Yuri's Story

Yuri [redacted] shadowed by the absence of his father, Yuri who rejected his family’s legacy, now found himself at the mercy of a most pedestrian and humiliating dilemma. The air in the workshop, thick with the scent of wet stone dust and the burnt tang of metal filings, threatened to choke him as he hunched over the block of multicolored marble. The ancient chisel felt absurdly disproportionate in his hand, as though it had been forged for a much larger, more competent individual—perhaps a full-blooded giant with hands the size of bread loaves, rather than his own delicately jointed, infernal-blooded digits.
  Each time he braced the cutting edge against the blue-gold veined surface, the tool would catch, wobble, slip, or worse: gouge a line where none was intended. The stone should have yielded in layers, the glyphs emerging with all the inevitability and grace of frost forming on glass, but for Yuri, the pale whorls only deepened into a chaos of scratches and half-obliterated sigils. He could mortise, he had real talent when it came to paring stones, he could drill and even perform the delicate mortuary inlay work required for the more elaborate commissions. He could, in fact, do everything except the one step upon which all the others depended: shaping the damned things. The line between “untrained genius” and “clueless neophyte” was, for Yuri, a gaping chasm into which every attempt at artistry tumbled and shattered.
  He tried to blame the tools, the materials, the endless sounds and noises of this place, and the calm yet unwavering admonitions of Himitsu Seji, the strange, little stonecarving teacher and Silvered Artisan of the Bennain Guildhall. But the truth was, the stone did not lie; it transmitted every tremor, every microsecond of hesitation, down into the line so that the result was a perfect fossil of its maker’s uncertainty. It galled on him, that he should have so much trouble with an art form he always thought he would have a knack for.
  He wasn’t alone in the small workshop, set on the outskirts of the Bennain Guildhall, in an area that was on open campus and accessible to the public. The others—students, craftspeople, the occasional bored child hoping to see a chunk of quartz split itself open—went about their work with a quiet competence that seemed to mock his every motion. The roll of mallets against dolerite, the bell-clear sound of copper chisels striking agate, created an alluring music—beauty and violence combined. Occasionally, one of the onlookers, coated with marble dust and peppered with tiny chips of stone, would slip a glance at him, as casual and cutting as a paring knife. Yuri pretended not to notice, albeit it still felt strange to him; the way people in this place stared, pointed and talked openly without so much as a shadow of fear or deference.
  It was different in the abbatoirs and alleys back home, where his heritage guaranteed an uneasy respect. People muttered there, too, but never loud enough for anyone to hear, and always behind the back of the person who was being talked about. That was just polite and the proper way of behavior, after all. But not here; in Shal’Azura, every social interaction seemed a three-act play, everyone an actor, director and an audience rolled into one. The only one who was truly honest, he felt, was Te’Sarim, his red panda who awaited Yuri’s return in the nearby park.
  Something crashed, hard, at the far end of the shop, sending a shudder through the rose marble floor. Several students yelped; Artisan Seji didn’t even flinch. The instructor was, as ever, dryly assembled in a tunic that shed dust rather than accumulated it, and blue-green glasses perched on a long, pointed nose as if to signal perpetual skepticism of the visible world.
  “Kamir, careful with the three-inch tooth chisel,” Himitsu Seji rumbled, his jooiian accent harmonious and melodic, despite his bored tone. “From Rukari they are, and hard to replace. The Guildhall, they are still asking when I’m returning them.”
  He stepped to the front of the room, as was his habit when beginning or ending class, and announced, “Today, it is enough practice. The class, we will end it now, before concentration weakens and sloppiness creeps in. Your workspace, tidy it and secure your creations. Next time we will meet, Dúaday, Seventh Bell. The Guiding Light, they will keep you safe until then.”
  There was the familiar jumble of muted protests—of disappointment from the ones who genuinely craved craftsmanship and relief from those, who merely wished to escape. The room emptied around him and soon he was alone in the workshop, silence stretched through the room, claiming back its domain for the oncoming night. Late afternoon sunlight spilled in through tall stained glass windows, showing depictions of heroes of lore and legend.
  Yuri sat back for a moment and flexed his aching fingers one at a time, feeling the lingering tingle where the constant thrum of the chisel had made him numb. He indulged in a single, deep breath, filling his lungs with the mingled perfume of marble dust and ozone from the shop's lightning-laced artifice lamps, and for a moment he let the weariness have him.
  With a sigh, he dusted the marble crumbs off his plain cotton shirt, when a voice from behind him filled the silence of the previously empty room with a resonance that raised goosebumps on his neck and made his spine tremble.
