Chương 46: Chapter 29.5: A Row Of Birds

"You're making objects." Merris lowered himself into the opposite chair without invitation while shaking rainwater from his coat sleeves. I looked up irritably.

"They are objects."

"That's the problem." The old merchant picked up one of the dice and rolled it lazily between thumb and forefinger before setting it back beside the others.

"You're trying to grind the skill."

"That usually works."

"For ordinary skills." I leaned back slightly.

"What's that supposed to mean?" Merris gestured toward the little pile spread across the table.

"These are well made enough. Balanced too. Someone could actually gamble with them."

"That sounds complimentary."

"It isn't." The merchant pushed one die lightly with his finger.

"You made these because you wanted progression, not because the objects mattered." I frowned.

"They're useful."

"Useful isn't the same thing." Merris turned the die until the charcoal marks faced me.

"Who is this one for?" I had no answer. He tried the next, then the next, asking the same question until the pile stopped looking like twelve objects and began looking like one mistake repeated neatly.

"A tool can exist because a task requires it. A little thing like this needs a person, a habit, a memory, or at least an evening someone wants to survive. Otherwise you're only making inventory no merchant requested." The words irritated me immediately because they sounded too close to truth. Merris leaned back in the chair while the Cataract carried on breathing around us.

Refugees spoke quietly near the hearth while Garron and Lysa moved between tables distributing bowls and blankets with increasingly practised exhaustion. Somewhere outside, hammering echoed faintly where militia reinforced barricades before nightfall.

"You know what the strange thing is?" Merris asked.

"No."

"Most people never learn what their skills actually are." The old merchant nodded toward the dice.

"They learn what the skill is useful for." I looked back down at the table. The pile of dice suddenly appeared absurdly empty. Accurate little cubes. Functional. Neat. Dead. After a while I pushed them aside. The next piece of wood I picked up felt different immediately, though not because the carving improved. I stopped thinking about advancement entirely. The knife moved more slowly now, shaving away thin curls while the shape beneath my hands emerged gradually from memory rather than utility. Small wings first.

Then the curve of a narrow body. A perched posture balanced carefully against the grain itself. The blue bird. I had not consciously decided to carve it until halfway through the process. That unsettled me slightly. The knife continued moving anyway. The first attempt came out rough and uneven. One wing sat too high while the tail split awkwardly near the grain line. I stared at it briefly before setting it aside and beginning another. The second looked better. The third better still.

Soon a small row of blue birds sat beneath the firelight, each slightly different from the last. Some perched lower. Some leaned forward as though preparing for flight. None looked perfect, but unlike the dice, each carried something distinct inside its shape. I stopped correcting them towards one shape. The bird with the high wing became a creature turning in wind; the one cut too deeply through the breast became thinner, alert, balanced on feet carved from the remaining grain.

A knot near the tail of the fourth forced the body sideways, so I angled its head back as though it had heard something behind it. The work improved when every flaw became a decision rather than evidence that I should begin again. By the sixth bird, the row no longer looked like repeated practice. It looked like several small creatures sharing one branch and refusing to face the same direction. Reading on Amazon or a pirate site? This novel is from Royal Road. Support the author by reading it there. Memory.

Stillness. Snow-covered branches beside blood. The forest after the Crimson Elf died. The little bird had remained there watching me from the frozen branch while the cart carried death back toward Dunmere. Calm. Bright. Entirely untouched by the horror surrounding it. I had not understood at the time why the image stayed with me. It had seemed absurd then, almost offensive: a small blue thing sitting above blood and snow as if terror were only weather passing through branches.

Now, with Dunmere breaking itself against the shape of war and every useful skill tying me tighter to walls, trenches, and killing lines, the bird returned not as beauty exactly, but as refusal. It had not saved anyone. It had not changed anything. It had simply remained itself. Lysa eventually appeared beside the table carrying a stack of cleaned bowls.

"What's that?" I looked down at the carving in my hands.

"Nothing."

"That's clearly a bird."

"It's a bad bird." She leaned slightly closer, studying the small row lined beside the wood shavings.

"They're kind of sad." That startled me enough to glance up.

"Sad?"

"The way they're sitting." She shrugged lightly.

"Like they're waiting for something." The observation lodged somewhere uncomfortable beneath my ribs because she was right. One of the refugee children near the hearth noticed the carvings next and pointed excitedly toward them. The little boy with the boat looked up immediately, eyes widening with the same careful fascination he had shown before. Other children followed his gaze. A girl with bandaged fingers leaned forward from beneath her blanket. A smaller child stopped crying long enough to stare.

I slid the roughest bird towards the boy with the boat because its low body made it look ready to sit on a deck. He placed it inside the crooked hull and tested whether the two could balance together. The girl with bandaged fingers chose the bird turning into the wind, lifting it by the base rather than the wings without needing to be warned. The smallest child received the thin one and closed both hands around it until only the head showed between muddy knuckles.

None of them asked whether the carvings were worth anything. They decided what each one was for before I could. I suddenly felt surrounded. Not threatened. Seen. That was worse in a different way. I looked down at the birds lined across the table, then back toward the boy with the boat. The memory struck properly then. Not the Crimson Elf. Not Orven. Not even the blood. The blue bird itself. The strange impossible calm of it sitting above the snow while horror soaked the clearing beneath.

A tiny living thing untouched by violence. The moment the understanding settled fully into place, Knickknacks shifted sharply inside me. The advancement arrived quietly compared with combat skills. No flood of violent energy. No explosive heat. Just sudden understanding settling deeper into my hands. ABILITY ADVANCED Knickknacks has advanced from Iron (early) to Iron (mid).

You now better understand small symbolic objects, repeated forms with emotional variation, simple beauty, memory carried through craft, and the difference between functional object-making and meaningful small work. This ability grows through care, attention, remembered feeling, modest craft, and making objects whose value comes from what they help people hold onto. Balance. Shape. Emotional weight carried through tiny crafted things. Not decoration. Not toys. Not quite.

The skill cared about smallness, about objects too minor for ledgers and too stubborn for despair, about the strange human habit of giving meaning to things that could neither feed nor defend them and keeping them anyway. I sat motionless afterward staring at the unfinished bird in my hands. Not practical. Not useful. Yet somehow more real than the dice ever were. Merris watched the entire moment from across the room beside the hearth.

The old merchant only nodded once, as though something expected had finally happened. Outside, rain continued falling softly against the darkened streets of Dunmere while the eastern walls waited through another night beyond the river mist. Inside the Cataract, the children had begun whispering over the little birds. One asked whether they were for taking. Another asked whether birds could find houses after the trees burned. Lysa did not answer immediately.

Garron, moving past with a stew pot in both hands, looked at the carvings, looked at me, and then pretended very carefully to have seen nothing. Merris gathered the abandoned dice into his palm.

"These can go beside the broth pot," he said.

"People waiting for bowls require something harmless to lose at." He left the birds where the children had arranged them and carried the dice towards the hearth, turning failed progression into a common-room game without offering me the comfort of calling the work successful. Within minutes, two wounded guards were arguing over whether a charcoal mark crossing the grain counted as a five or a damaged six. I understood the kindness in that pretence, which made it difficult to look at him.

The axe leaned upstairs beside my bedroll. Ember Blade waited there, warm and young and terrible, a skill made for breaches, bodies, and the bright efficient answer of violence. Here, in the crowded common room, Knickknacks sat inside me just as real, quieter and stranger, asking nothing of the wall and everything of the reason men kept building them. I placed the unfinished blue bird beside the others. For once, my hands did not shake.