The first morning Trin woke with the sun, the camp was already moving.
Voices drifted through the canvas before he stepped outside—soft curses over cold steel, the low murmur of orders, the scrape of whetstones on blades. Smoke curled from the central fire, carrying the smell of porridge and something vaguely meat-like. The forest around the clearing glowed with early light, a pale green hush shot through with birdsong.
Naera noticed him first.
"You're up on your own," she said, moving toward him with a wooden cup in hand. "That's progress."
"Gravity and I have reached an understanding," Trin replied.
She handed him the cup. The liquid inside was warm, bitter, and comforting in its own rough way. He took a small sip, then another.
Naera studied him. "How's the head?"
"Quieter," he said. "Heavier. But…manageable."
"Good. Garran will want to test whether you can lift something heavier than a cup soon."
"Garran tests many things," Trin observed, eyes flicking toward the training ground where the big man barked corrections at a pair of recruits. "Not all of them gently."
"That's how you keep people alive," Naera said. "Soft words make for soft bodies. Soft bodies don't come back from patrol."
He was quiet for a moment, watching the camp breathe and move. The normalcy of it settled over him like an unfamiliar cloak.
"What do you want me to do?" he asked.
Naera blinked. "Today?"
"In general," he said. "You said this camp does not carry dead weight. I would rather not be ballast."
A slow smile touched her mouth. "Direct. I like that." She folded her arms, thinking. "Well, you said you were a crafter of sorts. We're short on menders and gearwrights. If you can repair leather, patch cloth, shape simple tools—"
"I can," he said, with automatic certainty.
She caught the flicker of something in his eyes—old memory, old habit—and tilted her head. "All right. We'll start small. Work with what we have, not what you wish you had."
He glanced down at his torn, half-cleaned armor and travel-worn clothes. "I will need to start with this."
Naera made an agreeable noise. "We can spare some leather and fabric. Not much, but enough. And if you can turn scraps into something useful, Garran will stop grumbling about your presence twice as fast."
"Only twice?" Trin asked.
"More is unrealistic," she said dryly. "Come on. Let's talk to him before he decides you should prove yourself with a sword instead."
They walked together toward the supply area, Naera calling Garran over as he dismissed the recruits. He joined them with a grunt, sweat darkening his collar, shield slung across his back.
"You're walking straight now," Garran noted. "Better than yesterday."
"Falling repeatedly grows tedious," Trin said.
Garran snorted. "Naera says you can work leather. That true, or is that one of those mysterious half-truths?"
"I can work it," Trin said. "Though I may need to…relearn some methods."
Garran's eyes narrowed. "What did you work before? Armor for nobles? Shoes for peasants? Ritual masks for some cult in the mountains?"
"Things that needed to last," Trin answered. "Under stress."
Garran considered him, measuring. "We've got straps that keep snapping and a few breastpieces that'll need reinforcing if we take another contract. If you can fix those, we'll count it toward your keep."
"And if I can't?" Trin asked.
"Then Naera will insist we keep you anyway because she thinks you're interesting," Garran said, "and I'll have to find other uses for you that are more…expendable."
Naera rolled her eyes. "Ignore him. Mostly."
"Half," Garran corrected.
"Quarter," she countered.
Trin watched their exchange with a faint, nearly invisible smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Show me what you have."
Garran led them to the supply corner, where crates and bundles had been stacked under oilcloth. He hauled out a small chest and kicked it open, revealing coils of leather, worn straps, and a few armor pieces that had clearly seen better days.
"Tools are in there," he said, nodding toward a smaller box. "Awls, needles, a serviceable knife, some thread. Not fancy, but they work."
Trin crouched, the motion careful but smoother than the day before. He sifted through the tools, fingers brushing metal and wood, cataloguing shapes: awl, punch, dull-edged shears, a bone shuttle worn smooth by years of use.
They were crude by his standard—and yet, unlike the void, unlike the battlefield, unlike the vast empty reaches beyond his reach now, these were real. Solid. Honest.
He reached for the familiar impulse, the old habit of simply willing something better into existence: sharper blades, perfectly balanced handles, thread that would never fray. The power answered with a faint flicker, then thinned, pulled away into the quiet distance.
