The Weight of Progress
An Examination of Authority
Reth had done this long enough to know what a missed date meant. Time was tight. Coin tighter. When the work stopped lining up with what it was costing, someone came down from the city to take a closer look.
The scaffold still stood over the South Ward canal, ribs of oak and iron braced around the rising spine of a lift-tower meant to haul cargo straight from the barges to the upper road.
From the street, it looked like progress.
From underneath, it didn't.
The builders felt the difference in their feet.
Reth felt it in his knees. A familiar ache carried by a stout frame and years spent under weight, his brown beard already dusted pale from the morning's stone, short hair cropped close beneath a sweat-darkened hood, his clothes plain and heavy with use.
He'd done this long enough to feel the scaffold settle, to know when joints clicked and set right. Here, they hadn't.
They were waiting on the counterweight housing. Again.
Until it arrived, the scaffold could only rise so far.
The woman from the city arrived midmorning, while the crew adjusted the eastern brace to compensate for stone that hadn't been cut true. She stayed off the scaffold and out of the way, lingering just beyond its shadow before unfolding a narrow table.
She set out ink and weights, then laid down a thick book with corners worn smooth from use.
"I won't be in the way," she said, opening it.
She asked for names first.
Then roles.
Then start times.
Reth answered without looking at her, eyes still on the brace.
"We'll keep building," he said. "You'll want to stay clear of the hoist path."
"I'll write that," she replied.
By noon, Merrin had started to notice the delays.
He worked the upper frame, where tolerances were tight and waiting cost daylight, moving along the beams with an easy balance that left the wood barely complaining. His face was lean and sharp, weathered more than handsome, labor showing in the way his jaw stayed clenched even at rest. His movements were quick and unfinished, as if stopping meant losing something he wouldn't get back.
"She's timing us," he muttered during the midday break. "Not watching the build. Watching us."
Reth didn't answer. He was listening to the scaffold creak as a barge slid beneath it.
The crate arrived on the third day.
It came stamped and sealed, hauled off a barge by two dockhands who were already looking for the next job. Merrin cut it open himself.
The parts were clean. Polished. The wrong size.
He held one up against the frame. It didn't fit.
"The housing's off," he said.
The woman from the city glanced inside the crate, then at the seal. "Delivered," she said, and wrote it down.
Merrin stared at her. "It doesn't work."
She didn't look up. "The delivery was made."
By the end of the day, the book showed progress.
The scaffold did not.
Because the delivery had been logged, the crate couldn't go back on the barge. There was nowhere else to put it. They hauled it up onto the platform, lashed it near the eastern brace, and marked it for later adjustment.
Isera spent the morning at the anchor joints, blond hair bound tight at the nape of her neck, sleeves rolled and hands bare, where mistakes didn't show themselves until they were already expensive. She moved with a patient economy her people were long renowned for, long fingers tracing lines others missed, hands lingering just long enough to be sure the work would outlast her presence. She checked measurements twice, adjusted once, and moved on.
"They're not here because of the Forge Guild," she said later, quietly. "They're here because the tower isn't rising."
"It isn't rising because half the work depends on parts we don't control," Merrin said. "And when they send the wrong ones, it still counts."
Reth's voice cut in. "Enough."
"No," Merrin said. "I'm tired of pretending this is some failing on our part."
Isera met his eyes. "I didn't say it was a failing. I said it's still ours."
By the end of the first week, the scaffold was unchanged.
Not worse.
Just held.
Mornings filled with briefings. The woman from the city stayed by the table, book open, asking how long each task should take, never raising her voice or stepping into the work.
Reth climbed less. When he did, he moved carefully, aware of eyes that would remember how it looked on the page, not how it felt under load.
On the ninth day, the crack appeared.
Small. Hairline. Just below the eastern brace, where the extra weight had been sitting since the crate was hauled up and left to wait.
Reth felt it before he saw it.
He came down already planning the fix.
"It'll take less than an hour," he said. "If we wait, it'll spread."
The woman looked at the book. "Stopping the work needs explanation."
"And it counts," she added.
Merrin laughed. "So if we fix it, we're late. If we don't, it weakens."
The woman wrote.
Reth reached for the wedge.
Stopped.
The tags fluttered against the brace, bright against the wood. The book lay open on the table, a fresh line waiting.
Reth set the wedge down on the platform, where anyone could see it.
He didn't pick it up again.
That evening, the canal kept moving.
No one wrote down the sound the scaffold made as it cooled.
No one noted when the work stopped being built.
Author's Note
This story grew out of a pattern I've seen repeat itself whenever work begins to slip.
When progress falters, the response is almost never to simplify. We don't remove obstacles or narrow focus. Instead, we add oversight. More tracking. More coordination. More reassurance that things are "under control." Time that once went into building is slowly redirected into explaining, justifying, and proving that building is still happening.
Reth understands the scaffold because he is part of the doing. He feels changes in load and balance long before they show up in a report. But once the work falls behind, doing is no longer the priority. Visibility is. The project doesn't need to move forward, it needs to look accounted for.
This is where the spiral begins. Each layer of oversight arrives with good intent: to reduce risk, to create clarity, to restore confidence. But each layer consumes time and attention from the very people needed to recover momentum. Less building leads to more concern. More concern leads to more watching. And soon, the work exists primarily to be measured.
I've watched projects fail this way. Not because the problem was unsolvable, but because the cost of oversight eventually exceeded the team's remaining capacity to act. Progress was still being recorded. The structure was still standing. But nothing was rising.
As with the other stories in Artumin, there is no villain here. The systems are functioning exactly as designed. The records are accurate. The meetings are justified.
The question is whether any work can survive when the effort to manage delay becomes the thing that prevents recovery.
No collapse is recorded.
Just a scaffold.
And the moment when watching finally replaces doing.