  “I bring to this house the words that have traveled far."
  It was a woman’s voice, but it operated at a register both lighter and lower, a twinned harmony that curled around itself like smoke.
  Yuri exhaled and straightened before slowly turning around, every muscle and instinct simultaneously urging him to both fight and remain perfectly still. He turned, attempting to arrange his expression into its most neutral shape, the one he wore meeting creditors or the rare family guest. But the figure at the door did not look like a patron or a debt collector. It did not look like anything easily categorized at all.
  She was tall, but not Shal’Azuran tall. Her silhouette seemed to stutter at the edges, as if the distance between them could not agree on where they actually began or ended. The figure seemed feminine, but not like an ordinary woman—not unless women in Shal’Azura were in the habit of dressing in half-molten bronze chains and black glass, with a ruby veil that shimmered between states, alternately revealing and obscuring the lines of a face that carried a faint touch of the Fey. The effect was uncanny: one moment she seemed the barely-there shadow of a noble lady, the next she was a geometric diagram caught mid-dream. Even in a city of floating islands and arcane spectacle, it was a look that compelled attention.
  Yuri forced his shoulders to settle. “You’re late to class,” he said, affecting the sardonic poise that usually worked in dissecting the pride of others before they could score his own.
  She did not dignify the comment. She stepped from behind the slabs of onyx and jasper that were arrayed by the far wall near the entrance, walking toward him without the uncertain hesitation of a newcomer. Her stride was effortless, silent, and her presence altered the light: the windows flared red-orange, bending color as if to burnish the edges of his vision in a reminder of home.
  “[Redacted]” she said, and her tongue pronounced each syllable in the ancient and correct form, the click of the 'ht' echoing with a hint of malice. "It is in your name to break, and remake."
  Unseen eyes fixated on Yuri, the stranger set a small box upon a slab of half-finished marble, lacquered ebony inlaid with a sliver of mother-of-pearl in the shape of a crescent moon. Yuri’s soul trembled at the sound of his True Name and he stood rooted in place, deeply shocked and terrified of what was to come, his gaze drawn to the small box.
  The longer Yuri looked at it, the more its geometry rebelled against expectation: the crescent inlay shimmered, its shape subtly shifting from a waxing moon to a sickle, back toward fullness. An occult gravity radiated from the box, as if it unmade the air around it by drawing in all available meaning.
  He raised his eyes to meet hers. Fear in his mouth, metallic and chill. “I have no more dealings with the Fallen,” he managed.
  “You need not traffic with them to be their echo,” she replied, her breath misting the air as if it were colder here than everywhere else. “You are a forge child, so you cannot help but fight the form. Your roots go deep. Your essence remembers. But I am not here to apprentice you.”
  From the depths of her obsidian sleeve, the stranger produced a card, ecru in color and thick with the texture of handmade vellum. She set it down beside the crescent-shaped box with the care of an artisan unveiling their life’s work. The ink on the card was so fresh that the sharp, precise calligraphy—eerily reminiscent of Yuri’s own—glistened under the lamplight. In the lower left corner, a crescent moon matching the one on the box was embossed in dark foil, topped by an intricate, swirling filigree that, when caught at just the right angle in the weakening sun’s light, suggested the image of a blindfold suspended in mid-air.
  Yuri stared at the card. No address, nor any name, just a single line:    
  *To You, the Named and the Nameless: The Blind Storyteller bids you join him at the Market of Melodies, Last Bell.*
  The invitation, handwritten in ink blacker than ink had any right to be, trembled minutely between his fingers, the edges of the fine paper rasping against the callus at the base of his thumb. He steadied himself, closing his eyes for a moment, for only the barest fraction of a second, trying to find his nerve and his inner calm.
  When his eyes opened again, his mouth already opened to question, he was alone again.  
  Gone. Not a trace of the stranger lingered: no footprints, no vapor, no imprint in the fabric of the air, only a violet crescent fading above the marble slab almost as if the box, too, had never been there at all.    
  Like a marionette whose strings had suddenly slackened, Yuri found himself rising from a defensive crouch he hadn't realized he'd assumed, the syllables of his True Name no longer binding his limbs in their invisible chains. He tried to gather his thoughts and recollect all the little details about the stranger.
  However, as the violet crescent faded from his sight, so did the memory of the strange encounter. Forgotten was the stranger and the box, the talk of the Fallen and the stranger’s unsettling knowledge about Yuri’s true self.
  Only one line remained in his mind; as the thick vellum card remained in his hand:  
  *To You, the Named and the Nameless: The Blind Storyteller bids you join him at the Market of Melodies, Last Bell.*