The Unmaker

… After little Dahlia picks her name for her eighth birthday, she rushes back into the house, huddling around the fireplace. Sanyon and Eria follow, closing the door behind them as they share a warm smile between themselves. It’s unusually cold today, but when they are together not even a blizzard will be able to tip them over—at least, that’s what Sanyon wants to think of the little burrow he’d built for the three of them, far from the tumult of the Bazaar and the New District.

While Eria moves to pull the window close and he feeds more logs to the fire, little Dahlia hops onto the living room chair and slaps her hand on the table.

“I wanna make something!” she declares, spinning in her seat as she looks Eria and Sanyon over with a brazen grin. “Papa! Teach! I wanna make something that you can make!”

“You’ll learn the basics next year, once you get into the Bug-Slaying School,” he says, as Eria hums and skips into their bedroom, closet doors being thrown against the walls. “You probably won’t like crafting, anyways. It’s difficult and laborious work for very little recognition. You’ll be better off learning how to use things other people make if you want to be popular with the other kids–”

“I don’t need to be seen! I just wanna make something!”

Hearing the conviction in her voice, he turns and glances at her properly; her eyes are shining, her irises are popping. She wants to make something for her eighth birthday—why not entertain her a little with his hobby, then?

“... Alright,” he says, slapping his knees as he gets up from the sofa, heading towards the table. “But do papa a favour and go get my insect parts from the bedroom. My knees haven’t been doing very well lately, so–”

“Here you go, papa,” Eria says, dumping the crate onto the table with a teasing grin as she does. Little Dahlia cheers and immediately hops onto his lap, drumming the table with her fingers.

He stares at Eria, nose scrunching, before sighing and retrieving the basic insect parts from his crate.

“What can I make, papa?” little Dahlia asks. He doesn’t answer immediately. He thinks deeply, without breathing, before his eyes catch on the broken ornamental clock dangling over the table.

‘Might as well’, he thinks.

His thumb flicks the dial of the spare pocket watch hung around his waistband, and the rhythmic ticks send his mind into a world of its own—his hands move on their own. He retrieves a small chrome mantis scythe, a butterfly veil, and a few plates of flattened beetle carapaces he’d been planning on using for one of the fifth-year’s bombardier beetle boots. He could just replace the parts at the Night Bazaar tomorrow. Tonight, he has sixty seconds to make something interesting; he begins by leaning forward in his chair, making little Dahlia squeal and giggle as she is thrown for a whirl.

First, his expression tightens, he reaches into his pocket and pops a small bloodberry candy into his mouth. His fingers press the malleable beetle carapaces into the shape of a half-dome, more oval than circular, before clipping small pieces off the spare carapaces to begin shaping them into little gears. Just five is enough. Once he has five, he props up the back of the dome with a chisel and stares at his mantis scythe pensively. When he’d bought the part from the bug trader a year ago he didn’t think its serrated edges would look any good as a moving hand, but on closer inspection he supposed they’d look somewhat smooth in circular motion. The tip is slightly curved, it’d be like a blade trailing through a soft bed of sand. Without excessive thought, he shapes three more beetle carapaces into small pins and jams them through the end of the three scythes, attaching the second, minute, and hour hand over three individual gears. Then he joins all three together with the two remaining gears, and the array is complete.

Little Dahlia’s eyes light up in excitement. Eria sits on the end of the table, smiling softly at them. He hardly notices their affectionate looks. The array is physically arranged, but he only has thirty seconds left to make it mechanically arranged.

He flips the array over, takes out a vial of firefly extract from the crate, and then immediately pours the contents into a single glass bulb. The bulb is here to serve a very specific purpose. Liquified firefly extract can act as a heat converter, meaning whenever the dial of the array is turned, the extract absorbs the friction generated by the dial and releases it as heat, which then turns the gears of the array via rapid heat expansion. The full mechanisms of how this extract functions elude him still, but he only needs to know it does work—to make the gears spin for an entire day without stopping, one only has to turn the dial once and leave it at that. It is almost akin to a wind-up mechanism, only, the longevity as amplified by the firefly extract far exceeds that of any normal wind-up machine.

With four seconds to spare, he screws the bulb onto the back of the array, sticks the array into the half-dome, hastily wraps the butterfly veil over the half-dome as decoration, and turns the dial while letting the pocket watch on his waistband ring away.

“...”

He lets out his breath at long last and frowns at his creation.

The ‘pocket watch’, if he could even call it that, is exceedingly crude and unrefined. The main beetle body isn't polished, the edges aren't completely smooth. The butterfly veil is hastily slapped on without proper sap and glue adhesives. There isn’t even a glass covering over the array, meaning if anyone were to knock it over the array would just shatter into pieces. He wouldn’t even feel good about putting it up on a shelf, let alone thinking about selling it at the Bazaar—but little Dahlia doesn’t seem to agree.

She grabs the watch, hops off his lap, and starts jumping on the sofa with it; just what is it that she sees in his shoddy creation?

“It’s not that good, you know?” he says, turning around in his chair as Eria places a hand on his shoulder. “You know what? I can make something you’ll probably like more. A pocket watch is boring for a girl your age. Do you want a plushie or a fake sword or a new shawl? Just say what you want, and I’ll–”

“Teach me how to make it! Again!”

Little Dahlia doesn’t seem to care about what he has to say as she jumps off the couch, hopping back onto his lap. Her fingers are drumming against the table once more, her eyes devouring the insect parts in the crate.

… How strange.

It’s just a plain, boring, shoddy pocket watch.

“Do you like the ticking sounds?” he asks.

“No!” she answers.

“Do you like the insect parts I used to make it?”

“I dunno what those parts are!”

“Do you like the butterfly decoration on the back?”

“I don’t like the webbed pattern! I want a flower pattern!”

“Then, what… do you like about it?”

Little Dahlia doesn’t hesitate, she doesn’t think; she answers with a smile bright enough to light up Alshifa.

“You made this for me, papa!”

“...”

Eria closes her eyes and squeezes down on his shoulder, but even he knows better than to say anything strange in response.

“Because I made this for you, and only you, huh?” he mumbles.

Little Dahlia doesn’t hear him and Eria squeezes his shoulder again.

“... Alright. But we’ll make a better pocket watch this time, okay?” he says, as he scoots his chair forward and makes sure little Dahlia can get her hands over the table properly. “Don’t be lazy. Don’t be generic. Everything you make must be made with ‘someone’ in mind, or else it will be as though you’ve made nothing at all.

“Can you promise me that, Dahlia!”

“Okay!”

“Good. Now here’s your candy. The sugar will give your brain a rush, and you’ll never fail to come up with something interesting.”

- Scene from Sina Household past