Furrow Inkwhisker's Arc

Chapter 2 of 2

The one full cask sat on the shelf, black and whole. Furrow needed a hundred more like it. The flower that showed the way had died in its pot. To build another cask, Furrow needed the same clay: thick-walled, dense, able to hold ink without cracking. But no such clay lay near the workbench. The soft mud outside curled and split when fired. Furrow knew this now. One cask was not a collection. Ninety-nine were still missing. Furrow scooped a lump of the soft mud and tried anyway. Thick fingers pressed it into a shell. Furrow hollowed it, fired it dry, sealed the seam with pine sap. Then Furrow poured in a thread of ink. The wall drank it. A crack opened along the side. Ink ran out and stained the floor. The mud was wrong. Furrow needed better clay, and the meadow held none. Furrow remembered the flower's roots. When Furrow had dug the plant up, the dirt around the roots had felt different. Heavy. Gray. Smooth as wet stone. Furrow tipped the dead flower from its pot and rubbed the root soil between three fingers. It packed tight and held its shape. This was the clay. The flower had grown in it. So Furrow followed the trail back to the meadow, to the hollow where the flower once stood. Furrow dug. Below the loose topsoil lay a thick gray seam of the same dense clay. Furrow pulled up armload after armload and carried it home against a wide chest. The clay was cold and firm. It did not crumble. Furrow shaped a new cask from the gray clay, fired it, and sealed it. Furrow poured in ink and waited. The wall held. No crack. No leak. The ink sat black and whole. Furrow made a second cask, then a third. Each one held. The gray clay worked. The problem was solved. But as Furrow lined the finished casks along the shelf, a harder truth came clear. Each round cask sat small and narrow. Each held only one batch. To hold the largest collection ever gathered, Furrow would need a hundred of them, then a hundred more. They would crowd every shelf, every corner, the whole floor. There was not enough room, and not enough clay in one seam to build so many. Furrow set down the newest cask and stared. One vessel could not fix this. Furrow needed a single container built to hold thousands of batches at once. A large one. Flat sides packed tight against flat sides, so many casks could fit in the space of one. A shape with straight walls. Six of them, maybe. Furrow pictured it: tall, hard-walled, one narrow mouth at the top, a body that swallowed ten thousand units of ink and never spilled a drop. The gray clay could build it. Furrow had the clay now. The next thing to build was bigger.