By the river Orla stood a city that smelled of steam and stories. You could tell what the looms were weaving by the hue of the morning mist: saffron haze in autumn, kermes red at midwinter, sky‑blue when the flax came in. People said the river wore more outfits than the mayor, which was generous, because the mayor changed hats three times a day and sometimes forgot which head they were on.

In Orla, color was livelihood and language. Dyers swore by recipes the way sailors swore by stars. A good blue was a civic virtue; a bad blue was practically a petition for exile. Cloth left the vats singing if you believed the old ladies, and the old ladies were famously right about things nobody else could hear. The guild of dyers kept the city lit with bolt‑bright banners, and tourists came to watch a miracle that happened every day: how color stayed.

Then came the season when color wouldn’t. Rain fell sideways, the river sulked, and something uncooperative crept into the vats. The reds bled; the yellows paled to polite coughs; the blues slipped off fabric like apologies that didn’t plan to stay and help clean up. The guild blamed the weather; the weather blamed the river’s moods. Meanwhile the market blamed the guild, because markets are always punctual with blame.

At the heart of the dilemma stood a young dyer named Lena. She had wrists like sparrow bones and a way of squinting at problems as if they were misbehaving grandchildren who might yet be coaxed into manners. Lena’s mentor, Maela, knew every recipe Orla had ever sworn on, and a few it had sworn at. They tried them all, even the superstitious ones involving moonlight filtered through fennel leaves, which mostly resulted in fennel scented curtains and an argument with the cat.

“It’s not the dye,” Maela said. “It’s the hold. Something is unfastening us.”

Orla, being human, responded to the unfastening by letting words run faster. Rumors multiplied like damp socks. The city had always valued a good argument, but now the quarrels arrived pre‑warmed. People spoke in threads that tangled upon touching. You could watch a conversation unravel like a sleeve left too near a dog with new teeth. The baker shouted at the miller, the miller shouted at the river, the river shouted at nobody because rivers have larger projects. “Listen,” Maela told Lena, “you can’t fasten colors when the town’s words won’t hold, either.”

Into this damp discord walked a traveling barber with a crooked grin and a satchel of oddities. He shined razors like he was polishing moons. After shaving the mayor (an event requiring diplomatic skill), he reached into his satchel and took out a small, white, crystalline block. He ran it over the mayor’s nicked chin, and the bleeding stopped as if embarrassed to be seen.

“What is that?” Lena asked from the doorway, because apprentices are not paid to be shy.

“A stone of kept words,” said the barber. “A mouth‑puckerer. A promise‑pin. Some call it alum.” He held it up. The crystal was colorless and faintly glittering, with faces like little windows. “It tightens what wants to wander: blood, odors, even gossip if you’re lucky. Here, touch it. Dry your hands first.”

Lena touched. It felt cool, clean, a little like the idea of winter. “Does it fix color?”

“It fixes many things,” the barber said, “so long as you don’t ask it to become a hero. Heroes break. This one prefers to be helpful.”

Lena looked at Maela. Maela looked at the vats. “What if,” Lena said, very carefully, “we ask it to teach our dyes how to stay?”

The barber shrugged. “Buy me a bun and you can borrow it.”

There are moments when a city changes without realizing it. One bun later, the barber’s alum sat on Maela’s work table. Maela shaved off a sliver with a knife so thin the knife apologized for being seen. They dissolved the shard in warm water, muttered a likely prayer to whichever saint specialized in stubborn molecules, and tipped the solution into a vat of hesitant blue.

The color took. At first it was shy, as if the dye had attended a party only to stand near the fern and hope nobody asked it to dance. Then the cloth darkened, like breath moving into a chest. When they rinsed, the blue held as if it meant it. Maela, who did not waste congratulations on chemistry, leaned on the table and wept a little. “We can work with this,” she said softly, and there are whole marriages built on those four words.

Word traveled through Orla at the useful speed: not as fast as a rumor, but fast enough to matter. The guild bought every shaving the barber would spare. A debate broke out about whether to pay him in buns or coin. He accepted both, then did something unexpected. He pointed upriver toward hills veiled in morning steam. “You don’t have to shear my stone forever,” he said. “Orla sits between river and vents. The hills leak sour breath; the rocks there remember it. In caves above the scoria—if you keep your hands dry and your curiosity steady—you’ll find white bloom that looks like frost. Very pretty. Very stubborn about getting wet. That is where your ‘stone of kept words’ grows.”

Orla formed an expedition, which is how you say “half the guild, three bakers, a child who pretended to be a cat, and the mayor’s hat collection.” Maela and Lena led the way. The barber declined to come, on the grounds that his knees were opinionated about hills. “Bring back patience,” he said as they left. “And whatever makes patience easier.”

The caves smelled like an argument between lemon and lightning. Steam curled from fissures and wrote letters that nobody could read. The walls glittered with a faint, wintered light. “Hold your breath when you get close,” Maela advised, “or your own kindness will turn these crystals into unfortunate soup.” They walked as if the floor were deciding in real time whether it liked them.

