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Reba Kotter remembered the stories from her youth.

Wicked spirits paraded the earth to torment the innocent, violating the contract given during their creation—to uphold the sanctity of mankind. To feed them, guide them, and nurture them where the gods could not.

There was a time when spirits were praised as the gods were. There was a time when a spirit would provide a divine harvest or much-needed rain. Archads would pray for their tidings, and they worked in harmony, striving towards the same goal as all beings: Life before death.

But all things were meant to fade, and Piamon, the god of chaos and shadows, always had his way.

When the Mother’s breath faded from the land, the spirits betrayed her. Her most loyal servants sealed her remains away, keeping her from the Neri, the space where all archaea returned. Then they sought to destroy her most prized possession—her children. Thus, the archads, mankind, were left to face their wraths.

Some said the spirits had become jealous of the gods’ affection toward the archads. Others claimed they were tempted by power, seeking to become gods themselves. Then some thought them to be corrupted by the shadows of Piamon. But to Reba, the war between man and spirits could have only been sparked by one thing and one thing only—greed.

She stood alone in an empty stack on the 10th day of the Spatial Moon. The stacks were brittle, full of those with so little they were forced to steal the air above another's home. This one was three stories high in a part of the Scrappers’ District most deemed unworthy of a lone young girl.

The stack was empty of any furniture or even a place to cook a meal. The one object in the room stared at her with the haunted, still face of a young girl. She was barely of any age to be left alone. As old as Reba was back then. Her face was a mix of emptiness and terror, her hands outstretched, clamoring for a coin—a coin she believed would save her life. And she cried when it was taken away from her.

Whoever was the thief likely didn’t care that the girl would be immediately encased in a golden prison because of their greed. They left her stuck here in a hot, abandoned stack, on the outskirts of the Scrapper’s District.

No one else seemed to care. Every day, people walked by the stack, passing her by as she cried golden tears frozen in time. They all knew she was there and did nothing.

Because she was a wrath.

Wraths were only made of wicked people, the stories said. So if the spirits claimed them, the archads wouldn’t.

But the stories were just stories to Reba Kotter. Bad things didn’t only happen to bad people. They happened because the spirits were evil. And she needed no more proof than the crying, statued Selplian girl in front of her.

Now she had seen fourteen passes of the moon, more of a woman in body, yet still somehow a child to everyone but herself. She had strained eyes that had grown smaller and grayer. Her face was boyish, firm, and proud, capped off with the metal of Selplian custom designing her eyebrow, nose, ear, and hair. She had three piercings signifying her ability to confidently conjure three types of metal: iron, steel, and silver. She was a conjurer, a Selplian, and a builder, never thinking to deny it by her looks.

The wrath was a conjurer, too. It didn’t matter what her looks were. Spirits only turned those of the same archaea. Darkness surrounded the statue, but the gold still glimmered from the cracks of smoky sunlight leaking in.

“Is she even still alive?” Reba muttered. All signs pointed to no. The body was completely solid and stark cold. “I have to try anyway.”

She grabbed a special gold sina coin she kept hidden in her boot just for this moment. Hesitating, she grabbed the statue’s outstretched hand, letting the gold connect with gold.

There was a spark.

Then the gold flashed. The entire body of the wrath began shining as if a sun had been placed right above its head. Reba had to shield her eyes from the brightness.

Then the gold encasing the wrath began to melt. Solid turned to liquid, running down the length of the little girl’s body, only to disappear once it hit the empty ground of the stack.

“Please don’t take it! It’s all I have!” the girl screamed once her mouth and body were set free.

The tears continued to roll down her cheeks, now unburdened by their golden hold. But she clearly didn’t expect to see Reba’s stout face standing in front of her. And she most definitely didn’t expect to find a gold piece resting in her hand.

In fact, the girl jumped back in fear as if she had been summoned to this stack from some faraway place. But even as she cowered, she clutched the coin to her chest tightly enough to merge it with her sternum.

