The merchant-captain had lost her daughter to fever, and she wanted to stop feeling. So she'd asked the dyer for something that would hold grief the way fine wine holds the year it was made. Something that didn't look sad. Something that looked like it had seen things, survived things, was deeper for having lived through darkness. The dyer had just succeeded with a new batch after two years of failures. She could have sold it immediately for ten times the cost. Instead, she looked at the merchant-captain's hands, saw the tremor that grief hadn't quite settled into steadiness yet, and knew exactly what this woman needed. The armor came back in Gorgeous Maroon, and when the captain wore it to the memorial service, people remarked that she looked transformed. Not healed. Something deeper. Like she'd already survived the worst and had decided to keep living anyway. The dyer never told her about the two-year wait, the failed batches, the vat full of potential that had finally aligned. Some gifts were meant to look inevitable...