Nothing changed.
The knife remained dull. The awl remained slightly bent. The thread remained coarse.
Trin exhaled slowly and let the yearning go.
"I'll need some time," he said.
Naera watched him, her gaze sharp. "You all right?"
"Yes," he said. "It's just been a while since I started from…this layer."
"What does that mean?" she asked.
He considered, then answered with a softer edge to his voice. "It means I am used to beginning at the bones of things. Not the skin."
"Start at the skin for now," Garran said. "We don't have time for philosophy when straps are breaking."
Naera elbowed him lightly. "You're just annoyed someone is taller than you in metaphors."
Garran grunted something that might have been a laugh and left them to their work.
Naera lingered. "If you need anything else—within reason—ask," she said. "I can't conjure materials out of thin air, but I know what we have."
"I'll manage," Trin said. "Thank you."
She nodded and went to tend to the central fire.
Trin stayed where he was, kneeling in the dirt beside the crates, the tools arrayed before him. The forest breeze tugged faintly at the tent edges and drying herbs overhead.
He picked up the awl, testing its weight. The metal tip was slightly crooked, the wooden handle uneven. He turned it between his fingers, then set it down and reached for the knife. Its blade had been sharpened too many times inexpertly, edges rounded where they should have been straight.
Once, he would have whispered a thought and the flaws would have smoothed themselves out. Once, he could have created entirely new instruments with a gesture.
Now, his hands were all he had.
He rolled his shoulders slowly, feeling the ache of unfamiliar limitation like a bruise under his skin.
"Very well," he murmured under his breath. "We start with bones by way of skin, then."
He began by making tools to fix the tools.
From the scrap wood near the crates, he selected a piece with tight grain and few knots. Using the dull knife, he shaved it down into a more ergonomic handle, fingers moving with practiced precision born from ages of working at much larger scales.
He carved slowly, carefully. Each shaving fell like a tiny surrender to the reality of effort. When the shape felt right in his palm, he bored a hole through with the old awl and repurposed its metal tip, resetting it in the new handle. He added a subtle groove along the side where his thumb would rest—a small refinement that made the motion smoother, the grip more natural.
For the knife, he took a thin strip of metal from a broken buckle and worked it with patient persistence, grinding it against a rough stone near the firepit when no one was using it. Back and forth, slowly, until an edge emerged. Imperfect, but sharp enough.
Hours passed like this—measured not by cosmic cycles, but by the creeping shade of the trees and the growl of his stomach.
Lysa appeared around midday, an apple in one hand and a coil of fletching in the other. She watched him a moment, then hopped up to sit on a crate, swinging her legs idly.
"So," she said, biting into the apple, "our mysterious crafter actually crafts. That's a relief. I was starting to wonder if you'd claimed the title because you were good at carving excuses."
Trin glanced up at her. "Is that a common trade in Vaelion?"
"More common than honest ones, some days," she said. She nodded toward the tools in his hands. "Those look…different."
"They are the same," he said. "But adjusted. A little finer. A little more aligned with how the hand wants to move."
Lysa leaned in to look, eyes bright. "Simple, but…there's something about them. Like they're familiar even if I've never used anything quite like them."
"That is the idea," Trin said. "They should not fight the user."
"Most things do," she said. "People. Swords. Bureaucrats."
He let a quiet breath of amusement escape. "Perhaps start with the tools you can control."
She studied his face a moment. "You don't look like a man who's done this day in, day out in a village workshop," she said. "No ink on your fingers, no old calluses on the usual places."
"I've…changed trades a few times," he said.
"Did they all involve making things?" she asked.
"In one way or another," he answered.
Lysa chewed thoughtfully, then shrugged. "Well, whatever you're doing, keep doing it. If my straps stop snapping mid-run, I might even start calling you by name instead of 'mysterious stranger.'"
"You've been calling me worse?" he asked.
"Only in my head," she said with a grin. "For now."
She hopped down, tossed him the remaining half of her apple, and wandered off to continue her patrol of the camp perimeter.
