Arin stood barefoot in the market as the morning sun dragged its slow, lazy light across the cobbles. He should have been at the bench, carving a new hinge for a door, listening to the small, honest rhythm of wood under his knife. Instead he was wrapping a cloth around a boy's scraped knee because the town trusted him more than the apothecary and less than the priests. He tied the bandage with hands used to knots and joints, hands that knew the right tension to stop a bleed and the right pressure to soothe a bruise. The boy thanked him with an earnest, breathless grin and ran off, and Arin felt, for a moment, a little bright thing in his chest—then nothing, as if the feeling had been borrowed and returned before he could claim it.
A sound threaded the edge of his awareness—a soft, insistent tapping at the rim of thought. Arin frowned and took a steady breath, the old habit he had learned for furious work and for quieting the small anxieties that came with living by his hands. He spoke his name out loud, a mantra to claim himself: "Arin Velas." The syllables felt oddly new in his mouth, like a song half-remembered.
Light pooled between two stalls, not sunlight but a faint, blue-white shimmer that hovered like a splinter of something larger. Carts rattled, voices stuttered into a hush. The stallholders nudged each other and crossed themselves; some slipped away muttering about bad omens. Arin moved closer because his feet did what his curiosity wanted, not because he was braver than the rest.
When his fingers brushed the shard, a rush of images slammed into him—a ruined temple with columns like broken ribs, a choir of voices in a tongue he didn't know but which felt like a memory, the weight of hands pressing something warm and heavy into his chest. Pain cut through, bright and clean. He snatched his hand back and held it, blinking as if to clear a fog. People gaped, and a child began to cry. In Arin's palm lay a sliver of pale light: no bigger than a fingernail, but it pulsed with a curious vitality that made his skin prickle.
"Blessings," a woman near him whispered, voice thin with age. A priest stepped forward, his robe embroidered with a dozen tiny sigils, and his face held the composed look of a man who had catalogued many strange things. "Keep your distance," he said to the crowd, though his eyes did not leave Arin. "To the temple, now. We will assess this."
Arin felt less like a man being summoned and more like a stick taken from a pile. He followed because the light on his palm felt warm enough to be alive. The path to the temple wound through narrow lanes and past a few small gardens where herbs and bruised flowers leaned against wooden trellises. People stared; mothers pulled their children in close. The nearer they came to the temple, the more the air seemed to thicken with the smell of old wax and incense. The Temple of the Forgotten Light was smaller than the old tales made it sound, squat and honest, its stone eaten in places by lichen. Inside, frescos faded into the damp, showing gods whose faces were rubbed away by centuries of petitions.
"You carry a spark," said the woman in shadow who waited by the altar. Her hair was bound back with leather and some of her fingers bore rings, not ornamental but marked with tiny scratches of use. Her gaze could read the score of a man's debts, Arin thought with a dry twist of spite. "Who gave you this, and why is the pantheon restless?"
Arin held out the sliver. When the woman—Mara, the Highwarden called her later—took it, her shoulder twitched. She closed her eyes and breathed, then looked at him with an expression that folded questions into equal parts worry and calculation. "A gap," she said softly. "A remnant of a fallen one. It seeks food—stories, belief, offerings. Those who feed it either rise or rot."
The words made his insides suddenly smaller. He thought of quiet nights beneath a roof with a woman humming beside him. That image shivered and blurred. "What does it want from me?" he asked, trying to keep his voice even.
"Time," Mara answered. "And choices. We will not bind you tonight. There will be tests." The priest stepped forward. "Rest here until dawn. Akin to the old rites, we will watch for the spark's hunger." He bowed, the ritual courtesy feeling both reassuring and cold.
They put him in a small chamber with a narrow window that looked out over the eaves of the temple. The shard lay on a wooden plate in the center of the table, breathing light. Night gathered beyond the glass. Arin sat with his palms on his knees and watched the thing that had become the pivot of other people's fears and hopes.
He thought of the boy with the torn knee. He thought of the small bakery where he ate his bread and if he ever had a family. He counted the familiar items he could name—his hammer, the old iron chisel, the scar on his left knuckle—and noticed after a few minutes that one of the small images in his mind had gone dull. He could not remember the name of the dog that had followed him for a season. A trifle, perhaps, but it prickled like a splinter. He pressed his thumb to his forehead, as if more pressure might shore up the leaking things.
The chamber was silent save for the slow breathing of the priest in the room beyond. A candle guttered and threw trembling shadows on the ceiling. Arin felt the shard's impatience as if the thing had lungs that wanted to take more than light. He whispered, not sure whether he said it to himself or to the fragment: "If I take it in—what will I lose?"
No answer came. Instead, in the clocks of his chest, in the tiny soft places where a man keeps his memories, a picture formed—an old woman's hands kneading dough, flour dusting the air like motes of sun. He tried to call from that memory a name and found that his tongue had nothing to fetch. The thought that he might be hollowed slowly terrified and oddly thrilled him, as if a prospectus for fortune had been offered in equal measure with a mortgaged soul.
Footsteps approached. The temple door opened and the Highwarden and Mara entered, their faces carved in the serious relief of duty. Mara sat across from him and folded her hands. "There will be trials," she said. "Small at first, to measure what the spark wants and what you are willing to pay. If you refuse, we can try to remove it. Many sparks leave quietly into the dark, and some seeds never sprout."
Arin looked at his hands, callused and plain. He had been a man who mended other people's things, who did not expect to be the subject of sermons. Everyone had a choice, he thought, and he had never seen a reason to deny his. He felt tired in a way that made his joints ache. "What if I can do good with it?" he asked. "What if I can stop people from suffering?"
Mara's mouth softened for a single, quick beat. "Then you will be tempted by results," she said. "Results are the easiest way to justify the slow erosion of self. Remembering why you started will be the only defense." She watched him with eyes that had once been bright and now shaded with reserve. "Sleep. Tomorrow you will begin."
He lay back on the narrow pallet and let the rafters throw long hands of shadow across the ceiling. Outside, the town folded into evening: bakers closing shutters, a ferryman's call, a lone dog padding the lanes. Arin turned the boy's scraped knee over in his mind until the little facts were sharp—the angle of the leg, the wet flash of a lip bitten hard—and he thought, not for the first time, whether mending such small things might ever add up to mending greater harm. Would each stitch cost him a piece of himself?
A name surfaced: Rosa, a woman who hummed while she kneaded dough. He reached for it to steady himself and found the name's edges blurring, the surname gone. The thought of losing such details frightened him; yet the prospect of stopping a fever, of staunching a streetful of blood, tempted him like a bright coin. He set his hand near the shard on the plate without touching it. The light pulsed once, patient as a beast waiting for permission. He imagined a life where his hands were used to larger work, and he realized with a dull, growing certainty that each gain might gouge something he loved.
Mara's mouth softened for a single, quick beat. "Sleep. Tomorrow you will begin."