Sorry about the wait, LTU.
I think you've been doing a good job with the epigraphs so far. I enjoyed the bit about the nose, and the end has punch.
Is there a reason they use gold leaf for dictation? I know it's malleable, but so is copper, which would be a lot cheaper.
Some of the hints you've put in about the sparks are interesting. I'm still enjoying the dialogue with Jin's invisible friend, but sometimes the voice sounds a bit awkward. I think you might be doing this to give the 'person' a sense of other-ness. but I actually think that might be stronger if he talked the same as everyone else, but just said very strange things.
I only have two real complaints here. The first is your voice. You have a tendency to write very clipped sentences, or just grammatically inconsistent ones. It's nothing a good copy-edit can't fix, but I'm also hesitant to tell you to just fix it, because it does seem to be part of your writing style. If you want a better explanation I could try sending you some line-edits
The other thing that bothered me was how little time they seem to have spent working on the hole. I feel like the lady should have been more concerned about this than Talvin, even, since the hole affects their magic. But unless I've read this wrong, they've only spent two or three hours of the huuk working on this. If Jin is doing poorly, I would expect they just bring in a different engraver to keep doing the work, and try to get Talvin to accomplish as much as possible.