Thyatira

In the dye-quarter of Thyatira, where the madder-vats run red and no craftsman lives outside his guild, Eudokia keeps her loom, her accounts, and her place at the prayer-house's edge. She is a careful woman: she pulled her household back from the edge once already, with her own two hands, and she commits to nothing she has not weighed.

Then Lydia — a purple-cloth trader who left for Philippi years ago — comes home altered in a way the market cannot name, carrying something she can only tell plainly, the way a merchant tells news.

Eudokia believes it. But belief has a price, and her first question is about the price: what does this new faith say about the guild feast — the table her son's whole future runs through, and the one the faith may not let her sit at?

No one can tell her. Not even Lydia.

Arsenios is a young dyer with madder-red sunk past washing into his hands, newly running the workshop his father can no longer hold. In Thyatira a craftsman lives and dies by his guild — its credit, its markets, its feasts — which ask a share in rites his faith cannot give.

His father always attended, and said God understood the necessity. A respected teacher in his assembly says the same, with learning behind it: a wise believer can sit at the table and take no harm. And the guild-master, who is no one's enemy, has begun to note — politely, as a matter of the rules — that a man who stays away will find the trade's doors closing.

Everyone he trusts tells him the price is one he can pay.

What Arsenios must decide is whether the morning he has been promised is worth losing all his father built.