"Board says no."

The funding proposal landed on Skrit’s workbench hard enough to scatter cinnaite dust across his measurement scales. Three months of documentation. Revised twice. Diagrams hand-drawn because the Alchemists’ Hall wouldn’t lend him a proper draftsman.

Nok held up both palms — the universal Kobold gesture for I delivered the message, don’t bite me. Behind him, Tivva was already packing her tools into a leather roll, her tail flicking against the doorframe.

"Forty-seventh time," Nok added, because Nok counted things.

"Forty-sixth," Skrit said. "The spring submission was a continuation, not a new proposal."

"That’s what you told the board." Nok leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed. He was thirty-two. Young enough to still have smooth scales on his knuckles. "Fennick called it — what was the word?"

"Redundant," Tivva said, without looking up. She buckled her tool roll. "He called it redundant, obsessive, and — the new one — a persistent misallocation of institutional resources by a researcher whose empirical record does not justify continued material access."

Skrit picked up the proposal. The rejection stamp was crooked. Even the clerk hadn’t bothered to press it straight.

"Fennick’s coming down, by the way." Tivva slung the tool roll over her shoulder. "End-of-quarter safety inspection. He’ll want the sulfur stores logged."

"They’re logged."

"He’ll want them logged again." She paused at the door. Not quite looking at him. "Skrit, the sulfur requisition alone — you’ve used more this quarter than the entire mineral wing. If he pulls your bench access—"

"He won’t."

"He might."

"Then I’ll work in my room."

Tivva looked at him for a long moment. Something between pity and exasperation. Same look his mother used to give his father before the old Kobold went into the caves for the ninth time to test whether copper salts could purify marsh water. They could. He’d also lost two fingers finding out.

"Goodnight, Skrit."

"Goodnight, Tivva."

The door closed. The workshop settled into its permanent state: sulfur-stink, candle flicker, silence. Three rooms deep in the administrative quarter’s basement. Walls thick enough that explosions — small ones — didn’t carry.

Skrit knew this from experience.

He was fifty-one years old.

For most Kobolds, fifty-one meant grandchildren, a seat near the kiln, and the slow dignified process of telling younger Kobolds how much harder things were in the cave-warrens. Skrit had none of these. He had a workbench, a cracked window, and forty-six failed mixtures annotated in a journal whose spine he’d re-bound three times.

His left ear hummed. It had hummed since the sulfuric flash incident three years ago — a persistent low drone, like a wasp trapped behind the eardrum. The Alchemists’ Hall healers had said it might improve. It hadn’t. His third finger on the right hand was bent sideways at the second knuckle, mangled by a crucible that had cracked under heat during Mixture 22-B. It didn’t straighten anymore.

Progress paid in flesh, his grandmother would have said. She’d said it about his father’s fingers. She’d said it about her own missing eye. The Vekkol family contributed to knowledge the old way — one piece of themselves at a time.

Skrit set the rejected proposal aside and opened his journal.

Mixture 47-C.

Three ceramic bowls sat on the bench. Small enough to fit in a Kobold’s palm, which was smaller than most people’s palms, which meant the quantities were modest. Modest was the distance between a discovery and a funeral.

Bowl one: sulfur. Fine-ground, two days of mortar work. His shoulder still ached from it.

Bowl two: softwood charcoal. Not forge-grade — willow bark, burned slow, crushed finer than sand. He’d told the requisition office it was for stomach poultices. Nobody questioned a Kobold making poultices.

Bowl three: cinnaite dust.

The Korthane traders had brought cinnaite into the markets fifteen years ago. The metallurgists called it a stonesteel catalyst. The Alchemists’ Hall called it a curiosity. Skrit called it the most reactive mineral compound he’d ever worked with — and he’d worked with everything Merrithane’s Treatise on Volatile Compounds had catalogued, plus eleven substances Merrithane had never seen.

Cinnaite, when heated past its crystalline threshold, released an invisible gas that turned litmus dark and made iron filings spark near open flame. During Mixture 31-A, cinnaite vapor and sulfur in a sealed flask had generated enough pressure to crack the glass.

A crack, not an explosion. A hairline fracture, a whistle, a smell like burnt metal.

But it was directed pressure. Contained. Measurable.

Sixteen mixtures later, Skrit believed he understood the ratio.

He measured with copper spoons. Three measures sulfur. Two measures charcoal. One measure cinnaite dust, pre-heated over the candle for thirty seconds.

The mixing bowl was double-walled ceramic packed with damp sand — his own design, after 22-B had melted through wood. He stirred with bone. Never metal. Metal near volatiles was how Fennick’s predecessor had lost his eyebrows and his position, in that order.

The mixture settled into the bowl like damp ash. Almost black, but with a faint amber sheen where the cinnaite caught the light.

Skrit tilted his head — good ear toward the bowl, habit — and listened.