Trin caught the apple automatically, stared at it for a long moment, then took a small bite. The sweetness grounded him in the present more than any meditation could.
By late afternoon, he had a small set of tools laid out on a strip of cloth: an awl with a newly carved handle, a sharpened knife with a wrapped hilt, a pair of improvised clamps made from bent metal and wood, a smoothed bone shuttle in place of the old splintered one.
They were simple. They were small. But they were his work, earned, not summoned.
He flexed the fingers of his right hand slowly, feeling the faint echo of power still coiled somewhere deep, unreachable for now. The void between what he'd once been able to do and what he could do now felt vast.
He picked up a damaged breastpiece, the leather cracked and stitching frayed.
"Begin," he told himself quietly, and did.
Over the next three days, the rhythm of the camp became the drumbeat of his waking hours.
Mornings, Garran oversaw drills, the thud of boots and bark of commands forming a steady backdrop while Trin sat under the shade of a tree or tent awning, cutting, stitching, and reshaping leather. Naera came and went with reports, herbs, and occasional questions. Lysa drifted in and out, often stretching on a nearby log while working on her arrows, offering commentary that danced between flippant and insightful.
The work was slow at first.
His fingers knew the principles of creation at every scale, but the flesh had grown unaccustomed to the minutiae of repeated physical labor. Muscles cramped. Shoulders ached. More than once he had to stop and flex his hands to keep them from stiffening too much.
But he kept going.
On the second day, Naera crouched beside him, watching as he reinforced a strap with a subtle double stitch that distributed strain more evenly along the leather.
"That's not a pattern I've seen before," she remarked. "Where did you learn it?"
"Watching things fail," he said, eyes on his work.
Her gaze flicked over the piece. "Very cheerful answer."
"Reliable," he replied.
She studied him for a moment, then nodded. "Do you always talk in tidy little riddles?"
"Only when the true answer is…complicated," he said.
"Try me," she said. "I've got time."
He paused, needle halted above the leather, then resumed stitching in silence.
Naera sighed softly. "All right. Not today, then." She tapped the reinforced strap. "You're doing good work. Garran pretends he hasn't noticed, but he spent a whole five minutes tugging on one of your repairs this morning trying to make it fail. It didn't."
"That is encouraging," Trin said.
"High praise, from him," she added. "You should see what he says about most armorers."
"Perhaps I shouldn't," he said.
She huffed a small laugh. "Fair."
On the third evening, as the sky blushed gold and the campfire popped, Garran approached Trin with a bundle in hand.
"Freewarden straps," he said, dropping the bundle beside him. "Mine."
The leather showed heavy wear, small cracks where stress had repeated over the years, the marks of many battles and long marches.
"You trust me with these?" Trin asked.
"No," Garran said. "But I don't trust the old stitching more."
Trin inclined his head and set to work.
As he cut away the worst of the worn thread, Garran watched, arms folded.
"You work like a man who's done this on a grander scale," Garran said. "Not just a village leatherworker."
"How does one do this on a 'grander scale'?" Trin asked mildly.
"You look at the strap," Garran said, "and you see where force will go before it gets there. You're thinking three failures ahead, not just one patch at a time."
Trin considered that. "Then yes," he said quietly. "You could say I've had practice at…anticipating failure."
"Sounds like a miserable way to live," Garran muttered.
"It can be," Trin agreed. "But it also keeps people alive, sometimes."
Garran grunted, oddly satisfied with that answer. After a few minutes of silence, he added, "If you keep working like this, we'll want you to stay past the next contract. Not as a charity case. As one of us."
Trin's fingers paused on the leather.
"One of you," he repeated.
"Don't make it sound like a curse," Garran said. "It just means you'll eat our food, take our coin, and share our trouble."
"I have already shared some of that," Trin said.
"Now you'd get paid for it," Garran said, turning away. "Think about it."
As night fell and the camp settled, Trin finally allowed himself to turn his attention to his own needs.
Using remnants of cloth and leather that Naera had cleared as "scrap," he laid out a rough pattern on the ground. He cut carefully, shaping each piece with an eye toward mobility and longevity: a tunic reinforced at stress points without being heavy, trousers that allowed for easy movement, a sleeveless leather jerkin reinforced with subtle internal layering rather than obvious plates.
