Smithiner had lived in the Town for his entire life. He and a small shoal of his brothers and sisters came to Town as egg spore on a travellers caravan. Dropped off to make their way in the world by some unknown pack of parents.

They hatched new and ready and eager to find their place in a world full of potential. They followed around and sought to find a place with all the bustling people and things around them. The people of the Town, field workers all were pleased by most of them. Called them cute and kept them around. Stumbled through finding out the proper care and feeding of the infants that Smithiner would a great time later learn are called clerks.

Over time they would dwindle though that first generation, there were many a hard lesson to learn. Like the importance of staying in town.

It was the only place a Clerk could survive. The fields were too sparse and wide and their bodies too clumsy and expensive to feed to work out there. When he was young he had tried a few times, as every larval child might, to seek a frontier of service to claim and make his own.

Thinking himself invincible or at least expendable he had tried to work a field. He’d nearly starved to death and asphyxiated both.

To start he could not relax his body the right way so he did not burn so hot during drifting between town and field. So he had to bulk up on stocks and make several poorly thought out attempts trying to learn how to not constantly use precious oxygen.

Then when he finally got to the field and tried to work with his too short arms, his gluttonous hunger for oxygen and water and his feeble musculature balance?

It was the work of ten field hands to keep him alive and bring him back to town from that ill thought out adventure. But it had left an impression on him. He could not do the most important work needed for his community. He was not suited to it no matter how hard he pushed himself.

So he had stayed back in town and worked to try and help his community somehow. He and the decimated population of his sibling clerks. He’d tried to do construction but again his arms were short and had poor leverage, his body was too soft and his hungers were too great. He needed so much more simple oxygen and food than anyone else. He suffered dizziness and hunger pains trying to keep up with what even the frailest and most sickly child of the field workers all around him could manage.

He again fell into a charity case of others as the debt mounted. He eventually ended up as the assistant of a smithery. And for a time it was wonderful, his new work mates fashioned tools to let his arms be longer, he took to it with all the zeal and gumption he could muster. But again the curse of his body asserted itself. He was not skilled and his body expensive. His friends and colleagues seemed to ignore it but he could feel the balance so badly shifted.

He cost more than twelve times one of the field workers to do the same work as them.

Even though their kindness and charity continued he simply could not stand the way he was always backsliding. The balance was awful, they were throwing away so much of their precious time and work for the fields. Work that could have been going to the great tithe of the Town. Wasting it on him, simple little useless Smithiner.

He could not stand that, he had to pull his own way like so many of the people and friends all around him. Like so many of the workers that went to tend the great Solar Canopy and did not return as anything but frozen corpses or ash.

He had to justify the waste of his own existence.

He started out by finding ways to save his colleagues time. It began at the smithy, he would stock up and organize the metal in one easy place for everyone, worked metal, raw fruit from the fields, freshly stocked symbiotes for those that needed them. He’d just organize them and hold them in readiness for others.

Then one shift moving through a pair made an agreement about trading an extra symbiote one had for some spare fruit they had on hand. They made the promise and Smithiner saw it. So naturally he promised to remember the deal and make the necessary exchanges.

That worked incredibly well, the field workers bartered of course, they knew how to trade and haggle with one another and did so with traders and travelers. But their memories were a bit flighty. Their grasp of sums a bit dodgy, and their education mostly concerned with how to follow the instructions of scriptures and codices that had been passed down from the Town’s founding.

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

So Smithiner took up the role of remembering their deals and helping to make their lives easier. When he did that he found that the sense of balance was better. Yes he eat up the air and food of a dozen field workers. But as he counted it up he realized he was starting to save half of that in time and effort and worry and waste.

And it went from there, Smithiner would discuss with clever tinkers that were well practiced in metal and have them make tools to help him along. He would check with scripture archivists to find useful treasures and secrets. He even sought out and began haggling with the traders that came through.

And as he took these things and put them into action he found more and more ways to save his fellow workers all that much more of their precious time. He made the scrip in vouchers of his seal of accounting and ribbons of exchange.

He began renting great silos and store houses for the bulks of goods he moved paying in promises that eased the strain of the owners. He worked with the architects and archivists to interpret the scripture for the town’s layout to help reposition and utilize its secret wisdom.

Smithiner worked the worth of his own pay in food and air and from his example his surviving brothers and sisters found their place in Town as well. He sired children, taught them the ways he and his shoal mates had learned in how to live and serve best in town. And swelled and grew prideful and happy. He bought tinctures and poultices from traders to shore up where his swollen body failed or rebelled from his desire to serve. Yet another way in which the field workers were so much better suited then he.

Ashley had been young when he was, and yet she had never faltered like he did. Her injuries had never accumulated the same way and she never seemed frailer or less capable then the first time he had seen her fully adult. She forgot him some times when she was on a long shift far away and he had to introduce himself all over again. But beyond the memory the field workers seemed to last until something horrible befell them. And so long after those difficult times as a young one he was pleased he could help so many that the balance of the great worth weighed him like the lives of thousands of field workers in the time he saved them.

But now with the mist enveloping all his friends and for lack of any stronger words family. Now when he sees them freezing and dying in panic and terror along the avenues that should have been full of life and peace. Smithiner did not feel he was anything but a lump of wasteful meat again.

His worth, the contribution he could make to the work of the Town was nothing if there was no one for him to help. And although he had seen many generations of the poor field workers never return from the hard labor tending the solar fields or the occasional silo accident or explosive battery failure he felt a stinging fear at the loss of them here and now.

Friends never became easier to lose.

If anything Smithiner was convinced by his relatively long life that loss just got worse the more it happened.

So he was bundling up three of his fellow citizens of Town. the precious life blood of his world. It was only fitting that he protect and nurture and pay them back for all that they had given him when he was wasteful and useless.

He had taken Ashley whose symbiote had starved to death and run her into his own blood and breath to sustain her.

And here now that he could feel the vibration of the air in a way he had never so clearly comprehended until now. The strange funny sense like light emitting among solid objects now given voice and clarity at last.

He would do everything to keep them safe.

Even though he did not know what he could possibly do against the presence of something so vast and terrible in this frozen mist.

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