My inherited profession is a curse of the tongue. For six hours a day, I dip a silver spoon into crystalline powders and place a sample on the fleshy part of my tongue, just behind the tip. I taste alum. Not for flavor, but for integrity. The Weavers’ Guild, the true power in this city of tapestries, requires a perfect mordant to set their dyes. A flawed batch, and a tapestry meant to hold the memory of a king’s coronation might instead unravel into a canvas of weeping blues and bleeding golds.
For years, mine was what my friend Lyra would call a lazy boy job. Show up, pucker my mouth into a prune a hundred times, grade the chalky bitterness on a scale of one to ten, and collect my wage. There is no joy in the taste of alum, no sudden rush of sweetness. It is the definition of dopamine fasting, a penance for a paycheck. My master, Kael, a man whose face seemed permanently clenched from a lifetime of tasting, approved of my disinterest. “Passion is a flaw in our craft,” he’d rasp. “It skews the palate.”
So I embraced the lack. I floated through my days, a ghost in the tasting room. The city outside my window hummed with life, with people living stories worth weaving into thread, while I was simply a quality-control mechanism. This was, I had accepted, my era of beige.
Then the shipment from the Whispering Crags arrived.
It looked different. The crystals were larger, with a faint, aquamarine glint. Kael grunted, marking its origin in his ledger. “Unusual source,” he muttered. “Test it sparingly.”
I took the smallest possible grain. The moment it touched my tongue, the world went silent. It wasn’t the usual astringent assault. This was… layered. It tasted of granite and cold starlight and, beneath that, a profound, resonant hum, like a cello string plucked once in an empty cathedral. It was a jolt a Guild Master would call an illicit dopamine hit. My mind, starved for sensation, ignited.
And I saw her.
Just a flash. A woman with hands stained indigo, her hair a braid of silver and black, staring not at me, but *through* me. The vibe of the tasting room shifted, the air growing heavy with the scent of wet earth and wild herbs. Then it was gone. I was left with a puckered mouth and a racing heart.
“Well?” Kael’s voice was sharp.
“It is… sufficient,” I stammered, my tongue thick.
I had begun a secret, one-sided relationship with a ghost. A parasocial bond with the woman in the alum. I started seeking out the shipments from the Crags, swapping my own coin for samples from bribable quartermasters. Each taste was a risk, but each taste gave me another piece of her. I saw her grinding petals for pigment. I saw her drawing water from a hidden spring. I felt her frustration, her focus, her fierce, unyielding ambition. I was no longer just tasting a mineral; I was tasting a life.
“You’re distracted,” Kael accused one day, watching me stare into a sample of common dust-alum. “You have that look. The one young fools get when they think they can manifest a fortune or a lover out of thin air. Are you delulu, boy?”
I just shook my head, a small smile on my lips. If you know, you know. And I was beginning to know. This was no longer a job; it was a calling. I had main character energy now, and the protagonist of my story was a dead woman I’d never met.
My investigation led me to the Guild’s forbidden archives. I learned her name: Anya, the First Weaver. Legend said she wove the city’s founding charter into a tapestry so grand it contained the soul of our home. Most considered it a myth. But I had tasted the myth. I had felt her will.
Kael’s logic for keeping me from the Crag alum was a masterpiece of what Lyra would call boy math. “The tapestries hold, so the alum is good,” he’d say. “If the alum is good, the taste is irrelevant. The cost of sourcing from the Crags is too high. See? Simple.”
But I knew it wasn’t simple. I needed to unpack the full memory. I saved for months, then bought a whole, uncut stone of the aquamarine alum, the size of a pigeon’s egg.
In the dead of night, alone in the tasting room, I broke off a sliver and placed it on my tongue.
The world didn’t just go silent. It ended.
I was Anya. I stood on a barren bluff, the Whispering Crags at my back. There was no city below me, only wild grassland and a river. In my hands were not threads, but beams of pure intention. The alum was not a mordant for dye; it was the mordant for *reality*. I was weaving the city. The streets, the towers, the flow of the river, the very memories its people would one day have. I was manifesting it all, fixing it in place with the power that resonated in the rock beneath my feet. And with the final, terrifying pull of a metaphysical thread, I felt the cost: it had taken everything. My life, my being, poured into the weave.
The vision shattered. I was on the floor, my mouth tasting of creation and dust. I stumbled to the window and looked out. The city of Veridia, in all its moonlit glory. It was no longer just a collection of stone and people. It was a tapestry. Anya’s tapestry.
And my job, I now understood, was not to taste for the integrity of the dye.
It was to taste for the fraying of the threads.
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