'The Octavian Engine' He called it The Octavian Engine, though in truth, it never existed outside the cathedral of his imagination. Every bolt, every plate of burnished copper, every slow-turning gear was a fiction built with the precision of longing. The boy spent afternoons in the half-light of his father’s workshop, surrounded by scraps of metal and dust, whispering instructions to invisible apprentices. Over time, the boundary between the hum of the real and the pulse of the possible began to blur. When he closed his eyes, the creature stirred, first a shimmer, then a shadow, then the full enormity of it, vast and ancient, with eyes like lanterns burning through the dark. He wasn’t afraid. He was the one who had imagined it into being, after all. It leaned close, its mechanical tendrils moving with improbable grace, its voice a deep vibration inside his chest. It didn’t speak in words but in knowing. The kind of knowing that made the air vibrate, the kind that told him that every...