Rain washed the alleyways of Akria the next morning, softening the edges of the Night Market into something gentler. The city always felt like this after one of them passed through — gods, ghosts, or those in between. Lira called it a hush that seeped into brick.
She didn’t open her stall that morning.
Instead, she lit the old stove in her loft, tied back her hair with a faded blue ribbon, and began cooking sugar over flame the way her mother taught her — with silence, and reverence.
Molasses went first. Then crushed coriander pods. Then a sliver of lemon peel dried three days under moonlight. She stirred, not watching the mixture, but watching the steam.
She always did, when her thoughts grew too loud.
The first time she came to the Night Market, she was seventeen and broke. The city hadn’t wanted her — an orphan girl with sunburnt cheeks and too little magic to offer. She’d arrived with a bag of cracked caramels and a promise from her mother’s journal: “Sweetness endures what sharpness cannot.”
She’d almost been laughed off the cobbles.
But she’d made one stranger cry with her ginger-cider drops. Another had traded her bread for a handful of salt toffee. And someone — she never saw who — left a pouch of copper for her pear-laced sugarglass and a note that said only:
Make more.
So she had.
Year after year. Bite after bite.
Until she carved out her little place here — barely enough for safety, but enough for stillness.
And still, last night… something had shifted. The hooded man, the others whispered — had not felt like a customer.
He’d felt like a door opening where there had been only walls.
The market returned to life that evening. Lanterns lit. Cries of vendors filled the air. The taffy-slingers across from her were already arm-wrestling customers for bets again.
Lira set her trays in place. Her hands moved with habit. Caramel first. Then the sugared violets. Then the—
She froze.
The honeylace tray was empty.
She always had at least a handful left over. But now… not even a shimmer of sugar dust remained.
Had he taken them?
Had she given them?
She shook her head and went to work.
The first hour passed as usual — customers laughed, paid, flirted, chewed. Children begged for fire-apple bites. One man asked if her licorice curls were laced with truth serum. (They weren’t. But she didn’t correct him.)
She didn’t expect him to return.
But he did.
At second bell.
Silent. Again.
The hush returned with him — quieter than before, but still noticeable. Like a tension in the throat before a word too dangerous to speak.
He stepped up to her stall without preamble.
Lira didn’t flinch this time.
“You’re early,” she said.
He tilted his head. “You remember me.”
“You don’t forget someone who walks like the ground moves for them.”
The smallest pause.
“Do you want more honeylace?”
“I want to ask you something.”
That made her look up.
His hood was drawn low, but not enough to hide the shimmer beneath it. Gold eyes — not metallic, not glowing — living. Like molten amber given breath.
Lira wiped her hands on her apron. “Ask, then.”
“Why did you not flinch?”
She blinked. “Last night?”
“Yes.”
“You bought candy. Not my soul.”
“Still.”
She shrugged. “Sugar doesn’t ask who eats it. Why should I?”
Something in his throat moved. A suppressed sound. A flicker of teeth — too many, too white, barely seen.
“I thought humans feared us,” he murmured.
“I thought gods didn’t care.”
He went very still.
Then — “You think me a god?”
“I think you’re not pretending to be anything else.”
Another long pause. Then, quietly: “May I sit?”
She blinked again. Her stall didn’t have seating. It was a narrow cart, just wide enough for her and her trays.
“I don’t—”
Before she could finish, he crouched on the stone just beside her counter, folding long limbs with serpentine grace. A man kneeling beside a street stall. Dignified. Terrifying.
Ridiculous.
But somehow… natural.
Like this wasn’t the first time.
“You're odd,” she said, before she could stop herself.
“Am I?” His tone was amused.
“Most people try to make themselves less frightening.”
“Most people aren’t frightening for long.”
She didn’t know what that meant. But it didn’t feel like a threat. More like a truth spoken by someone who’d watched centuries blink by.
They sat in companionable silence for several minutes — her serving sweets, him observing. Never staring. Just present.
After a while, she asked: “Do you have a name?”
“Would you use it if I gave it?”
“I might whisper it to your candy, if that counts.”
He huffed something that wasn’t quite a laugh. “Names carry weight.”
“So does sugar. And I don’t withhold either.”
He turned toward her, and for the first time, she felt something change in the air between them. Not magic. Not menace.
Recognition.
“My name is Kael.”
She repeated it softly, letting the syllables melt on her tongue.
Kael.
It felt too gentle for something that might once have been worshipped.
“It suits you,” she said.
“You don’t know what it means.”
“No,” she said. “But I’ll find out. Eventually.”
He stood then, smooth and fluid as poured oil.
She looked up, suddenly aware of how much taller he was — not just in body, but in presence. The way the light bent around him. The way shadows didn’t quite cling.
He placed a coin on her counter. Gold — real, glinting, unfamiliar.
“Tonight’s sweet,” he said.
“I didn’t give you anything.”
“You gave me your name. That counts.”
And then he left.
Not vanishing. Not dissolving.
Just walking away into the crowd, like any other customer.
Except he wasn’t.
And Lira knew — without knowing how — that nothing about her quiet little life would be untouched from this moment on.
End of Chapter 2
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