Chapter 1 — The Cloaked Stranger

The Night Market smelled of burnt sugar, wet stone, and magic on the cusp of unraveling.

Lira set her display with practiced hands, arranging the sugar-glazed pears first — always the pears, their golden skins glistening under lantern light. Beside them, she laid out her crystallized violets, each petal dusted in silverroot dust to help lull even the noisiest mind into sleep. The caramels came next, wrapped in sun-pale paper and tied with red string. The final tray she uncovered carefully, like revealing a secret: honeylace candies, thin as glass, laced with the faintest shimmer of enchantment.

She didn’t enchant them the way other sweet-sellers did — no song, no flare of fingers. Just a thought, a memory, and sometimes… a whisper.

“Lira,” called Master Ven from the fruit stall across the lane, “your candies are glowing again.”

She didn’t look up. “Only the honeylace. It does that when the city feels tense.”

Ven snorted. “The city is always tense. Between the ghosts and the taxes, no wonder.”

Lira smiled politely but said nothing more. She liked Ven. She liked most of the sellers here. But she didn’t come to the Night Market to talk.

She came to work. And to forget.

It wasn’t a place for the faint-hearted — the Night Market shifted, reformed, behaved like something half-alive. Cobblestones whispered if you stepped wrong. Shopfronts vanished and reappeared, sometimes upside down. The brave, the foolish, and the desperate came to buy or trade. The truly unwelcome never made it back out.

Lira had been selling sweets here for three years.

She hadn’t made a single enemy.

Not until tonight.

It was near the tenth bell when she felt it — the change. The quiet.

Crowds didn’t hush in the Night Market. Even in danger, people whispered, shouted, bartered, swore. But this hush spread like oil on water.

Lira’s hand froze over a ribbon of toffee.

A figure stepped into the market.

He wore a black hood stitched with gold thread — not gaudy, not ceremonial. Something older. His steps made no sound, though the wet stone should’ve echoed. He passed through the crowd like smoke — no bumping, no brushing.

No one blocked his path.

When he stopped at her stall, the air felt… heavier.

Lira swallowed. Carefully. Then: “What would you like?”

The figure said nothing at first.

Then, in a voice like dry velvet: “What do you recommend?”

She blinked. The voice was warm, not cold. Soft, even. Not what she’d expected.

Lira motioned toward the honeylace. “This one… settles the mind. Opens it, too. It’s our best seller on nights with long moons.”

The figure reached out, hand gloved in worn leather. But as his fingers brushed the candy tray, the glove shifted — and Lira glimpsed what lay beneath.

Claws. Polished, black as ink. Non-human.

Her spine stiffened. But her face stayed calm.

“Two,” he said.

Lira wrapped them. “Five copper, or a memory worth tasting.”

His head tilted. “You barter memories?”

“Only if they’re sweet.”

A sound like a quiet chuckle. He dropped five copper coins into her palm — cold as frost.

She counted them, slowly. “Thank you, sir.”

He didn’t move. Didn’t leave.

“You’re not from here,” Lira said carefully. It wasn’t a question.

“No.”

“Are you dangerous?”

Another pause.

“I try not to be.”

Their eyes met — or she thought they did. Beneath the hood, something gold glinted. Not lanternlight. Not human.

Lira held his gaze for a moment longer than was wise.

Then she smiled, small and polite, and turned back to her sweets.

The figure took his honeylace candies and drifted away, soundless as shadow.

She didn’t see him again that night. But the hush in the market never quite lifted.

Nor did her hands stop shaking.

Later, as she packed up for the night, Ven approached her, face pale.

“You saw him too,” he said.

Lira didn’t respond.

Ven licked his lips. “The Cloaked Stranger. He’s come before — but never to the stalls. Never to us.”

“Do you know what he is?”

“No. But one of the rune-markers says he might be one of the Forgotten Gods. The old kind. The ones that don’t care if you believe in them.”

Lira tied off her caramel satchels. “He was polite.”

“That doesn’t make him safe.”

“No,” she said softly. “It doesn’t.”

That night, she found a faint glimmer of sugar dust on her sleeve — residue from the honeylace.

It shimmered in her lamplight like starlight.

She touched it to her lips out of habit.

And for a heartbeat, she tasted something not her own: stone warmed by sun, a wind that smelled of heat and old temples, a quiet longing like teeth pressing against a locked jaw.

She pulled her hand back, heart thudding.

It wasn’t just sweetness she’d sold tonight.

It was a thread.

Something had been exchanged.

And it wasn’t over.

End of Chapter 1

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