The bell above the black wooden door gave a half-hung ring when Jonas pushed inside—a thin, tired sound, equal parts warning and welcome. The shop swallowed him in a pocket of slow light and dust, like stepping into a clock that had forgotten to hurry. For a second he simply stood there, feeling the ache in his ribs and the weight of the pouch at his chest, letting the room steady him: the hush, the soft halos cast by low bulbs, the scent of oil and metal folded with an odd green and wetness from potted things in jars.
The space was narrow and honest. Floorboards sighed under his boots. A faded mat at the door said WELCOME in cracked letters. Shelves rose in tidy disorder, jars and tins stacked like cataloged memories. Some glass held things that made him frown—monster fingers coiled in preserving brine, pale intestines looped like rope—but between the grotesqueries grew life: jars of plants that breathed a faint, cool light; vines crawling toward the rafters; small flowers with a sickly blue glow. Brass-toothed flutes and odd instruments rested near a heap of leather patches, as though musicians and smiths shared space and habit.
The jars of springs and tins of screws sat in the corner like a promise. Coils packed in messy order, labels smeared with grease; tins stamped with head sizes and thread counts. Tools were nailed to the wall: screwdrivers with handles eaten by oil, pliars pitted from use, two-headed hammers with one face battered and the other near-smooth, a pair of goggles whose glass bore a history of sparks. Everything here was rough and real. Jonas moved toward it with the economy of a compass needle.
He pressed his forehead briefly to the cool glass and read the faded labels: 0.65 inch, 0.60 inch, 0.55 inch. Springs wound tight as secrets. Screws sorted by head and thread. His fingers hovered before he touched anything. The shop smelled of iron and resin and the faint, bracing tang of those living plants. In his skull diagrams unfurled—lines and measurements he had committed to memory back on Earth when his body could not make even a loop of wire. Colt .45. Colt Navy 1851. Colt designs, chambers, cylinders—catalogued parts falling into place with the efficiency of a machine.
The Colt Navy tempted him: loose powder and ball loading, crude but serviceable. It required fewer machined casings, fewer tiny precisions. Yet the memories that burned beneath his ribs were sharper—Voss Agnes, broad fists, boots stomping ribs, men with unnatural resilience. The Navy might startle them. It might wound. It might not stop them.
The Colt .45 offered stopping power. He pictured the way a heavier slug would carry momentum, the capacity to shatter bone or rupture whatever unnatural protections these men wore. If he was to introduce firearms into a world of steel and sorcery, the weapon had to be more than novelty; it had to be definitive. So he decided: not a copy, but a creature of his own design—meaner, reinforced, built to kill and keep killing.
His mind moved through options with the cold arithmetic of someone balancing an equation. Enlarge the cylinder to accept a heavier round. Widen the bore to manage higher pressures and allow a denser projectile. Strengthen the frame from thicker stock to prevent flexing on discharge. Increase spring tension so the hammer carries greater energy. Reinforce the extractor and ejector to tolerate thicker casings or imperfect rounds. Add a gas-sealing lip at the cylinder face to prevent gas loss between cylinder and barrel. Adjust rifling twist to stabilize a heavier slug. Each change solved one problem and birthed another: more metal, finer tolerances, extra springs that must not fail, screws that cannot strip under torque.
A small, almost private smile crossed his face. It tasted like the edge of a solution. He had no machine shop yet. The forge and anvil were honest, blunt instruments; they could not mill rifling or turn cylinders to exact concentricity. But memory and a new set of callused hands mattered. Springs were here. Screws were here. Tools were here. The parts that did not exist, he could make—slowly, precisely, with sweat replacing lathe work.
He selected a jar labeled 0.65 inch and another at 0.60, fingers steady despite the residual pain. He grabbed a handful of screws: coarse-threaded bolts for frame plates and finer, slotted screws for sight adjustments. His eyes flicked to the wall and found the screwdriver whose head matched the profiles; he lifted it as if it were a blade. The wooden handle nested awkwardly in his palm—familiarity and discomfort at once—and the metal smelled of old oil and iron.
A while later Jonas slowly walked towards the counter and set the springs, the tins of screws, and the screwdriver down on the counter. The metal clicked once, a bright, personal sound in the quiet shop. The shopkeeper — a chubby, middle-aged man with a bald forehead and a thick mustache — looked up, eyes taking the pile in and lingering on the dark bruises that mapped Jonas' face.
He said nothing at first. He bent to a drawer beneath the counter, pulled it out, and pulled out two thin pieces of cardboard, both worn at the edges. One held neat sketches of screws, measurements scored in the margins; the other showed springs, their coils drawn with the patient hand of someone who had measured them a hundred thousand times. He tucked one card under his arm and pressed a spring from Jonas' pile against the drawing, squinting, matching shape to ink. He did the same with the screws: line, compare, nod or frown, slow and precise.
