The priests arrived then, fat with silver and fear. They demanded a sign. The Maker looked at them with His copper-burning eyes and said nothing. Instead, Tamar opened the book and read aloud the only passage that mattered:

Eliab nodded. “The dove’s true flight is a dive. You taught me that. It seeks the Maker not in the heavens, but in the deep places—the well where the first water was blessed, the clay that still remembers His fingerprints.”

“You hid it well,” the Maker said.

The dove, meanwhile, floated to the surface of the well. It was wooden again, eyeless, and perfectly still. But everyone who looked into its empty sockets saw, reflected there, the one thing they had lost: the image of themselves, bent over a workbench, learning to make something true.

And then it fell.

The priests said the Maker had abandoned them because they had turned His holy workshop into a counting-house. They sold doves for sacrifice at ten times their worth, then used the silver to guild the altars. One day, the Maker had simply laid down His hammer, wiped His hands on His leather apron, and walked east into the Salt Flats. No one had followed. They were too busy counting.