The first test came at dawn like a blunt instrument: not a dramatic demand from the gods but the crawl of duty across the floorboards. Mara woke him with a hand on his shoulder and a cup of bitter tea. The shard sat in a bowl of cloth between them, patient. Outside, the temple bell knotted the morning into regular beats; inside, the air smelled of linen and old prayers.
"You slept," Mara said. Her voice had no reproach, only a quiet that implied there were longer things to watch than a single night. "Good. Hunger is easier to answer on a full stomach." She stood, moving like a woman who measured each action before she let it loose. "Come. The infirmary."
The infirmary was a low hall with benches and shelves of pots. A thin light fell through a high window, catching dust like a mesh of time. Arin had not expected much: a scrape of routine, perhaps a word or two of ceremony, then a polite release. Instead, the infirmary held a row of bodies like a line of unpaid debts. People sat with fevered eyes and labored breaths. A child clutched a rag and stared at the floor. A woman hummed a listless tune as if the thread of her voice might stitch something together.
Mara moved among them with the surety of someone who had performed this route for years. She paused at a man near the back whose skin shone with sweat and who coughed like he was trying to clear his lungs of themselves. "He has been fevered three days," she said. "They say the healer is away. There are no salves left."
Arin's hands itched. The shard in its cloth was a small, steady presence against his palm when Mara passed it to him. "Show me," he said, surprising himself with how readily the words came. Not triumph, he realized; more like a steady hunger he did not fully own yet.
Mara watched him as he approached the fevered man. "Remember," she said softly, "what you give is not always what you think. The spark does not bargain in coin but in parts."
He laid his hands on the man's shoulders. The room seemed to exhale a little at the contact. A current moved through him — not an electric sting but a slow bloom that loosened a knot in his chest. He laid both hands with the practiced gentleness of a man who set splints and tuned joints. Then, without thinking, he let the light flow outward from the shard he had wrapped against his palm earlier.
Warmth spread like an oil stain; the man's cough faltered and then steadied. The fever that had been a red ocean settled into a calm ripple. The child's eyes widened; the woman who hummed smiled with a sudden clear edge. It took only a breath. Around them, people unclenched as if someone had unknotted a heavy rope.
The cost came not as a crack but as a soft edgeless erasure. Arin felt something slide from him with the warmth — a small, private thing that had been lodged in the back of his head like a pressed leaf. He reached to call it back and found his mind sticky where the thought had rested. He knew it as loss before he could name it: a face, a laugh, the smell of bread that had been round and bright. He tried to summon the name of the woman who once sang while she kneaded dough and found only a palate of flour and absence.
Mara's eyes were on him. There was no triumph there, only a careful record of consequence. "You have learned how to open a wound and to close it," she said. "But you also paid. Tell me what you lost."
He groped at his memory like one feeling for a lost tool in a dark chest. "A name," he said finally, tasting the word like an apology. "A woman. I remember hands—kneading—but not her name." The admission struck him with a sharper ache than any physical pain. Some things, he realized, were not recoverable by mending; they were worn and then rubbed away.
"Names anchor us," Mara said. "They braid us into the world. Lose enough and you drift." She did not say it as a warning so much as a map. "You did right. The man will live. Those you save will bind stories to you. They will give you pieces back in exchange for what you do. But be mindful: stories take longer to return than the heat you give."
The infirmary began to hum with ordinary talk. People fetched water and muttered blessings, and the man sat up and laughed weakly at a joke the child whispered. Arin felt the afterflow of the spark — a hollow that made him stare at his hands as if they belonged to someone slightly different. He had saved a life, and the ledger in his chest read a debt.
Over the next hours Mara guided him through small exercises: easing a swollen bruise, quieting a child's whimper, calling a broken tendon to knit its thread. Each act gave him a taste of what the spark could do — swift, practical, and terrifyingly effective. Each act also shaved something away, sometimes a memory, sometimes a feeling. After one success, Arin found he could not recall the exact timbre of his father's laugh. After steadying a mother in labor, he lost the recipe for a simple stew his mother once trusted him to make. None of these were vast at first, but they clustered in him like small moths gnawing at edges.
Between tasks, Mara would sit quietly and let the day's small victories buffer the lessons. "Use it to mend where you can," she advised. "But do not let quick victories be your barometer. People will measure you by the cures you give, and they will demand more. You must decide what you are willing to hand across the table. A god takes what is offered because a god is never satisfied."
Arin thought of what she had said the night before: that the spark sought stories, belief, offerings. He also began to see how quickly belief could turn into obligation. In the market, news of his touch had already muttered through the streets; by midday a man had left a small coin and an earnest thanks and a whispered prayer. By evening, a woman brought a child with a pale belly and asked—voice tight—if there was any hope. "Try," she whispered, hands clasped in a way that asked for salvation with the economy of someone holding out her last coin.
Arin felt the weight of such trust like a stone in his chest. He laid hands on the child and let warmth move through the small body; the child's breathing eased, and a sound like weeping broke from the woman's lungs. The cost took from him in a way no one could see: he could no longer call to mind the exact hue of the first cartwheel he had ever fixed, a trivial detail that had always made him smile.
That night, as the temple closed its heavy doors, Mara and the priest sat with Arin and laid out books and scraps of old sermons. "There are patterns," the priest said. "Some sparks favor one kind of sacrifice over another. Some demand youth, some demand memory, some demand feeling. There is no comfort in patterns beyond the fact that we can predict their shape."
Mara leaned forward. "If we teach you restraint, then you can choose your losses," she said. "You can ration what you offer so that you keep what is essential. Or you can let the world decide. People will pressure you. Desperation makes bargains look like salvation. Choose carefully, Arin Velas."
He looked at the bowl where the shard lay and felt a strange kinship with the idea of appetite—both his and the thing's. Outside, the town breathed in sleep. Inside, the light from the shard pulsed, patient. He did not know yet if he would be a man who rationed his gifts like bread or a man who threw everything onto the blaze and watched the fire do its honest work. He only knew that each small decision would slice him. Each good he did would cost something small and irreplaceable.
The following morning would not be simple. The shard had tasted, and the town had seen. He was no longer simply a mender of wood and joins; he was a fulcrum between life and debt. He closed his eyes and tried to call the woman's name—Rosa, he thought, fluttered at the shape of the sound—and the memory lay like a cloud on water, thin and hinted. He let the name hang there like a talisman and slept, aware that whatever path he took now would be counted in missing things as much as in saved lives, for now.