When Eren Tal stepped into the center of the High Chamber, he didn’t remove his leather workshop apron. The heavy hide was scarred with scorch marks from the forge, stained with dark pine pitch, and smelled strongly of neatsfoot oil and sawdust. He carried no rolled thick parchment scrolls and no ribbon-bound legal briefs. In his left hand, he held an eighteen-inch ash-wood carpenter’s rule marked in eighths of an inch with notched brass studs. In his right, a grease-stained pine work order board, clipped with a rusted iron spring.
He set the work order board on the clerk’s polished dark wood desk beside the shattered fragments of Sorell’s granite core samples. The contrast was stark: on one side lay the fractured ruins of high academy alchemy. On the other, the plain pine board of a Lowbank artisan.
“State your name and guild standing for the record,” Councilor Vesk said.
“Eren Tal,” he said, his voice filling the curved marble hall without any effort, carrying the quiet, gravelly weight of a man accustomed to shouting over the roar of a waterwheel and the ring of an anvil. “Master Wheelwright of the Lowbank Basin Yard. Thirty-one years in the trade. For the past twenty-eight days, chief mechanic and logistics coordinator for the Courtesy Bridge Workshop running out of Sister Merrow’s back kitchen.”