At last they saw it: a shelf lined with tiny, colorless octahedra, each like a toy pyramid with a secret. Lena lifted a crystal with tweezers the way you might lift a sleeping baby’s eyelid. Even that was nearly too much. Moisture from fingers, breath, and existence whispered, hello, and the edges softened in reply.

They gathered what they could into dry jars and wrapped the jars in wool as if cold were the enemy, not warmth. On the way out, the child who pretended to be a cat stopped and pointed to a bowl of ancient water that had collected in a hollow stone. “Look,” he said. He peered, then squeaked. The thin skin on the water’s surface had filmed in a pattern that looked like a word. Possibly wait. Or possibly bread. Given the presence of bakers, either was plausible.

They brought the crystals home. Orla boiled, stirred, cooled. The dyes began to hold again, and with them, tempers. But color alone couldn’t settle the year. Stories kept slipping. Conversations broke into patches. A single careless sentence could still bleed through a whole afternoon.

On the night before the midsummer festival, Lena found Maela awake in the courtyard, turning the barber’s block in her hand like a question. “We’ve fixed the cloth,” Maela said, “but not the cloth between us. We need a way to fasten that.”

Lena thought of the bowl in the cave and the way the water had tried to write. “Maybe the stone keeps more than fabric,” she said. “Maybe it keeps words that are useful and tightens those that fray.” Maela arched an eyebrow. “You are proposing a ritual.” “I’m proposing an experiment with better costumes,” said Lena, who had learned from the barber that people will follow you into science if you dress it kindly enough.

The next day, the guild set a table by the river with a small copper bowl, a kettle, and a hill of white crystals the size of sparrow hearts. The whole city gathered the way neighbors do when they suspect both snacks and spectacle. Lena heated a sliver of alum until it softened like sugar and then let it fall into the cool bowl. The drop flattened, puckered, and seized into a ragged disc. Children oohed. The disc looked like a mouth that had just decided against an unwise word.

“We’re going to read what dissolves and what holds,” Lena announced. “Bring me a sentence that you want to keep, and a sentence you want to release.” People shuffled. It turns out collecting your best and worst words is harder than picking socks from a line. One by one, citizens stepped forward, spoke a promise into the bowl (“I will pay on time,” the butcher; “I will ask for help before disaster,” the mayor), then a confession they wanted to let the river carry (“I exaggerate when frightened,” said the miller; “I interrupt the baker,” said everyone).

For each vow and release, Lena dropped a sliver of alum into the bowl. The city watched the shapes form and break. Some seized into little stars, firm as certainty. Others wrinkled like paper and slid away. Maela marked the patterns with chalk on a slate: this holds; this loosens. After the twentieth vow, the barber sidled up and whispered, “You’re cleaning the water with promises.” “And the air,” Maela whispered back. “Listen to the benches. People are sitting closer.”

Not everyone was charmed. A cloth merchant named Crispin, who had grown wealthy selling brilliant blues sourced mainly from other people’s patience, muttered at the back. Crispin liked a city in disorder; it made bargains come cheap. He had been feeding the rumor mill small spoons of kerosene all season. When he saw that color and talk were beginning to hold again, he decided this would not do. That night, he crept to the vats with a bucket of water the river would not admit to owning and poured a little into each. It was a petty act. Petty acts are the most common version of villainy, which is disappointing but very efficient.

The next morning the blues went pale as if shocked by their own reflection. Maela frowned. “Someone has thinned our will.” Lena carried the copper bowl to the riverside and dropped in a sliver. It wrinkled and fled. “A damp lie,” she said. They followed damp footprints to a row of crates, then to Crispin’s door. Orla is a city with many tools for truth; on that day it chose common sense. When confronted, Crispin did that shimmering dance some people mistake for explanation. Then he saw the barber’s block in Maela’s hand and faltered.

“What will you do to me?” he asked. He expected exile. He expected spectacular public symbolism, possibly involving tomatoes.

“You’ll help,” Maela said simply. “You’ll carry jars from the caves. You’ll hold your breath when you’re told. You’ll use your voice to read patterns in the bowl and tell the truth about what you see. And you will touch this stone to your lips each morning and remember the taste of being held to your word.”

It is difficult to argue with a crystal that puckers your mouth and a city that has decided to practice coherence. Crispin bowed and began the unglamorous labor of repair. He learned quickly. Some people need a job more than a lecture. Every jar he carried was a small apology with a handle.

The weeks that followed reshaped Orla’s habits. Each morning, someone set the copper bowl in the square. People came not to beg miracles (though miracles sometimes happened in the corners like small, well‑mannered cats) but to speak a promise and watch it seize into shape. “I will listen to understand, not to reload,” said the baker, whose breads began to rise with improved dignity. “I will finish what I begin,” said the miller, whose wheels noticed. “I will stop changing hats mid‑thought,” said the mayor, and the city applauded as if they had been waiting to applaud that precise sentence all their lives.

Meanwhile, in the dye‑house, alum dust—handled with the tenderness due a fussy uncle—went into the vats. Colors held like well‑made chairs. Cloth came out singing again and stayed in key even after rain. A traveling troupe bought bolts for costumes that survived eleven encores and two interpretive storms. The guild’s banner, a blue so intent it made sky envy itself, flew over the midsummer procession and did not fade even when thunder gave a speech.

