Karangbraja always smelled like rain that hadn't fallen yet.
Young Karel breathed in that scent every morning—cold earth, metal dust, and something older than both, something clinging to the workshop walls like smoke reluctant to leave. His father's workshop stood on the slope, a wooden-and-stone building larger inside than it appeared from outside, with shelves crowded with half-finished heirlooms and lanterns that burned without wicks.
"Hold it like this," his father said, his large hand adjusting Karel's fingers around the handle of the small chisel. "Don't grip it. Guide it."
A thin frame of yellow iron lay on their workbench that night, still without lenses, still nameless. His father called it only a "prototype"—a word that sounded far too grand for something so small. Karel didn't know that one day it would become the only inheritance left to him. That night, it was merely cold metal reflecting the firelight.
"Why does it have to be this combong stone, Dad? The one on that shelf is bigger."
"Bigger doesn't always mean stronger, son." His father lifted a shard of black amethyst into the light and turned it slowly. Behind it, for a fraction of a second, Karel saw something move—a shadow that wasn't entirely a shadow. "This little one held an entire life before it became stone. It already knows how to see."
Karel frowned. "See what?"
His father fell silent for a moment—a silence Karel would only understand years later as the hesitation of a father unsure whether his son was old enough for certain truths. But that night, he chose honesty.
"This world has two layers, Karel. What you see now—wood, fire, me, you—that's one layer. In the other, there are beings who never asked to be born here. They come from a place people call the Hollow Realm. Empty. Without a name, without form, without weight." He placed the stone in his palm, as if weighing something far heavier than its size. "When a dukun calls them here, they're forced to take shape. Forced to feel gravity they've never known. Imagine it, son—a lifetime spent floating, then suddenly having to bear the weight of your own body."
"Does it hurt?"
"It always hurts." His father's voice dropped, almost like a confession. "And the people who bind them—the dukuns who work for the wealthy—they don't care about that pain. They only care about who can be forced into becoming the cheapest weapon." He looked Karel straight in the eye, something he rarely did. "Remember this well. Binding an entity without respecting it isn't strength. It's just theft wrapped in a spell."
Karel didn't fully understand that night. He only nodded, because nodding was the language he knew best at that age, and stored his father's words somewhere he wouldn't open for years—when those words changed from advice into the only map he had left.
The following nights passed as usual, as if the world were deliberately giving them a little more time before everything changed. His father taught him how to sharpen a chisel without cutting his fingers, how to tell genuine yellow iron from a cheap imitation by its smell when heated, how to listen—truly listen—before deciding whether an heirloom was finished. Karel remembered sitting for hours in the corner of the workshop, watching his father's hands move with a certainty that was never hurried, as if he had envisioned every stroke a hundred times before making it.
He also remembered one other thing whose meaning he would only understand years later: his father never received visitors at night. Never. Until recently.
Three times in the past month, black cars had stopped on the path leading to the workshop, and each time, his father had ordered Karel to go to bed early—a command that was beginning to sound less like habit and more like tightly restrained vigilance. Young Karel only thought it strange, not threatening. Children rarely know the difference until it's too late.
The knock on the door came after midnight.
It wasn't an ordinary knock. Too quiet for a visitor, too measured to be coincidence—three times, a pause, then two more. Half-asleep in the bed tucked into the workshop's corner, Karel felt his father's body tense before the sound had even finished.
"Karel." His father's voice was low and quick, without the panic that might have made his son panic too. "Get under the workbench. Don't come out until I call you. Whatever you hear."
"Dad—"
"Now."