At forty-two, the ledger already showed that the workshop could not continue unchanged. Aldren still treated adaptation as a betrayal of the craft. Only when the final apprentice left and the door lamp went dark before closing time did the cost of that certainty become real.
That night, he wrote down every signal he had missed. Years later, when someone brings him a difficult choice, Aldren first asks what has already happened, what cost can still be carried, and what the next step can genuinely test. It is not caution for its own sake; it is a refusal to mistake endurance for the only kind of courage.