Sally

Touching the knife was like holding a piece of the void, both impossibly cold and terrifyingly empty.

Cold burned her fingertips so badly they had started to blister, and numbness had spread to the palms of her hands. She felt the creep of what felt like frost through the bones of her arms, up to her shoulders. Her power, so unconsciously it barely felt like hers, was busy pouring heat through her arms, like new arteries pushing warmth into her muscles and blood.

She wanted to drop the knife, she wanted to let go. But Sally was afraid that desire wasn't hers.

"Sally," Crafter Lionel Adams said, with that click of his tongue that hinted at disapproval. Sally remembered it from her very first lessons at the Apprentice Hall. "You really ought to put that away. You look like you're egging Oversight on."

"It's comforting," Sally replied.

"You've said that before." Lionel reached over and grabbed the knife by the handle. "Give it to me, before we see anyone else. Another Crafter might think you've lost yourself, never mind what a Shadow might do."

Lionel pulled on the knife. Part of her seemed to roar in joy, and that roar sounded like the Spire. Sally gripped the weapon harder, by both handle and blade, and tugged it away. "I need it. It's easier to hear myself when I'm holding it."

The expression on the old Crafter's face was inscrutable. The discipline of nearly a century of life kept his emotions off his face. He held on to the knife for a moment longer, before he let go and took a step backwards. "Let's just find Olivia and get you back to the guild, Sally."

"The Spire," Sally whispered. She turned her head towards the City, and to its luminous heart.

Even here, fifty miles away, she could hear it roar. The song it sang as it poured fire from below the earth was a mesmerizing, singularly beautiful note. And that note spoke of everything.

The Spire didn't exist as a thing that lived and changed. Sally had heard other Crafters say as much before, but she didn't understand it then. But she knew it now, those fires didn't age, grow or grow weak over time. The brightly burning heart of the City just was, as it was the day day the Crafters bore a hole into the earth to draw it up from the fires below. As it would be, long after she was dust.

It burned. Unrestrained and untroubled. From beneath the earth to beyond the sky. Immortal in an instant, unchanging and impervious to mortality. Fire burned.

Sally felt herself rise up, and the pain of the Coldstone stabbing her fingertips began to fade. She could feel herself becoming more, feel herself grow tall as she became the heat rising up from the stones around her. Became the torches at the edges of the platform, the heat in the air  all across the station. She felt herself slipping away, being washed away by what she could become.

And the knife slipped in her hand, as her grip loosened.

"Sally!" Crafter Adams called, from a thousand miles away. But she felt the edge of that clumsily made knife cut her fingertip, and that more of fear in the back of her mind finally screamed loudly enough to hear.

"Adams?" Sally asked. She shook her head, finding herself staring at the Spire. Dozens of people had stopped to look at her, all of whom were staring with wide eyes, some pushing their way to find a clear path to run. And they kept a wide berth. Strangely, it was exactly the same amount of space she normally let her heat haze stretch to.

"Sally, you need to focus," Crafter Adams said. He clapped her on the shoulder and turned her away from the Spire. "Keep yourself centred, remember who you are."

"There's so little of me left," Sally murmured, but she clutched the knife tightly and let herself be lead down the platform.

She felt something, just up ahead. A strangely painful sensation at the edge of her heat haze, like something was stabbing at her. Stabbing at her Craft, though she was finding it difficult to separate where she ended and her power began. But it felt a great deal like...

Like the knife in her hands.

"Madam Crafter," a man said from up ahead. The people around him shied away quickly, revealing a badly scarred man dressed in black. On the right side of his head, just past his eye, was a patchwork of a deep burn, in the shape of small squares like a game board. He had his hands at his sides, his palms faced her. He didn't make eye contact, his gaze was aimed at her boots, but he didn't entirely seem like he was looking through them.

"Shadow, this is well beyond the scope of your responsibilities!" Crafted Adams said angrily, striding forward and letting his red coat billow out.

"Where's her shadow, Crafter Adams?" the shadow asked. His gaze had moved away from her boots to the stone by her feet. Strangely, the stone was blackened, in a wide circle around her. "Where is someone who's trusted to evaluate her condition? Especially since she fought a Golem, and you're taking her back to the City."

"Her insights could prove critical during our next battle with a Golem," Crafter Adams replied, but he didn't make another move to stand in the shadow's path. "No Crafter has ever survived to speak of bringing down a Golem. Your bureau has no small hand in that."

"True," the shadow agreed, and he stepped into the circle of blackened stone. He faced her again, but still didn't make eye contact. "Crafter Sally Carathal, wasn't it? You stood on the wall with Garland Kohl."

"I did," Sally said, and the memory was both intoxicating and terrifying. Crafter Kohl had become power in his last hour, power the likes of which she knew she would drown in, and desperately wanted to emulate.