“Everything’s alright,” Reba held her hands up in peace. “You’re good now.”

She regarded Reba skeptically, as though she expected her to steal the coin she had just been given.

Reba sighed. “What day is it today?”

The question confused the wrath. “Ummm… I think… we’re under the Frost Moon. I don’t know the day,” the girl responded in her tiny voice.

“Hmmm…” Reba paused. “That was two moon shades ago. We’re under the Spatial Moon now.”

The girl’s face dropped in the expected shock. That’s over fifty days suddenly unaccounted for, and she was going to need a minute to realize it. Reba purposefully avoided the girl's widened eyes and sat down to conjure while she waited for her to get over it. The silver sphere came, drawing the wrath’s attention.

“Umm… what are you doing?” she asked.

“Building a new staff. That gold coin you’re holding, the man I got it from wasn’t very friendly about it.” Reba flattened the conjured steel and rolled it into a sizable staff, trying to make sure to get the weight balance even.

The wrath awkwardly twiddled her fingers. “Do you… have any more?”

Reba stopped her build suddenly and crossed her arms. “You’re the wrath of the greed spirit, aren’t you?”

The girl took a step back. “I don’t know.”

“So the spirit that got you, was it creepy? Was it big? Was it a scary monster that hides in the shadows and eats your bones when you sleep?”

The wrath’s eyes widened. “I don’t… think so.”

“Well, what did it look like?”

“I don’t know. It was dark, and it was so fast… I couldn’t—”

“Where?” Reba cut the girl short.

“I was… I was by the big boats, in the big square building with the red roof. I was just playing around, promise. And there was this big ol’ treasure chest. It had so many things. Shiny things. I was only gonna take one and then… Well, I took more than one. But I didn’t like stealing it… I just kinda did.”

“Mhmm. So you took treasure from the chest, and then the spirit jumped out at you, turning you into a wrath. That all?”

“Then I came back here, and some mean boys took the only coin I got away with. And I guess two moons passed. And no one came for me…”

“Great,” Reba’s eyes shrank and flattened into what her family dubbed her sloth face. It came whenever she lost interest or was just lacking sleep, which she always was. “Now don’t go taking from any more treasure chests, and always keep at least one piece of gold in your shoe where no one knows you have one. If I find you like that again, I’ll have to pierce a coin through your head. Or if you like, I can do it now, so you don’t lose it again.”

“No thanks.” The girl took a step back.

“I get it. That would look stupid… Anyhow, I’ve got five extra gold pieces on me.” With a sleight-of-hand trick, Reba made the gold appear in her hand. “I s’pose I can let you have a couple, just to keep you on the safe side. Wouldn’t want you turning into a statue again. No telling what could happen. Someone could come and scoop out your eyes and use them to buy some basilisk whale meat.” She paused. “On second thought, I’ve never had basil meat even though we live right next to an ocean... You don’t need both eyes, do you?”

Looking down, Reba saw the girl was ripe with terror. She had gotten her point across—your life depends on these coins. Don’t ever let anyone take them from you again.

But was there such a thing as making a point too well?

Because as soon as Reba let her guard down, the girl snatched the other five sina from her hand and took off out of the stack. “Wait! Stop, you ungrateful rat!” Reba yelled, chasing her outside.

It was too late. The girl’s footsteps had disappeared down the street, and she ducked behind a corner before Reba could see where she went.

Reba chewed her tongue. “I at least wanted to keep one. Now I have to eat stupid potatoes again.”

She kicked a rock in frustration, only for it to connect at the worst possible angle on her pinky toe. The sound of her whimper was loud enough to alert the executioner on the prowl. Reba felt the presence of a demon breathing down her neck. It was as if the world stopped, and a single glare from the demon turned her to stone. And she smiled, not in happiness but as if this would be her last smile on this planet.

“Found you,” the demon said.

