Senior Engineer Kalth'ren returned to the workshop three days after Misaki had submitted his revised bridge design, and the expression on her four-hundred-year-old face told him everything he needed to know before she even spoke. She carried his diagrams rolled under one arm, and the way she set them down on the drafting table—with careful precision rather than enthusiasm—suggested bureaucratic rejection rather than engineering approval.
"The Mountain Trade Council reviewed your design," Kalth'ren said without preamble. "They acknowledge the thermal innovation and structural elegance. The embedded mythril heating elements are particularly clever, and the wind-resistance calculations are sound." She paused, and Misaki felt his stomach sink. "However, they've rejected the narrow bridge proposal."
"On what grounds?" Misaki asked, though he could already guess.
"Commercial viability. A bridge one and a half meters wide serves pedestrians beautifully, but Seleun'mhir's economy depends on merchant traffic between the northern and southern valleys. The standard trade cart used throughout the mountain regions measures two meters in width when loaded. Your bridge would force merchants to unload, carry goods across on foot, and reload on the opposite side." Kalth'ren's tone was sympathetic but firm. "That's not infrastructure—that's an expensive pedestrian walkway."
Misaki looked down at his innovative design, at the elegant solution he'd crafted to solve multiple problems simultaneously. The narrow deck that reduced weight and wind resistance. The embedded heating elements that would prevent ice accumulation. The aesthetic beauty of a crossing that connected people to the landscape rather than isolating them from it. All of it rendered impractical by the simple reality of cart dimensions.
"How wide do they want it?" he asked quietly.
"Four meters minimum. Five would be preferred, to allow two carts to pass each other at the midpoint without requiring one to back up to a passing station." Kalth'ren unrolled his rejected design on the table, her experienced hands smoothing the parchment with the care of someone who respected good work even when circumstances prevented its implementation. "I understand your frustration, Haruto. In my three centuries of engineering, I've seen brilliant designs rejected for pragmatic reasons more times than I can count. But infrastructure serves people, and people in Seleun'mhir need to move goods, not just themselves."
The problem crystallized immediately in Misaki's mind. A bridge four to five meters wide would have triple the surface area of his narrow design. That meant triple the heat loss during winter, triple the weight on the support cables, and exponentially increased difficulty maintaining the ice-free surface temperatures his embedded heating system required. The elegant thermal solution he'd developed would become barely functional at that scale.
"The heating elements won't work at that width," Misaki said, running quick calculations in his head. "To maintain surface temperatures above freezing across a five-meter deck in winter conditions, we'd need approximately six thousand kilojoules per hour. That's three times the thermal capacity of my original design. The mythril rods would need to be prohibitively thick, or we'd need to triple the number of heating stations, which would require furnace infrastructure at intervals along the bridge length rather than just at the anchor points."
Kalth'ren nodded slowly, acknowledging the engineering challenge. "Yes. Which is why the Trade Council has accepted that the bridge will likely close during the worst winter months, just as the old bridge did. They want a crossing that serves merchant traffic during viable seasons, not a year-round pedestrian path."
The practical defeat of his innovation stung more than Misaki had expected. He'd spent three days developing that design, incorporating principles from Seleun'mhir's vapor heating system, calculating thermal dynamics, solving problems that the mountain kingdom's engineers had apparently accepted as unsolvable for four centuries. And now he was being asked to abandon the solution and build a conventional bridge that would face the same seasonal limitations as its predecessor.
But he was a refugee working on a state-funded project, not an independent contractor with negotiating authority. His role was to execute the engineering requirements given to him, not to redesign infrastructure policy based on personal preferences.
"I'll revise the plans," Misaki said, keeping his voice professionally neutral. "Four-meter deck width, conventional suspension design, built to serve commercial traffic. When do you need the updated specifications?"
"Two days. I'll review them with the council, and assuming approval, we begin construction immediately." Kalth'ren's weathered face showed understanding beneath the professional distance. "For what it's worth, Haruto, your narrow bridge design will go into the Engineering Corps archives as a theoretical achievement. When thermal technology advances sufficiently to make year-round heating viable at commercial scales, your design will be the foundation future engineers build upon. Innovation isn't always immediate. Sometimes it's seeds planted for people who come two hundred years after us."
The perspective helped slightly. In a world where people lived eight hundred years and infrastructure served for centuries, perhaps thinking in generational timeframes rather than immediate implementation was simply how progress worked.
Construction began the following week after Misaki submitted revised plans that the Trade Council approved without modification. The bridge site transformed from pristine mountain landscape into organized industrial chaos as Seleun'mhir laborers—many of them refugees from Ul'varh'mir assigned to public works projects—began the foundational work that would support a crossing designed to last six centuries.
Misaki stood at the northern anchor point watching workers excavate the foundation pit that would house the primary cable anchors. The mountain stone here was harder than anything he'd encountered in M'lod, requiring specialized tools and techniques developed over millennia of mountain construction. Workers used wedges and hammers to split granite along natural fracture lines, then employed lever systems to remove the massive blocks that would be repurposed as foundation material elsewhere.
The foreman supervising the excavation was a man named Serrik, perhaps two hundred fifty years old, who'd spent his entire adult life on mountain infrastructure projects. He explained the process to Misaki and Thel'mor with the patient thoroughness of someone who understood that today's apprentice would be tomorrow's senior engineer.
