Thornfield Mill roared with unbroken fury, its looms a chorus of iron and despair as Eleanor bent to her task. The air shimmered with cotton dust, a gray veil that settled in her lungs, each breath a rasp against her ribs. Her fingers, raw and blistered, danced over the threads, snagging on splinters as the machine’s rhythm pounded her skull. Shadows of women flickered in the gaslight—coughing, hunched, their youth ground away—and she felt the dust’s weight, not just on her skin but in her soul, a sediment of ruin.

  Hours bled into one another, marked by the cng of the overseer’s bell, his voice a whip: “Faster, you ggards!” Her back arched, a bow strung too tight, and sweat stung her eyes, mingling with the grit. She thought of Eldric—his bird, his ugh—and pushed on, though her chest burned, a coal smoldering within. The sixpence clinked in her mind, a meager shield against the hunger that gnawed at home, yet it mocked her frailty.

  She stumbled home through Wolthrope’s dusk, the streets slick with coal ash, the mill’s echo in her ears. Eldric sat by the hearth, his frail hands rolling the wooden horse. “Mama,” he said, and she sank beside him, dust shedding from her like a mourner’s cloak. “I’m a dragon now,” she joked, coughing, and he giggled, a sound frail as gss. She forced a grin, though her lungs ached, each breath a bor she hid from his watchful gaze.

  Margaret muttered nearby, “Smoke’s rising,” her mind lost in phantom fires, and Henry’s wheeze filled the silence, his eyes dim. Eleanor lit a taper, its fme trembling as her hands did, and saw her family’s fragility mirrored in its glow. Thornfield’s dust was more than filth—it was a thief, stealing her strength, her hope. She pressed Eldric close, his warmth a fleeting stay, and felt the mill’s shadow tighten, a noose she could not escape.