"I'm sorry he didn't survive. He was a friend," the shadow said. He now stood inside the stone her heat haze had marked. He smiled, or at least tried to, but when his gaze finally met hers Sally found herself wondering how long it had been since the burned man from Oversight had last been happy. "At least, as much of a friend as I could have from someone wearing a red coat."

The shadow took one more step forward, and sniffed at the air. "Scorched air, but the tinge, it smells like firing ceramics. Like the pipes that carry the flame from the Spire. You like that work."

And amazingly, Sally felt something she didn't think she was able to anymore. Surprise. "Yes," she admitted in a whisper.

"I have a theory about the heat haze," the shadow said. "Garland's always had a mild smell of starch, and it wasn't just because he used the stuff to keep his collars stiff. Olivia's smells almost exactly like that damned orphanage she fussed over. Hell, even her apprentice Vincent, his smells like melting rock. I think the air inside a Crafter's heat haze smells like where they're most comfortable."

The shadow took another step into her heat haze, and his boots left light-grey footprints on the black soot. "I can still smell the kiln. That's you coming out in your fire, which means you're still Sally Carathal. Crafter. You make things. The torches along the walls, those fires are carried by your pipes."

She ought to have laughed at this scarred shadow. Even just yesterday, she'd have found his earnest insistence silly and dramatic. But all she could do as that small part of her listened, the frightened little mote, was wonder how much of herself was gone.

"So Sally, I was wondering, could you let go of this heat haze? It's a little warm for those of us who can't Craft," the shadow said, and he took another small step towards her.

"My heat haze?" Sally asked. She hadn't realized it was still up. "No, I don't-"

But she realized she knew it was up. She could feel the contours of the stone around her, the small divets where chisels had separated the rock into blocks. She could feel the wind brushing the edge of her heat haze as if it were blowing across her arm.

And she could feel the knife in his coat pocket, just as clearly as she felt the one in her hands.

"Oh, it's definitely up," the shadow said. There was a chuckle in his voice, as if he were correcting her about it being night out. "Feels like foundry work. You can't take a train like this, think of the upholstery."

Sally nodded. That tiny, terrified part of her agreed with the shadow. But even as she agreed, and tried to recall the importance of returning to the City, she found she was watching the shadow without her eyes, and likely had been for nearly their entire conversation.

The scarred man looked up, over his shoulder, and sniffed the air again. "The air's cooler, but you're still holding on to it. Just like that knife. It's one of the coldstone knives, isn't it?"

He took another step forward, but Sally focused her sight through her eyes again, looking at the weapon in her hands. Small beads of red had formed a crystalline lattice in several spots on the blade, and part of the edge had shards of ice growing from it. "It is."

"I can tell from the way your blood has frozen on it," the shadow said. He laughed, and wiped at his forehead with his hand. "We had a rookie drop one of those into a sink full of water last year. I kid you not, it froze the water around his hand as he picked it back up."

The shadow chuckled as he told the story. But his eyes, —those sorrowful, haunted eyes — studied her with an intensity that Sally found frightening. Even the part of her that now held the Craft.

Sally fear did something to the air inside of her heat haze, which the shadow noticed. "Not a great story? Poor kid got to keep all of his fingers, if that helps."

"I need the knife." Sally clutched the knife closer to her stomach, pressing it against her shirt.

"I can see that," the shadow said. But the smile on his face was real, and for the first time, his eyes looked kind. He still had his hands spread out, open, to show they were empty. And the knife in his pocket still stabbed at her fires. "But do you remember my request, just a moment ago?"

"Let your heat haze go," the shadow repeated, and he took another step closer. The coldstone in the shadow's pocket stabbed at her, drank her heat, poisoned and consumed her all at once.   It twisted at her thoughts like a sliver of ice in her thoughts, stabbed at her sight like a needle in her eye, and drowned out what she could feel like the knife was already in her chest.

She was shaking. That small part of her, the little more of fear named Sally Carathal, was shivering in both cold and fear. Those dull eyes that didn't burn, they were staring at the knife in those frail hands, more resting on top of numb fingers than being held.

It was hard to think, to see, to feel, to live, as long as those knives were so close. So she took those trembling hands, slick with frozen blood, and let the knife fall.

Icy steel slashed through her, and cut into Sally Carathal's heart.

She wheezed in shock, unable to draw a breath. But even as hear heart and lungs screamed in shock and pain, Sally smiled in relief. The lure of the power was gone, her will was quiet. For a blessed moment, she was just Sally Carathal.

Sally tried to smile, as the pain grew worse. But there was a darkness just past that pain, an empty numbness, and she was falling into it. With eyes newly wet with tears she looked at her killer, and tried as hard as she could to thank him.

And she tried for as long as her fire would burn.