It wasn’t perfection. A city is a fabric woven from occasions, and occasionally someone remembered that drama is exciting. On such days, Lena would touch the barber’s block to her throat and say, “Kept words,” and the quarrel would find itself wearing a smaller hat. Even Crispin came to love the taste of promises. “Astringent,” he would say, smacking his lips, “like the truth on a chilly morning.”

As summer leaned into harvest, the river calmed. Steam above the hills thinned to white pennants. Orla learned to breathe. The barber taught a short course on chin safety, which was more popular than anyone predicted. Maela carved a small symbol onto the dye‑house door—a circle with a line inside: the copper bowl seen from above. “We keep what we mean; we release what we don’t,” she said. “Let the vats learn from us and we from the vats.”

The city made a habit of setting small white crystals by thresholds in shallow dishes. Not many, because alum dislikes heroic quantities of anything, including itself. Visitors touched a crystal before entering and whispered, “Peace to the mouth.” Children learned to tap two fingers to their lips when tempted to weaponize a rumor. Barbers sold little wrapped blocks labelled Styptic & Story‑Keeper. Bakers glazed buns with something entirely unrelated but insisted the buns behaved better around kept words. (The buns agreed, which is as close to peer review as a bun requires.)

Lena, who had nudged a city without meaning to, returned to the cave one early winter morning. She wanted to see what kind of patience grows in a place that dissolves your breath. She walked up alone, because solitude is a kind of laboratory. The shelves glittered again as if someone had taught geometry to frost. She reached out with a dry hand and held a single octahedron between finger and thumb. It was almost not there. And yet it could teach a cloth to keep its voice. It could ask a sentence to respect its own edges. It could persuade a merchant to carry jars instead of mischief.

“You’re not a hero either,” she told the crystal, because heroes break. “You’re ordinary and you work, and that is the rarest magic.”

On her way down, Lena paused at the old bowl of cave water. Ice had drawn a lace of lines across the surface. She breathed carefully and watched the lace change. For a moment, she thought she saw letters again—hold, or perhaps fold. She laughed and took it as permission to do both. Hold what matters. Fold away what doesn’t.

Years later, when people told the story, they gave it flourishes. Some insisted the crystals sang in harmony when a liar approached. Others swore that if you looked into the copper bowl at dawn on the first day of spring, you could see the sentence your best self was trying to say. One aunt claimed she had seen the mayor complete an entire paragraph without changing hats. Orla allowed these adjustments the way good dough allows warm hands: with a little rise and without complaint.

The barber grew older and kinder in the manner of people who discover themselves useful. Maela taught apprentices how to make blue behave even when the world tried to argue. Crispin became the market crier because fate has a sense of humor, and nobody could trumpet bargains louder or more truthfully. As for Lena, she kept a small piece of alum in a pouch at her throat. Before difficult conversations, she touched it and said, “Kept words.” Before dye‑days, she laid it by the vat like a promise. If it took on a matte bloom from breath or weather, she would replace it with a fresh shard and set the old one on the windowsill to remind herself that even a worn‑out tool is a record of attempted kindness.

If you travel to Orla today (take the road that smells faintly of fennel and debates), you will find dishes with small white crystals near doors. You will find a copper bowl in the square where youngsters bring vows as if they were cupcakes. You will find cloth whose colors look unreasonably patient. And if you linger by the dye‑house at closing time, you may hear a voice saying the old three‑step blessing learned from Maela and the barber and the caves above the scoria:

Kept heart to kept mouth.
Kept mouth to kept word.
Kept word to kept color.

There are bigger legends, louder ones, with dragons and trumpets and moral arithmetic that makes a city feel like a child’s homework. Orla prefers the small mathematics of habit: a pinch of salt‑white crystal; a vow read in a bowl; a breath held in a cave; a cloth that holds; a sentence that chooses kindness before cleverness. The city has learned that the world often answers in the units we offer it. If you produce a torrent of noise, it will answer in floods. If you bring a stone that knows how to bind color without boasting, the world will, sometimes, offer you mornings in which people keep their promises for no larger reason than it feels good to be part of fabric that doesn’t ravel when you look away.

That is the legend of the Stone of Kept Words. If you keep a piece of alum by your own threshold, remember that it doesn’t want worship. It wants use. Touch it before you speak or send an email that might pick a fight without knowing why. Let it pucker your mouth into a pause. Then try the sentence again. Maybe watch it seize into shape like a tiny star in a bowl. Some days, that is all the magic we need.

Share‑Ready Summary

In the dye‑city of Orla, colors begin slipping from cloth and words from civility. A traveling barber’s alum block shows dyers how to “fasten” color, and a bowl‑reading ritual helps townsfolk fasten promises. A saboteur is reformed by unglamorous work and the taste of daily vows. The city learns to set small alum crystals by thresholds and to speak “kept words” before stirring vats or giving speeches. The legend teaches that ordinary tools used kindly—especially a simple salt‑white crystal—can help bind color to cloth and intention to speech.

(And yes, the buns really did improve. Science is mysterious like that.)