A delta town of 134 people built on the one gradient where stillwater runs shallow enough to work and deep enough to be worth working. Every trade here is a wager on depth.
Stillwater pools in low ground and slows time inside it. The delta basin where the Veridia meets the Thrakis holds three stable depth bands, and Kryllhold exists because all three sit within reach of one shoreline.
Shallow enough to stand in. An hour's labour costs fifty-four minutes of the worker's own life. Siltstone worked here hardens in patterns it cannot hold in open air.
The productive band, and the dangerous one. A full shift submerged returns the worker to a shoreline where four hours have passed and their own body has aged one. Bio-fibre steeped here takes a set no dry process reproduces.
Entry is irreversible. Three drillers went under at the collapse two seasons ago. They are still visible from the bank, still falling, and will not have finished falling within any living person's lifetime.
Three trades, seventy-eight workers. Each one sells time at a different exchange rate, and each worker pays in the same currency.
Carvers work waist-deep in the Creeping Flow, shaping siltstone that sets into lattices impossible to form at surface time. The ten-percent drag is gentle enough to stand in all day.
The largest trade. Weavers descend on weighted lines into the Stasis Mire to steep bio-fibre, surfacing on a schedule set by the shoreline rather than by their own sense of the hour.
Six people keep every clock in Kryllhold honest. Shoreline time and Mire time diverge continuously, and a weaver surfacing on a mistuned count has been stolen from.
Two statutes unique to Kryllhold. Both were written after the thing they forbid had already happened.
No resident may descend past the three-metre line under any authority, contract or wage. The prohibition covers rescue.
Damming, diverting or stirring the stillwater between one and three metres is forbidden. Turbulence makes the band's slowdown unpredictable, and a weaver cannot surface on a count that no longer holds.
Three people whose unfinished business runs through the trades and statutes above.
Wants to sink a fixed siltstone platform into the Mire so weavers can work standing instead of hanging from lines. Building it means stirring the band for weeks.
Forty years on the lines and she has lived maybe fourteen of them. She refuses the new weighted rigs, insisting she can feel the count in her hands. Twice this season she has surfaced late.
Building an instrument to read the exact depth at which slowdown becomes irreversible. The reading cannot be taken from above the bar, and he has started asking who would notice.
What breaks Kryllhold inside a year.
Kael's platform and Torvin's instrument need the same stretch of water: the shelf at two and a half metres, the last place a person can stand before the bar. Kael must stir it to build. Torvin must hold it perfectly still to measure. Neither can proceed without ruining the other's work, and both have gone to the weavers for support.
The weavers are split by age. The young ones want Kael's platform, because standing work would cost them a fraction of what hanging work costs. Seren speaks for the old ones, who know that a platform means longer shifts at the same wage, and that the arithmetic which sounds like mercy has never once been mercy. She has begun calling Torvin's measurements a pretext for going under the bar, and she is not entirely wrong.