She opened her mouth, but then closed it again. “I suppose I did. Well, attaching one is the simplest process in the world, but by the time you can use it naturally, it will be your arm. It will be attached to your body and spirit, you see. Losing it will be the same as losing the limb you were born with.”

Lindon's eyes drifted back to his stump before he jerked them away. “I see. I'll be sure to choose carefully, then.”

A thought occurred to him, and he nodded to his pack sitting in the corner of the room. “What if we added a binding of our own? To the Shifting Skies arm, I mean.” That one was clearly the best selection, if only it came with a technique.

Fisher Gesha clearly understood what he meant, because she hesitated. “You should know that we've studied bindings like that one for generations. Dreadbeasts have plagued our lands long enough that we wanted to know what kind of madra created such monsters.”

She waited for him to ask a question, but he remained silent, so she reached into her robes and pulled out a sheaf of papers bound together with string. The Soulsmith notes he'd taken from the foundry back in the Desolate Wilds.

“We never had a name for the white madra in dreadbeast bindings,” she continued. “Our drudges could measure some of its properties, you see, but not enough to identify it. These notes call it hunger madra, which is perhaps one of the most absurd names for a power that I've ever heard. Though it seems to fit.”

“Hunger madra,” Lindon repeated. He'd read the notes, so he had heard the expression before, but he hadn't put the phrase together with the binding he'd carried around for the past year. “Is it compatible with my Paths?”

“As far as we can tell, it's compatible with everything,” she said wryly. “Dreadbeasts attack us with madra of all aspects, and they all have one of those bindings inside them. Although it could be that the ones with incompatible spirits die off...”

She waved a hand in the air. “You're distracting me. These notes reference an origin for this madra, a single source from which they got all their samples. They were trying to breed sacred beasts that left Remnants of this aspect, but they never made it. At least, not by the time these notes were written.”

Lindon nodded. If they didn't have a reliable source of Remnants, then the bindings and madra for the Ancestor's Spear must have come from somewhere else. “So where did the bindings come from?”

“That is what disturbs me,” she said. She shook her head as though shaking off cobwebs. “But it doesn't matter, does it? I could put your binding into this arm, certainly, but there would be no framework for it. We would need more hunger madra to reinforce and adapt the arm to handle the binding. Besides, do you really want a hand that devours madra? It could start feeding on the spirit of anyone you touch.”

To Lindon, that sounded incredible.

“If it worked like the Ancestor's Spear, my Paths would be much easier to advance,” he said delicately, keeping his enthusiasm from his voice. If she knew how excited he was, she would try and talk him out of it. “Reaching the peak of Truegold would be no problem. I could even split my core again, and drain yet a third Path.” He nodded to the color-tinged glass arm, which was tapping its pointed fingertips on the tray like a woodpecker. “We have such a fine sample here. Why not try an experiment?”

He was trying to appeal to her curiosity as a Soulsmith, but she shook her head. “The Ancestor's Spear worked thanks to its script as much as its binding. Without those scripts, we can't be certain what it will do, and testing out the binding might destroy it, and render our tests useless. Besides, we need more hunger madra if we're to build it into your arm without collapsing it, and the spear has dissolved already. There's no—”

She was cut off when the steel-banded wooden door creaked open, revealing Eithan grinning and holding up a pure white knife.

Gesha pinched the bridge of her nose and let out a heavy breath, but soon composed herself and bowed. “Underlord.”

Lindon started to greet Eithan, but no words came out. The man's easy smile stabbed him.

“It seems you need further materials,” Eithan said cheerily, striding into the room. “I just so happen to have some to spare.”

He tossed her the spearhead, but instead of reaching out her hands to catch it, she jerked them back as though afraid. Lines of purple madra lashed out from her, lashing the blade to the ceiling and slowly lowering it down to her eye level like a spider on a line. Clearly, she didn't want to risk having her madra drained away, even if Eithan had been holding it in his bare hands with no apparent problems.

When she saw that her technique had remained intact despite its contact with the weapon, she gingerly plucked it out of the web with two fingers.

The spearhead was about a foot long and a hand wide. She studied it for a moment, and then two long purple spider's legs reached up from beneath her. Her drudge.

The two legs snatched the blade from her, juggling and spinning it between them for a good two minutes before the spider-construct let out a hiss.

Finally, she gave a single nod. “There's enough here to...try. I'll have to break this binding down to its materials to avoid a conflict, and once we have the fragments of this weapon, we can begin merging them with the Shifting Skies limb.” She jabbed a finger at Eithan. “I cannot promise anything, you understand. And you'll be giving up this weapon.”

“I expect to gain a better one,” Eithan said, his gaze on Lindon.

Fisher Gesha gathered up her tray, returning the limbs to her script-sealed box before the madra decayed any further. “I'll need my assistant for this,” she said. “I don't want to muddy this with more aspects than we need, so Fisher madra is not the most suitable. We'll need his pure madra to link it all together, and perhaps Blackflame to break down the extra binding.”

Lindon was eager to begin working, and he started to struggle out of the bed—no matter how weak he felt, this was something to do. Something to focus on besides what he had lost.

Eithan held up a hand, stopping him.

“I apologize, Fisher, but I need a word with him for a moment. Do what you can on your own, for now, and I'll send him to you when he's ready.”

Gesha hesitated, looking between Lindon and the Underlord.

“Don't you give him any trouble, now,” she said firmly, and to Lindon's shock, she wasn't speaking to him. She was looking straight at Eithan.

He raised his eyebrows. “I'll try my best not to.”

“He ought to get some time to rest after a day like this. You hear me? He's not a construct. Even if he were, you couldn't push him every day like you do without ever giving him time to rest.”

“I don't intend to—” Eithan began, but Fisher Gesha interrupted him.

“A whole year I've been here,” she said. Her spider-legs carried her forward, and she actually rapped her knuckles against the Underlord's chest. “A whole year of my life I've given up, and I don't have many of those left, do I? Well, I've always wanted to see the Empire, and so I have. I've tried foods I'd never heard of before, I've worked on Remnants I couldn't imagine, I've met strange people and seen strange sights.”