivialities—names of streets she no longer visited, the scent of a market pastry, a childhood rhyme she could not sing fully anymore. She kept only what would not break the shape of who she was.
Rafi, her apprentice, moved across the floor with the blunt affection of someone born to keep other people's secrets. He hummed while he wound bobbins, a sound that steadied Elara the way the loom steadied her heart. "You will burn yourself out if you keep bartering away pieces like curios," he said once, as he looped a scrap of lumensilk into storage. He said it without accusing; it was the way those close to her worried aloud. Elara had reasons for her restraint—reasons that fit neatly into the hollow where names and small faces waited—but she also knew the city needed the service she provided. Some things would not survive if someone else did not carry them for a while.