The workshop smelled of ozone and warm metal — the after-scent of a long day at the bench and the low hum of coolant running through the pixel-strip housing. Cassian did not remember switching on the overheads. The light he was working by came from the blade itself, laid flat across the felt-lined tray, its emitter pointed away from him the way a good gunsmith angles a barrel. A soft orange bloom licked the underside of the shelf above. It was the only warm thing in the room.
He had built sabers for other people for six years. Every hilt in the case behind him had gone out the door strapped to a stand, wrapped in tissue, tucked into a foam-lined case addressed to a fan somewhere in Toronto or Perth or Malmö. He had never kept one. That was the rule. The blade you make is the blade you send. A saber-smith who hoards his own work is a saber-smith who has forgotten who the myth belongs to.
The bench
The bench itself was older than the workshop. His grandfather's woodworking bench, brought over on a container ship in 1994, the top scarred by three generations of chisels and now three years of pixel-strip solder. The vice at the near end still turned smoothly. The one at the far end had seized the summer his father died and Cassian had never gotten around to freeing it. There were rings under the coffee mug where the mug had sat every evening since. There was a smell of pine sap under the ozone, if you knew to look for it.
Every crystal wants something. This one wanted silence.
from The Fragments of Cassian
Tonight the bench held one blade. A Xenopixel V3 Core, custom carbon housing, a hilt he had machined from a solid billet across two weekends in April. The colour was a matched pair — ember at ignition, deep-forge at hold, and a signature flicker on unlit that he had spent three evenings tuning until it looked less like a fault and more like breath. It was, he was privately certain, the best thing he had ever built.
He had not built it for a customer.
The choice
Two boxes sat on the shelf above the bench. In the left one, a stand — matte black, satin-buffed, the ARTSABERS mark scored into the base. In the right one, a helmet. Beskar-inspired, matte black, the visor line ruthlessly clean. He had built the helmet the same weekend as the blade, from a set of forming dies his father had left in the shed and a resin cast he had never quite trusted until now.
The choice was simple. The stand was the safe thing — put the blade on the wall, admire it in the mornings, treat the eight weekends of work as an artefact. The helmet was the other thing. The helmet was what happened when the maker stopped being the maker and became the character. It was what he had not let himself do for six years.
He picked up the blade.
Every crystal wants something. This one wanted silence.
from The Fragments of Cassian
His grandfather had said that. His grandfather had been talking about a chisel at the time — a fluting chisel that had rolled off the bench and stopped just short of Cassian's ten-year-old bare foot, and his grandfather had picked it up, turned it over, handed it hilt-first to the boy and said the line with the weight of someone who had been waiting years to say it out loud. Cassian had not thought about it in a decade. It came back tonight like an unshielded arc.
The workshop, at midnight
He walked to the shelf. Took down the helmet. Set it on the bench beside the blade. The visor caught the ember bloom and threw it back at the ceiling in a long slow band, and for a second the whole workshop was lit the colour of a forge at dawn. Then the blade cycled to its idle flicker and the room went dim again, and it was only him, and the bench, and two objects that were about to become a person.
He fit the helmet over his head. The lining was warm from the packing foam. The T-visor cut narrowed his field of view to a single band of ember-lit room. He picked up the blade a second time — this time with the grip his father had taught him, the grip his grandfather had taught his father, the grip he had never once used on a customer's blade because a customer's blade is not yours to hold like that.
Fig. 1
The blade at hold — Xenopixel V3, custom carbon housing.
The blade ignited to full. The visor caught it. The workshop caught it. Somewhere in the dark space above the shelf a small metal thing — a hex key, probably — rolled off a ledge and hit the concrete floor with a bright ringing note that sounded, for one absurd second, like an answering hum.
Cassian stood in the middle of the workshop and did not move. He let the blade hum. He let the visor cast the room in orange. He let himself be, for the first time in six years, the thing he had been building for other people.
Fig. 2
The workshop at midnight, seen from the far bench.
The morning after
He put both objects away before the sun came up. The blade went back into its case on the bench. The helmet went back on the shelf. He shut the workshop, locked the door, walked the two hundred yards down the yard to the house, and slept for the first time in three weeks without the low grinding worry he had been carrying since April.
In the morning he cancelled a customer order. Not a large one — a repeat client, a good one, the kind who would forgive a delay. He would build the replacement over the next fortnight. But the blade on the bench was already spoken for.
It was his.
Every crystal wants something. This one wanted silence.
from The Fragments of Cassian
He does not display it on a stand. He wears it on the belt some evenings, when the workshop is quiet and the yard is empty, and once — only once — he carried it out to the fence at the edge of the property and ignited it under the stars, and stood for a long time in the dark with the helmet catching the light, and did not think of anything at all.
That is the story of how the maker became the myth.
Yours is waiting to be built.
— Chloe