 “Hey there, Dad. They must’ve let you out the factory early, huh? Well, in that case, I say we just go home and enjoy the rest of the—gaaack.” She croaked as her father’s meaty hands snatched her by the collar, dragging her back to the dungeons.

Before Reba knew it, she was placed in a dark, old room in the middle of a smelly, old factory filled with sweaty, old conjurers. She stared at him as he locked his beady bear eyes back on her. The two metal studs on his cheeks always made him look disturbed when he frowned.

“Don’t neglect your job,” he said stoically.

“I was just taking a well-deserved break. I was going to come back.”

“You were only here for ten minutes.”

“Eh… In this place, it could be ten minutes or ten weeks for all I know. Someone should conjure a window or something.” She averted her eyes, looking for someone else to blame.

Her father sighed. His hair was a bit greyer, but the skin on his face tightened over the years. “And what were you doing that was so important that you had to leave work?”

“Just taking a stroll...” She shrugged. “Enjoying sunshine outside this dungeon.”

They exchanged aggravated stares.

“Listen…” He palmed the top of her head in a half-hearted attempt to assert dominance, which only made Reba narrow her eyes even more. “It isn’t pretty in here, no. But your two little siblings count on the sina we make to keep fed and the tax collectors from blowing down our home. You keep running off, and they won’t let you back in here. And that’s our family’s income sliced in half. Do you want us to starve?”

Reba flexed her brow, having heard this speech before. “Food is better than no food,” she said dryly.

“Right. And it’s a builder’s dream to be able to conjure all day, every day, perfect their craft, and get paid for it. This is what we live for. One day, you might be making the best anchor chains known to mankind. Then all this time won’t feel so bad.”

“I get it. You want me to just do what builders do. Working for scraps. Spending the rest of my days making chain after chain after chain…“   She picked up the half-made string of chain she had left before her excursion. She placed it on the table and made her father watch her slowly conjure the next link. “…after chain.”

He groaned but eventually went back to his own post, never fully taking his eyes off her. Reba looked around at what builders “live for.” There were spiderwebs in the corners, and weaver ant trees with their twigs stuck out of the floorboards like iron vines. The place smelled, and it really did have no windows.

It was a steel factory dedicated to the capital’s ports, meaning most of what was conjured here would end up on a boat, either as cargo or as part of the vessel itself. Reba’s post was making chains for anchors.

It was her father’s special request. “Let her build the chains and only the chains.” He had decided that it was Reba’s true calling.

The work was slow and tedious.

She hated every part of it.

Summoning her sphere, she would strip the archaea down to the size of her finger, stretch it into a thick oval, poke out the centers, and connect it to the previous link. The metal was small and compact enough that even a child could forge a good link in less than a minute.

The others in the factory were forging entire anchors or crafting boat frames. A few were making thin plates for rowboats or locks for chests and doors. And yet, Reba was stationed in a lonely corner, a few yards from her father’s watchful eye, crafting nothing but chain links.

She was on the twenty-fourth link of a forty-link chain, barely paying attention as she wove the metal through itself. She moved her fingers back and forth,

back and forth,

back and forth.

She was still irritated about the greed wrath taking off with her not-so-hard-earned gold coins. But she tried to make it old news. The bigger story was the spirit, hiding away at the docks. It had already wrathed one girl, taking her life and mincing it into pieces. Reba’s gold coin was only a temporary fix. Wraths are forever. That girl would have to live the rest of her life hiding what she is, however long that would be.

The spirit had to be dealt with.

But Selplians are builders, they said. They can’t fight, they said. But all citizens must fight, they said.

“That’s forty links and one completed chain out of however many boats there are in the world. Probably fifty, right? There can’t be that many boats.”

She groaned and let her daydreams distract her from the idea that she would be stuck here forever. “Maybe a small builder with a big imagination can build their own special hands that can do anything they ask them to…” Currently, her imagination took her somewhere far away, out beyond the charmed walls… fighting spirits.