The workshop smelled of oil, hot brass, and sleepless nights. Gears in half-assembled configurations littered every surface. Diagrams sketched in black ink sprawled across tables, pinned to walls, even chalked across the floor itself where Adrian had run out of parchment. Blueprints for devices that should not exist—heart-valves built of copper mesh, veins envisioned as tubes of polished steel, diagrams of flesh intertwined with metal—covered the room like a shrine to obsession.
Adrian stood in the center of it all, goggles perched over weary eyes, as he worked with trembling precision. Tiny sparks leapt from his brass tools as he welded a lattice around a crystal chamber. The steady tick of a gear-driven timer echoed the rhythm of his own heart, each second reminding him that Elara's life was slipping through his fingers.
Behind him, Elara's voice broke the silence.
"You've stopped eating again."
Adrian flinched but didn't turn. He tightened a screw instead, as if fastening one more fraction of hope into place. "I will, once I finish this component."
"You said that yesterday," she said softly. She was seated in a worn armchair near the window, a blanket drawn around her shoulders. She had insisted on being in the workshop with him rather than the quiet suffocation of her bedroom. Her presence—pale but resolute—was both balm and blade.
Adrian wiped sweat from his brow, set the delicate piece into a glass case, and finally looked at her. The lamplight caught her eyes—tired, yes, but alive with a stubborn brightness that the illness hadn't yet claimed.
"You shouldn't be here," he murmured. "The air is heavy with fumes."
She smiled faintly. "If you think I'll leave you alone with your madness, you don't know me as well as you claim."
He almost laughed, but the sound caught in his throat. "Madness. That's what they'd call it, if they knew."
"The Guild?"
He nodded grimly. "The Guild of Mechanists banished experiments with living organs decades ago. There were… incidents. Men who tried to replace lungs with bellows, who grafted aether pistons into spines. The results were horrors, Elara. Half-machine, half-corpse. They outlawed it all."
"And yet here you are," she said.
"Because none of them loved you." His words rang with a desperate finality that silenced the workshop's ticking. "None of them had to watch you fading away. If I must walk the same path as those failures to save you, then I will."
For a moment, she said nothing. Her fingers clutched the edge of her blanket, knuckles white. Then, softly: "And if I don't want to be saved that way?"
Adrian froze. The thought was a knife he had never dared let near his mind. "You'd rather die?"
"I'd rather live as myself than survive as a stranger in my own skin."
His jaw clenched. He wanted to argue, to tell her she was wrong, that the world needed her laugh, her stubbornness, her warmth. But every second she spoke was borrowed time. He couldn't risk losing her to ideals.
"I won't let you go," he whispered instead.
She looked at him long, her gaze unreadable. Then she turned away, watching the city lights flicker through the window's fogged glass. "Just remember, Adrian—sometimes saving someone can mean letting them go."
Her words haunted him even as he returned to his work.
Hours blurred. He assembled filigreed valves, calibrated pistons no bigger than fingernails, set aether conduits in precise channels. His hands moved with a fever that outpaced exhaustion, each turn of the wrench a plea to the universe. He scarcely noticed when dawn light crept across the city roofs.
At last, he stepped back.
On the workbench lay the clockwork heart—no longer just a prototype, but a finished device. Brass ribs encased crystal chambers. Copper veins curled outward like roots. The aether core at its center pulsed steadily, glowing with a light eerily similar to life.
Adrian stared at it, wonder and terror warring in his chest. He had done it. He had built the forbidden.
But as he reached to lift it, a faint thrum filled the air. Not from the device, but from somewhere beyond the walls. The entire workshop seemed to vibrate with disapproval, as though the city's massive Aether Engine had felt the disturbance.
Adrian froze, hand hovering over the heart.
"Elara," he whispered, glancing at her. She was asleep in the chair, her breathing shallow, fragile.
He looked back at the heart, glowing softly in its cradle.
"Forgive me," he murmured. "For what I must do."
And with that, Adrian Holt crossed the line from inventor to transgressor.