Elara’s first heartbeat was a dutiful thud, a metronome set to the rhythm of sorting grey river stones into slightly different shades of grey. For years, this was the only pulse she knew. She’d become a master of quiet quitting long before she knew the term for it; her body was present in the great Sorter’s Hall, but her spirit had evacuated the premises years ago. Her tenure there was the great un-defining, what the apprentices with their newfangled words might have called a situationship with mediocrity. It paid in dust and silent lunches.
One Tuesday, while separating a slate-grey from a charcoal-grey, she was overcome by the ick. It was a sudden, full-body revulsion, so profound it made her drop the stone. It clattered with a sound that felt like a final, dead note. She stood up, brushed the grit from her trousers, and walked out of the hall, ignoring the bewildered stare of her supervisor. She didn’t have a plan. She was simply following a silence, the new, terrifying space where the thud of the river stone was supposed to be.
The silence led her away from the combed-over parts of the city and into the tangled alleys where cartography went to die. A new sound began to surface, faint and erratic. It wasn’t one beat, but many—a flutter, a skip, a syncopated triplet. It was the sound of life trying to figure itself out.
It led her to a shopfront squeezed between a dream dispensary and a memory pawnery. The sign was a single, humming gear. Inside, a man was bent over a workbench, his brow furrowed in concentration. The place smelled of ozone, melted starlight, and something like cinnamon. Gears and springs of impossible materials—some that shimmered with captured dawn, others that were dark as a forgotten secret—lay in organised chaos. This was Kaz.
He didn’t look up when she entered. He was coaxing a filament spun from raw courage into the housing of a clockwork bird. The air around him buzzed with a focused intensity, that strange, undeniable charisma the truly devout possess. Not charm, exactly. Rizz, the younger sorters might have whispered, if they ever came to a place like this.
“I’m broken,” Elara said, the words surprising her.
Kaz finally looked up. His eyes a storm-cloud grey, but unlike her stones, they held the promise of lightning. “Nothing is broken,” he said, his voice raspy, as if sanded smooth by long silences. “Just poorly assembled.”
She told him about the single, monotonous beat that governed her life. He listened, nodding slowly, his gaze drifting back to the half-finished mechanisms on his bench.
“You don’t need a repair,” he concluded. “You need an addition. A second system, built on a different framework.” He gestured to his creations. “But I am only the architect. You have to bring me the materials.”
“What materials?” Elara asked, looking at the vials of bottled laughter and petrified echoes around them.
“Something authentic,” he said. “A moment you chose, not one you endured. A colour you’ve never seen. The sound of a risk paying off.”
The townsfolk thought her unhinged. “Leaving a Guild position for… what? Whimsy? You’re delulu,” her former supervisor had hissed when they’d passed on the street. But Elara was on a salvage mission for her own soul. This was her new main character energy: not the star of a grand play, but the determined scavenger in the ruins of her own conformity.
Her first offering for Kaz was the crimson of a dusk-petal poppy that only bloomed on the highest, most treacherous cliff-face. It took her three days to climb it. She brought him the petal, bruised and smelling of wind, and he distilled its colour into a single, glowing gear.
Her second was the sound of her own voice, singing an old, forbidden lullaby in the crowded market square. The silence that followed her final note was not empty, but full of held breath, before a single, tentative coin was tossed into her open hat. She brought that sound to Kaz, held in the memory of the coin’s cool weight, and he forged it into a counterweight, bright and resonant.
She brought him the taste of sea-salt on her lips after swimming in the ocean for the first time, the jarring fear and then the weightless bliss. He spun it into a mainspring. She brought him the shared warmth of a stray dog she’d sheltered during a thunderstorm. He hammered it into a casing. She was not pursuing a life of ease, the so-called soft life she’d heard others dream of; she was building a sustainable one, piece by hard-won piece.
Finally, the day came. On his bench lay a beautiful, intricate device, no bigger than her thumb. It pulsed with a soft, internal light, a collage of her courage.
“It will sit alongside the first one,” Kaz explained, his touch surprisingly gentle as he traced a line over her sternum. “It will not replace it. The beat of duty is strong. But this,” he held up the mechanism, “is the beat of joy. You must learn to listen to both.”
The procedure was painless, a brief shimmer of cold and a sense of something slotting into an empty space she never knew she had. And then she felt it.
*Thud-thump.*
The old, steady beat of her first heart.
*Flutter-whir-ZING.*
The new, unpredictable, vibrant pulse of her second.
It was a discordant symphony. The first heartbeat was a flat, grey stone. The second was a clockwork bird taking flight. *Thud-thump. Flutter-whir-ZING.* One was the life she was given. The other was the life she had built.
She walked out of Kaz’s shop into a world that was no longer monochrome. The cobblestones held hints of lavender and moss. The sky was not just blue, but a tapestry of celadon, azure, and periwinkle. With every step, she felt the duel in her chest, the rhythm of the river and the song of the bird, a constant, beautiful argument for what it meant to be truly alive.
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