The door gave its usual tired click, and the Underworks came in with them. Obi slipped through first, with his usual mocking spirit hidden. Hikari followed, one hand on the small of the compact black case as if it could try to escape on its own. Raizen came last and shut the door with care, as though loudness might shatter something inside him that was already cracked.
Takeshi was at the bench, doing he knew what. Sleeves rolled. Shoulder loose. Alive in the old way that meant: working. A driver lay near his left hand and the prosthetic's forearm panel sat beside it, and the arm itself rested on a cloth. As they stepped in, his flesh hand shifted one small thing the way you might move a cup to make space.
"Welcome back," he said, and the relief was there without being performed. "Any trouble?"
"Define trouble," Obi said, grinning too quickly.
Raizen didn't say a word, and placed the sidearm on his workbench and then sat on the floor, with a thoughtful look on his face. He could still feel its weight ghosting along his forearm where he'd rolled it. He flexed his fingers. They obeyed. Good. He was not a weapon. Not always.
Hikari set the case on the table. The room seemed to lean toward it.
Obi got impatient. "Permission to ruin the suspense?"
Hikari nodded, then startled a little at herself, as if her throat could never work.
Obi slid the case toward him. He didn't want to wait any longer, so he quite literally cracked the lock open. He tipped the lid.
Light didn't pour out. It gathered.
Nestled in dark foam were two stones that didn't look like stones. One was a pale yellow sphere, glass-smooth and faintly opaline, like a thread of golden lighting locked in glass. The other was a crescent of blue, thin as a shard and curved, taking the shape of a beautiful crescent moon. The color of cold water lit from within. Both of them held light instead of reflecting it; the light breathed in slow, patient pulses.
Nobody spoke. Even Obi shut up. Rare, but even his jaw dropped.
Raizen leaned in. The yellow one tugged at something under his ribs - not loud, not a strong. A quiet recognition. Hikari's fingers hovered over the blue crescent and the light, impossibly, seemed to brighten like a cat deciding a particular lap was safe.
Takeshi was the first to move. He didn't touch them. He didn't have to. "Luminite…" he said softly, and for the first time the word sounded like a name.
Obi's smile snapped back, wider and realer than anything he'd worn since the Maw. He clapped once, then choked the sound into his sleeve.
"Okay. Okay. I know I said I don't cry, but-" He pointed, reverent. "Sphere wants to sit in a socket. Blade core for sure. Blue crescent… Hilt spine? Or a channel. Or - no, listen – A staff so it floats just off the metal and sings when you move." He realized he was talking too fast and apologized to the table.
"Calm down" Hikari giggled. Her eyes were on the crescent. You could almost mistake the reflection inside it for a mirror of her own. "We'll get to that part too… Eventually…"
Obi bounded to the door. "I'm getting Louissa. Nobody breathes on these until Granny says you're allowed to exist near them."
"Obi-" Takeshi began.
But the young smith was already halfway down the hall, the door banging behind him, his laughter echoing like a promise he meant to keep.
Takeshi stood up, gently. He poured tea. This kind was different from all others. It had a more exotic fragrance. The steam put a little life back in the air. He set a cup by Raizen's hand and pushed it a bit closer. "You did what you had to."
Raizen didn't look up. "What if that becomes who I am?"
Takeshi took his own cup, left it untouched. "Then you learn when to put it down."
"The Rust Room built it," Raizen said. He hated how small the words sounded. "It built a… blade."
Takeshi's mouth tugged in a way that wasn't quite a smile. "Blades do what hands tell them. You're not lost, boy. You're sharpened. It's not the same."
Hikari's shoulder touched Raizen's for the briefest time, a ghost of a lean. "You saved me," she said, very simply. "That is… not lost."
His breath shook once. After that, it didn't.
The door swung in and Obi poured through it like a storm of good intentions, Louissa in tow. She brought night with her the way she always did - shawl, basket, an air of being exactly where information wanted her to be.
