The water of the glow-stone pool was the color of crushed mint leaves.
It glowed with soft, cold soft glow. It cast rippling emerald patterns across the vaulted ceiling of the grotto. She sat on a flat slab of grey granite at the water’s edge. Mira Vale was threading a steel needle with waxed hemp thread using only her left hand and her teeth.
Her right arm, faceted and polished to smoky perfection, rested motionless upon a folded wool blanket in her lap. The thirty-two facets caught the emerald glow of the pool, refracting the light into delicate sharp-angled bands across her charcoal shift.
With her left thumb, she anchored a heavy square of boiled rawhide against a coarse wool tunic. Her carved boxwood thimble—the tiny, worn relic from their attic in Low-Khorat—pushed the steel needle through three layers of dense sheep’s wool and rawhide with a firm, rhythmic pop-pop.
Ten paces away, Artificer Ren sat cross-legged by the dying embers, his diamond loupes swiveled up into his grey hair. He watched her fingers work.
For nearly an hour, neither of them had spoken. The only sounds in the cave were the dripping of water from the ceiling stalactites, the crackle of dry cedar shavings, and the soft, glass-like shear hum resonating from Mira’s chest.