"We drill sixteen meters into solid granite," Serrik said, gesturing to the expanding pit. "Then we pour concrete mixed from volcanic ash, mountain limestone, and crushed mythril powder. The mythril powder isn't for heating—it's for structural bonding. Creates a concrete matrix that actually becomes harder over centuries rather than degrading like conventional mortar."
Thel'mor was writing furiously in his journal, documenting every detail. The young apprentice understood that he might work on infrastructure projects for the next seven hundred years of his life, and the knowledge gained here would compound across centuries of application.
As the day progressed, Misaki noticed something odd about the light. Ulth'rk—the red sun that dominated Vulcan's sky—hung at a noticeably lower angle than he'd grown accustomed to in M'lod. The star's apparent size looked slightly smaller, its red coloration less intense, and the overall daylight period seemed longer than the familiar cycle he'd internalized during his months in Ul'varh'mir.
"The day cycle is different here," Misaki observed to Thel'mor during their afternoon break.
The apprentice nodded as if this were obvious. "Seleun'mhir sits at higher latitude and higher elevation than the southern lowlands. Ulth'rk's angle changes based on your position relative to Vulcan's equator. Here in the northern mountains, the daylight portion of the cycle extends longer during this season—maybe thirty-two hours of light, only ten hours of darkness. But in winter, it reverses. The night cycle can stretch to twenty-eight hours, with only fourteen hours of daylight."
Misaki filed that information away, his engineer's mind automatically adjusting expectations for worker productivity and scheduling. Longer daylight meant extended work periods were feasible, but it also meant crew fatigue would accumulate differently than he was used to calculating.
By the time full darkness finally descended—noticeably later than sunset would have occurred in M'lod—the first day's foundation work was complete. Sixteen meters of granite had been excavated. The concrete mixing stations were prepared. Timber forms were being constructed to contain the pour that would begin tomorrow. Progress that would have taken a week in primitive conditions had been accomplished in a single extended work cycle thanks to Seleun'mhir's sophisticated infrastructure and experienced labor force.
Misaki returned to the refugee quarters exhausted in ways that went beyond simple physical fatigue. The mental weight of abandoning his innovative design, the pressure of working on infrastructure that would outlast his lifetime, and the constant awareness that engineering failures in this world were remembered for centuries all combined into a peculiar exhaustion that sleep alone wouldn't cure.
He opened the door to his assigned room and stopped immediately.
Sera lay curled on his bed, her small seven-year-old frame taking up barely a quarter of the sleeping space. Kyn slept in her arms, the infant breathing with the peaceful rhythm of a child who finally felt safe enough to rest deeply. They'd both been cleaned recently—their clothes were fresh, their hair washed, the persistent grime of refugee existence temporarily scrubbed away.
Lyria sat in the room's single chair, a medical text open on her lap but her attention clearly focused on the sleeping children rather than the pages. She looked up as Misaki entered, her expression soft with the particular tenderness that healers developed toward those they'd helped survive impossible circumstances.
"They waited for you," Lyria said quietly, keeping her voice low to avoid waking the children. "Sera asked when you'd return at least twenty times this afternoon. I finally told her she could wait in your room, thinking she'd give up after an hour. But she just climbed onto your bed and fell asleep. Kyn followed shortly after."
Misaki felt something tighten in his chest—not quite pain, but the emotional complexity of being needed by children who'd lost everything. He barely knew Sera beyond carrying her during the exodus north and occasionally sharing meals in the communal dining area. But apparently, in the chaotic mathematics of childhood attachment, those small kindnesses had been enough to make him a anchor point in her devastated world.
"I don't want to wake them," Misaki whispered.
"Then don't. I'll stay here tonight. You can use Riyeak's bed—he's dead asleep in the laborers' barracks after his first full shift in the mythril quarries. The boy discovered that moving ore blocks for twelve hours makes even his ridiculous strength feel inadequate."
Misaki glanced toward the adjacent room where Riyeak's massive frame was indeed collapsed on his bunk, still wearing his work clothes, snoring with the profound unconsciousness of complete physical exhaustion.
"Torran was given metalworking assignments," Lyria continued, her voice carrying quiet satisfaction. "The Engineering Corps needed someone who could forge custom nails and bolts for bridge construction with specifications more precise than standard production. His one hundred sixty years of smithing experience made him the obvious choice. He's been working in the state forges all week."
The refugee community was integrating. Finding work. Building new lives in a foreign nation that had granted them asylum when their own kingdom had tried to exterminate them. It should have felt like victory, but somehow it just felt like survival with administrative approval.
Misaki looked back at Sera and Kyn sleeping peacefully on his bed. Two children who would grow up in Seleun'mhir instead of Ul'varh'mir. Who would learn mountain engineering instead of forest lore. Who would speak with northern accents and build lives among people who'd shown them mercy when their own countrymen had shown only violence.
"Let them sleep," Misaki said finally. "I'll take Riyeak's bed tonight."
As he settled into the adjacent bunk, exhaustion finally overwhelming the day's frustrations and revelations, Misaki's last conscious thought was of bridges—both the literal crossing he was building between mountains, and the metaphorical ones being constructed between refugees and their uncertain future.
Some bridges were rejected for being too narrow.
Some were built despite knowing they'd fail during winter.
And some were forged in the hearts of children who chose to trust strangers because all their familiar anchors had burned.