There was no map to the Bazaar of Forgetting, only rumors and directions whispered by forgetful drunks, each insisting they'd never been. It was a place that found you, often when you'd misplaced everything else. Some claimed it wandered through the folds of cities like a parasite, appearing only to those who'd misplaced more than keys or names—those who'd lost their reasons. Ilyan was gone. Take by the depths of his own truth, somewhere, between something.
They arrived under a sky that flickered like faulty paper lanterns. The path had been winding, passing through Valeight's shattered glass alleys, where laughter echoed backward, then beneath the Bridge of Unspoken Bargains, where the echoes charged tolls in favors owed. At last, through a narrow curtain of rain that fell upward into the clouds like regrets returning home.
"Smells like something I owe taxes on," Loup muttered, adjusting his hat as if it might sprout legs and flee. His coat jingled with charms, trinkets, and a harmonica that sometimes cried in its sleep.
Ashwen said nothing, eyes fixed ahead. Her usual sharpness was dulled. The loss of Ilyan had hit her in a way she hadn't expected. She didn't like it. Rue walked beside her, keeping pace, her brows drawn as if trying to solve a riddle only the city knew.
The Bazaar pulsed with color and contradiction. Vendors hawked jars of second-hand names, gloves that could slap your enemies by memory, pastries baked with dream-yeast. A woman with a missing shadow sold clocks that ticked only in reverse. A mime painted in invisible ink mimed drowning and received applause.
Nothing had a price. Everything had a cost.
Rue tilted her head, catching wind of something peculiar—a vendor displaying faces pinned like butterflies, labeled with emotions. One of them frowned at her.
"Do we even know what the witness looks like?" she asked, brushing past a stall selling bottled excuses.
"He used to be a man named Pilgrim Jax," said Groat, who now sat in Rue's coat pocket, squinting at the surrounding madness. "Known for faking his death several times. Unfortunately, one of them stuck. Temporarily."
"Sounds like Ilyan," Rue muttered.
"No, Ilyan was much worse at scheduling," the coin replied, sounding personally offended by the concept of Ilyan's mortality.
They found the contact — a booth made entirely of receipts, stacked and folded like origami towers. The man inside was made of paper, literal and metaphysical. His eyes were typed in Courier.
"Pilgrim Jax?" Ashwen asked.
The figure blinked, dislodging a flake of ink. "I don't remember you. Which is good. Means I can trust you."
"We need your testimony," said Rue, stepping forward. "You remember Ilyan. When he died."
Jax's paper shoulders crinkled. "I remember... someone going quiet. A name slipping through. But the memory was extracted. You'll need to retrieve it. Memory-lantern. Sold it years ago."
"Where?"
"To the Inkwell Prophet. He speaks in spills and riddles. You'll find him behind the stall that sells umbrellas that open into other weather systems."
Monsieur Loup exhaled through his nose. "Oh là là, sounds poetic. Or incredibly inconvenient."
"Both," said Jax.
Rue turned. "Let's go before this place forgets we exist."
As they left, a whisper rippled across the bazaar—a pulse of old ink. Something had awakened. Behind them, Jax folded back into silence. The faces pinned at the emotion vendor wept a little harder.
They wound their way through a corridor of sighing tents. The crowd thickened: pickpockets who returned memories instead of stealing them, a preacher made of bees declaring the end of narrative cohesion, and a two-headed singer crooning a lullaby no one could forget.
Groat hummed anxiously. "The Prophet is known to deal in existential liquidity. Be careful not to agree to any rhetorical hypotheticals—those are legally binding in three dimensions."
"What does he look like?" Ashwen asked.
"Like a thought someone spilled onto the floor and gave up trying to clean."
They passed the umbrellas—floating, spinning gently, dripping hail, ash, and occasional applause.
And there, scribbled into being by the stains on the ground, was the Inkwell Prophet.
He looked like an accident with purpose. His robes were made of scrawl and draft pages. His beard was a fountain pen that never dried. His eyes were quotation marks.
He smiled. "I know why you're here. But do you?"