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TheLord Tanner. I beamed. What an incredible sight! And what extraordinary invention, to throw one’s voice so widely.

I was not alone in my wonder. A girl tugged my sleeve unconsciously and stood on tiptoe to see him better, and another cupped her hands to her mouth. But there were those who were not so taken. One mean-faced boy stood behind my right shoulder and spat on the ground right between his feet.

I, however, knew more than he did about the governing leader of Belavere Trench. I had studied his art. Lord Tanner had crafted marble statues around the city that depicted weeping angels and dying saints. He’d sculpted a granite bridge that scaled over three hundred feet across the Gyser River. He’d created these things with his mind alone. He was a stone Mason of the highest order, and the sight of him turned my skin to gooseflesh.

“To see so many of you is to feel immensely proud of this nation, and its people. People from all walks of life, coming together to celebrate community, prosperity, and…” But whatever else it was we were celebrating was impossible to hear. From behind, a low voice laughed derisively, then muttered, “Fuck off.”

It was the spitter. Of course it was. A boy with dirty brown hair and an extremely clean shirt, standing too close for my liking. He smiled like hedidn’t mean it, stood still like he wanted to bolt, stared at the man with the microphone like he’d knock the tiny teeth from his mouth, given the chance. The boy shook his head, shifted his weight to his left leg, then looked me right in the eye.

I was taken aback by their color. Pale blue. Crystal clear. Completely at odds with the rest of him—cracked fingernails, wrinkled trousers, the sole of his shoes gently peeled at the toes. A suntan that circled the bottom of his neck, a starched button-down shirt that made him fidget. He adjusted the collar and the sleeves like he’d found himself in someone else’s clothes by mistake. He was too skinny for his height. The belt around his trousers looped over itself.

I wrinkled my nose, mouthed the wordpig,and turned back to Lord Tanner. Praise God.

“… and the Almighty sent to us His greatest creation, His daughter, who was not deity nor goddess, but a human who walked on this land as one of us.”

Idia, I thought, staring wide-eyed at the book Lord Tanner now held: the Book of Belavere. He read from it in a voice adults use when they believe what they’re saying is gravely important. I straightened my shoulders, determined to remember every word.

“Through Idia, the Lord spoke, and He told us this land was a Holy place. He bade us protect it, and when others came to sully its sacred ground, Idia led our armies, and she bled when we bled… and her blood was ink.” And here, Tanner held high a familiar stone.

It could have been a lump of coal if it weren’t for the sun that shone through it, filling it all the way up with light, revealing its true color. Blue like the deepest part of the sea, like slow-falling night.

“Terranium,” Tanner stated. “The most important ore our land bestows. For only within this particular stone do we find the crystallized blood of Idia, mined from the land, and given back to its people, even thousands of years after She was returned to God.”

Murmurs stirred. I shifted restlessly.

“Through idium, we are made better. We become the person God intended. Through Idia’s teachings, we know that creation comes from the body and the mind. Craftsman and creator. Both are equally vital in the turning of the world, for who will shift the Earth on its axis, once the idea has been conceived?” Then, Tanner’s free hand lifted.

Awe stilled the crowd. The children fell still and silent and reverent, for who could deny the miracle before them? I gaped at Lord Tanner’s empty hand, the way his fingers flexed and relaxed. Hovering above it was a small but perfect sphere of granite stone, spinning in the air by Tanner’s will alone.

Tanner watched the stone intently, just as we children did, and it began to change shape. Pieces broke away, crumbling to dust at his feet. I heard the minute cracks as it was carved into something new by no visible force. It became the model of a church, then a hammer, a clock tower. When he needed it, the discarded fragments at Tanner’s feet rose again to rejoin his sculpture, and soon the stone crumpled inward, and became a solitary planet once more, smooth and unblemished, rotating in the hand of its sun.

I had never seen a thing so beautiful.

Amid the exclamations, Tanner replaced his stone with a vial of dark liquid. Idium. The purported blood of Idia, siphoned from stone.

“Today, children, you have the very great privilege of learning what God plans for you, whether it be pursuits of the mind, or that of the limbs. When you welcome Idia into your bloodstream today, you become an important part of Belavere’s body, and you will begin to aid in its many necessary functions.” His tiny teeth flashed in a smile. “So welcome once more to all of you. Today, you have arrived on the threshold of adulthood, and you will leave knowing your purpose.”

There was short applause, and I led it. It was tempered with nervous anticipation for that gleaming vial of inky blood—the precious substance we were all about to consume.

Lord Tanner stepped away from the microphone with a politician’swave and disappeared back into the building, and the crowd broke into a violent, frenzied chatter.

I did not join in the conversation. Emblazoned in my mind was that piece of granite transforming into ideas, again and again, and a smile crept in.

I looked skyward to the highest story of the House, where Tanner’s office likely was. I would wager it was the size of my entire home back in Scurry. Bigger, even. Filled with oil paintings and sculptures and busts and ornately carved furniture from the finest everything, and I longed to be in the presence of it all.

Would the Artisan School be like this? Austere and bright and towering?

The double doors opened out to the courtyard again, and a dark-haired woman with narrow features and heeled shoes approached the microphone and said, “Residents of Belavere City and Baymouth will queue first for siphoning. Five lines at the door, please. No fighting.” And that was that.

While the summoned twelve-year-olds moved forward to queue before those double doors, the rest of us hung back. Some moved to find friends. Some tried to find a place to sit while they waited. I, however, was too filled with absolution to sit. Too evangelized to chat. I simply stood there, beaming from the inside out, filled to the brim with that same light that had impregnated the lump of idium.

I suddenly felt sure, though I couldn’t explain why, that I would be deemed an Artisan this day.

A person destined to the pursuits of the mind—that was me.

Inside the waist of my skirt was the parchment I’d saved, but back in Scurry was the pile I’d discarded, strewn with sketches and landscapes and dried flowers and all my thoughts painted into shapes. I’d always had “natural aptitude.” I was made for bigger places, meant to be surrounded by creation spun from the loom of one’s mind.

I relinquished a smile.