Silence. No hiss. No off-gassing. Stable.

He noted this in the journal, then positioned the slate screen. It came up to his chin, which — at four feet two — meant it covered roughly half of him. He’d calculated the coverage once. Decided it was sufficient. Decided again, later, that sufficient was doing a lot of work in that sentence.

He lit the brass ignition rod. A treated wick on a thin pipe — arm’s length delivery of controlled flame.

His arm’s length was not very long.

He lined up the rod. Steadied his grip. The mangled finger throbbed.

He touched flame to the surface of Mixture 47-C.

The bowl stopped existing.

The bowl didn’t shatter — that implied fragments following predictable arcs. The bowl detonated. Ceramic became shrapnel. A pressure wave — real, physical, the thing Skrit had been chasing for three years — hit the slate screen, hit the ceiling, hit the far wall, hit him.

Sixty-two pounds of Kobold left the ground.

He struck the supply shelf with his back. Glass rained. Something wet hit his shoulder — an acid compound, non-reactive, cold on his scales. Something sharp opened the skin below his left eye. The candle disappeared. The ignition rod disappeared. The workshop went white with smoke, then grey, then dark.

His ears screamed.

His right ear screamed — a high crystalline tone, the frequency of struck glass. His left ear was silent. The hum was gone. The last of whatever the sulfuric flash had left him was gone.

The workbench was on fire.

Skrit moved before thought caught up. Sand bucket — two paces from the bench, always, rule one, Merrithane, Chapter three. He threw the contents. Smoke billowed. Second bucket. The fire died.

He stood in the dark.

His lungs burned. The smoke tasted like iron and old eggs and something else — sharp and clean, the way air smelled after lightning hit the Ironvein Corridor road during storm season. New. That taste was new.

Footsteps in the corridor. Fast.

The door banged open. Senior Alchemist Fennick stood in the frame, lantern raised. An Elf — which meant tall, thin, and currently filling the doorway the way a closed gate fills a road. His eyes swept the workshop: the smoke, the shattered glass, the soot-blackened wall, the four-foot-two Kobold standing in the wreckage with a sand bucket in one hand and blood running down his face.

Fennick’s expression did not change. It rarely did. In twelve years, Skrit had seen it move twice — once during a budget review, once when a mouse had fallen into Fennick’s tea.

"Vekkol."

"Senior."

"Was this your—" Brief pause. His eyes landed on the ceramic fragments embedded in the far wall. "—mixture."

"Yes, Senior."

Fennick looked at the wall. At the soot pattern — radial lines emanating from the bench, a perfect pressure signature printed on stone. He looked at it the way a man looks at a stain on someone else’s tablecloth: mild distaste, no curiosity.

"Clean this up before morning. The safety inspection is at first bell." He lowered the lantern. "And log your sulfur. You’re two quarters behind."

He left. The lantern light retreated down the corridor. The door didn’t close all the way — the frame had warped from the pressure wave. It hung at an angle, letting in a blade of hallway light.

Skrit stood in the wreckage.

His right ear was still ringing. The smoke was thinning, drifting toward the cracked window. Glass crunched under his feet as he walked to the far wall.

The blast pattern.

A circle of black soot and embedded ceramic particulate, radiating outward from where the bowl had sat. A pressure fracture, not a scorch mark — scorch marks were messy, uneven, shaped by whatever burned closest. This was radial. Symmetrical. A pressure signature with clean geometry.

Skrit raised his hand — the one that still worked properly — and touched the wall. The stone was warm.

He turned. Looked at the floor beside the bench leg. A thin crescent of unburned mixture sat in the shadow, protected from the flame by the angle. Maybe two grams. Dark grit with amber flecks.

He crouched. His knees popped. He picked up the journal from where it had landed beneath the shelf. The spine was cracked, the pages bent, the ink smudged with soot.

He found today’s entry. The charcoal pencil had rolled under the overturned stool. He reached for it with his right hand — the mangled finger seizing, because a ceramic fragment had reopened the old break — and he gripped it anyway.

He wrote by the light of the supply shelf, which was still smouldering.

Mixture 47-C. Ignition test.

Combustion speed: instantaneous. Smoke: white-grey, dense. Blast radius: embedded ceramic at 3 meters. Radial pressure signature on stone wall. Personal displacement: full-body, ~1.5 meters. 𝑓𝘳𝘦𝑒𝑤𝑒𝘣𝘯ℴ𝘷𝘦𝓁.𝑐𝑜𝑚

He paused. Blood dripped from his cheek onto the page. The left ear heard nothing. The right ear’s ringing was fading into the distant clang of the cathedral night bell. Two bells. Middle watch. Ashenveil slept above him.

He wrote the last line slowly. Each letter pressed into the page hard enough to dent the sheet beneath it.

It worked. I need more cinnaite.