Moonforge crouched beneath the cliffs like a thing that had been hammered into being and never forgiven for it. Its chimneys breathed a slow, metallic smoke; its windows were slats of glass that threw back the light in shards. The forge's courtyard smelled of flux and hot iron and the faint, wrong sweetness of metal that had learned to remember. Forgers moved like ghosts among anvils; apprentices kept their heads down and their hands steady. It was the kind of place that made anchors and plates and, if you listened closely, the kind of place that could teach metal to hum.
They came at dusk because dusk softened edges and made shadows useful. Aria rode with the Spiral Log at her hip and a packet of witness sheets tucked into her satchel. Thorne carried a spool of sigildamp tiles and a warded lens; Marcus had arranged a ring of facilitators and two neutral escorts; Keeper Sera bore Remnants seals and a stack of notarized custody terms. Luna arrived with a small teacher cell—three women and two men who had practiced cadence rotations until their voices braided like rope. Calder, under Remnants protection and pale with the knowledge of what he had built, walked with them as a technical guide and a man who wanted to make amends.
They had a plan that fit on a single scrap of vellum: approach through the service gate, slip a warded reader into the forger's crate, swap a broker plate for a sealed microetch replica, and extract a ledger page that Calder believed would point to a private slip. The Moonforge's inner vault was rumored to hold a crate that had passed through Halv's slips and carried a plate stamped with a pale codex ghost. If they could prove the plate's provenance and link it to procurement stubs, the rope would tighten.
Thorne set anchors at the service gate—stones from the ferry, a baker's token, a child's carved bead—and threaded a living cadence through the ring so the approach would feel like a neighborhood rather than a raid. The sigildamp tiles were placed in a careful arc; their wards hummed a counternote that would make mapping expensive. They moved with the practiced patience of people who had learned to step where the world thinned.
Inside, the Moonforge was a different animal: benches of glass and iron, coils of tempered wire hanging like vines, and a vault door rimed with sigil grooves. A forger's apprentice—young, pale, and startled—looked up when Marcus's shadow fell across the doorway. He froze, hands still on a hammer with a sigil groove. The crate they sought sat on a bench beneath a cloth, its seal stamped with a broker flourish and a faint, familiar ghost of codex geometry.
Calder's hands trembled as he read the manifest. "This is the one," he said. "Halv's slip. Corin's flourish. The plate inside—if it matches the Moonforge variant—ties the procurement chain to Saltport."
They worked fast and quiet. Marcus and two facilitators secured the exits while Thorne and Aria moved for the bench. Thorne fed a pulse through the warded lens and watched the microetch bloom. The plate's broker flourish matched the Veiled Crossing variant; a pale codex ghosted the edge. Thorne sketched the match in shorthand and slid the rubbing into a Remnants packet. The crate's seal was intact but the forger's apprentice watched them with the blank, frightened look of someone taught to obey.
They had rehearsed the swap until the motions felt like muscle memory. Thorne would lift the crate's cloth, feed a warded reader into the seam, and read the plate's microetch without exposing the artifact. Aria would perform a Redirect if the plate's resonance tried to reach into the apprentice's mind. The sigildamp would be tuned to a microvariation that made the overlay hesitate. Calder would confirm the plate's template and mark the ledger page for extraction.
At the bench, the crate's cloth came away and the plate gleamed like a small, dangerous sun. The warded reader slipped into the seam and hummed. For a heartbeat everything was still. Then the plate's microetch answered with a thin, hungry note—the kind of note that reached for anchors and cadences. The apprentice's eyes glazed for a moment as a memory that was not his brushed his mind: a bell, a woman's scar, the taste of bread from a town he had never seen.
Aria moved before the thought finished. She stepped into the plate's bloom and sang a Redirect she had practiced in the Loom's quiet hours—an inversion that unhooked a small portion of the plate's graft long enough to free the apprentice's borrowed memory. The effect was immediate and violent. The plate's resonance folded like a struck chord; the apprentice's eyes cleared; the bench's air snapped taut.
The cost came like a toll. Aria felt a cold, clean absence where a private memory had been: the smell of a particular bread her mother used to bake, a small line of a lullaby she had hummed to a child once. The memory thinned and then was gone, leaving a blank like a missing tooth. Her head swam and her hands trembled. She steadied herself on the bench and tasted salt and jasmine and the sudden, sharp ache of loss.
Thorne cursed softly and fed the sigildamp a counternote that made the plate's overlay burn cycles to re‑model. The reader hummed and the plate's microetch stuttered; the warded tile at the threshold flared. Calder, pale and shaking, confirmed the template: a Moonforge broker variant with a pale codex marginalia. The ledger page they needed—an accession stub—was tucked beneath the crate's packing straw.
Marcus moved with the quiet efficiency of someone who had practiced restraint. He bound the apprentice's hands with a soft cord and called for witnesses. Keeper Sera's Remnants seal would make the plate a legal artifact; the ledger page would be copied into triplicate and notarized. They would not remove the plate from Remnants custody; they would take a rubbing and a sealed microetch replica for demonstration.
They did the small, human work that made law possible. Keeper Sera read the custody terms aloud and the Remnants' scribe copied the apprentice's narration into triplicate. The boy's voice was thin at first; then, as the ritual of telling took hold, it steadied. He described the forge's rhythms, the way the master had taught him to hold a hammer, the smell of flux and jasmine that had been in the room the night before. He told them about the memory that had come to him and how Aria had unhooked it. Sera pressed the Remnants seal to the witness sheet and stamped it with wax.
Thorne wrapped the plate in oilcloth and sealed it in a double‑warded box. He fed the microetch pattern through the lens one last time and sketched the bloom in shorthand. Calder copied the accession stub into the Spiral Log and pointed to a clerk's initial that matched the facilitator shorthand they had been tracing. The rope tightened: Halv's slip, Corin's flourish, a clerk's initial, a private dock near the Glass Lighthouse.
They left the Moonforge before dawn, the crate's bench empty and the apprentice wrapped in a blanket and a witness packet. The plate rode in a warded box under Remnants escort; the ledger page was sealed in triplicate and a microetch replica was tucked into Thorne's satchel. On the road back, Luna walked close enough that their shoulders brushed, a small, steady contact that did not need words.
Aria opened the Spiral Log and wrote the day's entry with hands that shook but did not falter: Moonforge Heist — Moonforge crate accession inspected; broker plate matched Veiled Crossing variant with pale codex marginalia; apprentice exposed to graft; Aria performed Redirect to unhook apprentice; cost recorded: Aria experiences permanent loss of a named memory (mother's bread lullaby); temporary disorientation; plate quarantined under Remnants custody; accession stub copied and notarized; facilitator shorthand and clerk initial identified; prepare targeted subpoenas for private slip manifests; prepare sealed microetch replica for Council demonstration; rotate sigildamp operators to mitigate cumulative haze.
They sealed the log and felt the ledger's weight settle in their hands. The Moonforge had given them a plate and a ledger page and a human witness; it had also taken a memory from Aria that would not return. The cost was private and public at once: a blank where a lullaby had been and a line in the Spiral Log that would be read in courts and markets. They had won a thing and lost a thing in the same breath.
On the road back, Calder walked a little straighter, as if the act of confession and the work of repair had steadied him. Luna's hand found Aria's and squeezed, a small, fierce promise. "We hold the net," Luna said softly. "We pay to protect."
Aria let the words settle like a benediction and a warning. The Moonforge had tightened the rope; the patron committee's face was closer now, and the Loom would follow the procurement thread with witnesses and sigils and public packets until daylight showed every stitch.