His new tools glided more easily now, their familiarity growing with each pass. He added small details almost without thinking—folds that allowed heat to vent, seams angled to follow the body's motion, hidden loops where additional straps could be added later.
Lysa appeared again, this time with no apple, just curiosity. She perched nearby, watching him work.
"That doesn't look like any style we use," she said.
"It's not from here," he said.
"From wherever you're from, then?" she pressed.
"In a manner of speaking," he replied.
She leaned her chin on her hand. "Everyone here wears tokens of something," she said. "Garran wears the ghost of his old legion colors. Naera wears ink from her Arcanum. I wear Windfern braids and forest leathers."
"And you," Trin said, "wear your questions openly."
She smiled. "Someone has to. What will your clothing say about you?"
He looked at the half-finished jerkin. It was practical, unobtrusive, with lines that suggested neither noble nor peasant, neither priest nor soldier. It would let him move quietly in a world that did not know his name.
"It will say that I am not from here," he said at last, "but I intend to walk here for a while."
Lysa considered that. "Not bad," she said. "A little dramatic, but not bad."
"It is difficult to avoid drama when one has been nearly killed repeatedly in a short span of time," he said.
"Fair," she admitted. "Just…if you're going to be mysterious, at least wear something that lets you run when trouble comes. Trouble loves mysterious people."
"I've noticed," he said dryly.
By the time the fire had burned down to embers, his new clothing and armor were complete. He ran his fingers over the seams, checking for weak spots, testing each strap, each joint.
There were imperfections—small unevennesses where his hands had faltered for a moment, where his experience with effortless shaping warred with the resistance of real material. He left them.
They reminded him he was not what he had been. They also reminded him he was still something.
He donned the new garments in his tent, the leather settling against his frame with the subtle resistance of fresh work. The weight felt right—lighter than his old celestial remnants, heavier than simple cloth.
When he stepped out, Naera looked up from her notes by the dying fire.
"You finally changed," she said.
"Your old loan nearly quit on me," he replied. "I thought it wise to relieve it."
She stood and walked around him once, assessing. "Functional," she said. "Good coverage on the torso, flexibility at the joints. You made that from scrap?"
"Yes," he said.
Garran's voice came from the shadows near the training area. "Not bad," he called. "You look less like a burned-down temple and more like someone who belongs on a road."
"That was the intention," Trin said.
Lysa emerged from wherever she had tucked herself, eyes bright. "Now you almost look like a Freewarden," she said. "You'll need a few more scars and a bad habit or two, but the armor's a good start."
Naera folded her arms. "So. Crafter of sorts. You've proven the 'crafter' part. The 'of sorts' remains suspicious."
"Some suspicions are healthy," Trin said.
She held his gaze for a moment, then nodded. "We leave for a short scouting contract in three days," she said. "Nothing too dangerous, we hope. By then, you should be strong enough to travel."
"You wish me to come," he said more than asked.
"I wish to see what you do when the work leaves the camp," Naera replied. "And I suspect you'd rather not be left behind with only the pots and the recruits for company."
He considered the forest beyond, the paths not yet walked, the world Althera had hinted at, pulsing somewhere deeper, calling him without words.
"I will come," he said.
"Good," Garran said gruffly. "Bring your needles. Armor never fails when it's convenient."
Lysa grinned. "And bring your mysteries. The road gets boring."
As the camp settled into sleep, Trin lay awake for a while, feeling the ache in his hands throb in soft counterpoint with the faint, distant hum of creation inside him. It was still there, small and dim, pulled toward something beyond his sight.
But here, now, he had leather, thread, wood, and steel. He had names: Naera, Garran, Lysa. He had a place in a circle of tents under a mortal sky.
He flexed his fingers once more, feeling the roughness newly forming on his skin.
"If this is where I begin again," he murmured to the darkness of the tent, "then let it be with work that holds."
Outside, the forest whispered. Inside, Trin closed his eyes and slept—not as a god watching over a universe, but as a tired craftsman in a small, temporary camp, on a world that did not yet know it had inherited a creator.