"Before you say anything," Obi announced, "I didn't lick them."
"No one was going to accuse you," Louissa said, already stepping to the table, already seeing everything there was to see. She took one look at the sphere and crescent and her face did a peculiar softening - respect first, then something like old affection.
"Ah," she said. "You were lucky."
"Skilled," Obi corrected. "Unbelievably skilled."
"Lucky," Louissa repeated, eyes still on the gems. She reached into her basket and brought out a strip of woven cloth, old and clean. She laid it beside the case. "May I?"
Everyone nodded at the same time.
Louissa lifted the yellow sphere with the cloth, not skin, and held it up to the lamp. It woke brighter, as if it had been waiting to be invited, and a faint honey-colored halo hummed along her fingers.
"Purity's nice," she said. "pretty high. It'll answer a strong body without burning it away. It wants heat, yes, but it will not be bossed by it."
She set it down, picked up the blue crescent in the same careful way. The light inside it rippled - a pond's answer to a stone you never saw thrown.
"And this," she said with a small, pleased exhale, "is rarer in this shape. Good for mass control. It listens more than it shouts. Blade or staff, spear… this beauty can handle multiple fronts at a time ."
Obi nodded so hard his curls nearly leapt off. "I said staff! I literally said staff! Granny, tell them I said staff."
"Obi said staff," Louissa intoned gravely. "The world is improved by the record."
Then her voice turned a tone Raizen had only ever heard when she'd reached over a flame to move a pot with her bare hands. "Now listen to the warning you came here to collect without knowing you came."
They listened.
"With Luminite, you don't just make a weapon," Louissa said. "You let it make you. Where you cut with it, your path will open. Where you refuse to cut, it will close. And most wicked of all - if you let the gem teach you only the parts of yourself that hurt, it will carve you to that shape and keep carving."
She folded the cloth back over the stones as if tucking two unruly children to bed. "Take them. Use them. But choose very carefully how you're going to use them. Rage obeys quickly, yes. So does fear. Hope and bravery is slower. But it holds thousands of times more."
The word hope hung there. Raizen could feel it - small, stubborn, unwilling to leave.
"We need sockets," Obi said, already moving again, hands sketching lines the air was kind enough to keep for him. "Temper baths. I'll pull the ore slag from the last batch and start fresh. We'll bring steel that sings names back to them. Grip scales for him, balance and speed. For her… Hmm…"
"We'll decide later" Hikari interrupted his thinking
Takeshi had said very little, and yet everything he needed had been heard. He reached to the bench, closed the prosthetic's panel with a practiced snap, and flexed the fingers. Whirr, lock, release. Behind him, under his desk, the rag where he'd hidden the object in cloth sat innocently. No one looked. It was fine.
Hikari's palm hovered over the crescent again. The light inside it answered like a heartbeat you'd only just noticed was yours. Raizen put one finger from his two hands near the sphere and felt warmth climb his arm - not heat, not burn - just the sense of waking muscles and small shock
He was still afraid of what he had been in the Maw. But this? This felt like choosing.
Obi clapped his hands once, a smith's prayer disguised as impatience. "We start at dawn. Which is to say, as soon as the pipes sing the right pitch that means dawn happened somewhere else. I'll clear the forge, bribe the fan, kick the soot out of the flue, and tell the anvil to mind its posture."
"Tell it twice," Takeshi said, deadpan.
"Oh, I always do." Obi sketched a bow, which somehow, on him, looked like swagger trying to behave. Then he sobered, for just a breath. "You two bring yourselves rested. I can hammer out metal. I can't hammer out sleep."
Hikari smiled at him, small and grateful. Raizen tried to, then remembered how and managed it.
They didn't open the case again. The light leaked through the seam anyway, just a little, like dawn sneaking through a curtain.
And somewhere beneath the bench, under a folded rag, an old stone waited - the shape of a secret Takeshi wasn't finished telling.