Jonas watched without movement. His pouch rested in his palm, the weight familiar and small. He did not hurry the man. Routine was its own tempo here; interruption would only invite questions.
The shopkeeper's voice came low and rough as gravel when he did speak. "Life's hard." He continued without looking up, more to the air than to Jonas. The words had a worn quality, like rims on an old pot. "Wars keep going. Kingdoms, tribes, merchants—everybody's got a reason to fight. Some rise, some fall. Folks laugh, folks cry. We move forward because we have to. But every step forward feels like gambling with everything you've got."
He turned the spring in his hand, eyes narrowing. "I'm afraid of losing what little I have. Still, I keep going." He glanced finally at Jonas, meeting the bruised man's gaze for a long second. The shopkeeper's mouth softened into something like encouragement. "You should too. Keep fighting."
Jonas froze on a single thought — the words were out of place, but not meaningless. He had no desire for small talk; words like that were rarely instructions and more often placeholders for something else. He said nothing. His face gave nothing away. Inside, his mind filed the statement under "human variables," a note to be used or discarded later.
The shopkeeper straightened, sliding the cardboard back into the drawer. He cleared his throat and shifted into business, the personal remark folded away as if it had never been spoken. "That'll be a quarter gyron. 0.25 GY."
Jonas loosened the string around the pouch and produced a coin — black, heavy, its face stamped with some old ruler Jonas did not know by name. He set it on the counter with the same careful deliberateness he brought to everything now. The shopkeeper pinched it between two fingers, eyes narrowing in practiced suspicion, then dropped it into the drawer with a sound like authority.
He took a small paper bag and filled it — springs, screws, screwdriver — folding the top with neat fingers. He pushed it across. "Thanks for buying," he said, voice neutral.
Jonas took the bag, muttered a short, quiet thanks, and moved as if to leave. He had no interest in lingering; remaining visible increased the chance of trouble. He had a list and a plan, and everything beyond that was a cost.
At the rim of his vision, however, a flash of wrong color pulled him back. A jar on a high shelf caught the dim light: red and green dust, glittering faintly like embers trapped under glass. It did not belong next to rusted springs and coiled wire; it looked theatrical, ceremonial — bright as a wound.
He pointed. "What's that?"
The man followed his finger and grunted. "That? Kyrium Mixed. Green and red Kyrium."
The name meant nothing to Jonas — neither in the blacksmith's scattered memory nor in the cold catalog of knowledge he carried from his old life. He let the ignorance stand long enough to be deliberate. "What does it do?"
The shopkeeper scratched at the thick skin above his lip, thinking through the rumor rather than solid fact. "Bought it off a buddy," he said at last. "He said it came from some outlands tribe — half-savages, he called 'em. They used it for rituals, painting their bodies, carving marks in hides. All that." He shrugged in a small, dismissive way. "Looked pretty, so he brought me some."
Jonas kept his face composed; inside, the information was a vector. Ritual dust. Tribal use. Trade from remote sources. Not immediately useful, but not worthless either.
The shopkeeper hesitated, then added, almost as an afterthought: "My buddy said… that stuff's highly ignitable."
The words landed with a different weight. Ignite. In Jonas' head, the syllable split into calculations: combustible compounds, oxidizers, rates of burn, flash points. He saw the primer in a new light — not just a spark but an approach: a compound that could be coaxed to produce a clean, instantaneous ignition when struck, and yet resist detonation under pressure. Kyrium's "highly ignitable" rumor mapped to part of the impossible problem he'd sketched.
Jonas turned the bag in his hands, feeling the slight weight of metal and the faint clink of screws. He kept his voice flat. "How much?"
The man named it without drama: "Two gyron for the jar."
Two GY. Jonas tasted the number in his head — expensive, but not unattainable. He ran the ledger quickly and silently: a quarter GY for the springs and screws; two GY for a jar of bright dust. The thugs who'd beaten him walked the streets with pouches and careless hands. When he'll end them, their purses would be a source — quick, ugly, finite. Kill, take, cover costs for weeks. The math inspected itself and found no moral hesitation; it was just arithmetic.
Jonas set the bag on the larger pocket of his overcoat, took a few steps forward, and picked the jar with both hands. It was heavier than it looked. He untied the pouch at his breast and counted out eight black coins — four pairs stacked neatly, each coin a quarter-gyron. He laid them out in even rhythm. The coins clinked, a small percussion under the shop's quiet.
The shopkeeper checked the weight, his face neutral. "All yours," he said, dropping the coins into the drawer.
Jonas slid the jar into his coat where it would not shift. He nodded once — not gratitude, not triumph, only acknowledgment — and pushed the door open. The city's gray noise folded over him as he stepped back into it, the jar and the bag pressed to his ribs like two new variables in an already complex equation.