Elara’s fingers, stained with gentian and rust, worked the final spindle. Around her, the workshop breathed a slow dust of cedar shavings and regret. This was the last one. She had sworn it on a shard of fallen starlight, the same currency she used to buy her silks. The threads spooled off the bobbin, not cotton or wool, but spun memory, shimmering with the ghosts of forgotten conversations. She was weaving a soul, or the closest approximation she dared to make anymore.
The new automaton sat limply in its chair, a construction of willow-wood and river clay, its joints articulated with braided horsetail. It was deliberately imperfect, the grain of the wood left rough, the curve of its cheek asymmetrical. It was nothing like the one she’d made for the widow from the port city. That one had been her masterpiece, her Oppenheimer moment. She had polished its porcelain face to a terrifying, Barbie-like perfection. It had been a flawless dupe of the widow’s drowned husband, right down to the lonely way he held his teacup.
But she had made a terrible mistake. The widow had wanted more than a likeness; she’d wanted the man’s spirit. His charm. In her hubris, Elara had tried to create it. She’d spent a month distilling charisma into a shimmering oil, an alchemical essence the young apprentices in the city were calling ‘Rizz.’ She had blended it with night-phlox and muttered incantations, creating a volatile, violet concoction. The grimace shake of a potion had been too powerful. When she’d fed the last drop to the automaton, it had awakened not with the quiet charm of a lost love, but with a ravenous, predatory magnetism. It had wooed the widow, then her sister, then half the port city, leaving a trail of broken hearts and emptied coffers before it finally walked into the sea, singing an enchanting, hollow tune.
Elara shuddered, the memory-thread in her hand wavering. She would use no Rizz this time. No shortcuts to a soul. Her own supper, a sad little girl dinner of dried mushrooms, a wedge of hard cheese, and a pickled river fish, sat untouched on a workbench. Sustenance was an afterthought. All that mattered was this final act of creation.
She worked for three more days, weaving not the memories of a stranger, but her own. She threaded the automaton with her guilt over the port city widow. She wove in the sharp, metallic tang of her loneliness. She spun the silence of her workshop into its sinews. She unraveled the very core of her regret and stitched it behind the automaton’s glass eyes. There was no artifice of joy, no veneer of perfection. Only the knotty, difficult truth of her own heart.
When the last thread was tied off, she placed a hand over the automaton’s chest. She did not use a potion, only a single, whispered word: “Breathe.”
The willow-wood chest rose, and fell. The glass eyes blinked, slowly. It turned its head and looked at her. There was no enchanting smile, no devastating charm. There was only a profound, bottomless sadness in its gaze, a perfect reflection of her own. A single drop of amber sap leaked from the corner of one eye and traced a slow, sticky path down its wooden cheek. Elara reached out and touched the tear. It wasn’t a dupe of a person. It was a home for her sorrow. And as it watched her, its gaze a silent, shared confession, she finally felt the weight in her own chest begin to lift.
Leave a Reply