Part Two
Whispered Truths — The Peddler's Tale
Marashir Market, Dusk
**
The bazaar was quieting, lanterns flickering to life as the wind funneled through Marashir's spires. The scent of crushed spice and hot brass hung in the air. Breathlight shimmered along narrow glass canals, each ripple catching on the faces of merchants closing their stalls.
Between two shuttered fruit stands, a crooked tent stitched from scavenged banners fluttered like a broken sail.
Khalen paused.
A scent, dried herbs and bone-oil and smoke, coiled from within. Inside sat a hunchbacked peddler wrapped in mismatched silks, his eyes glinting with the kind of hunger no meal could ease.
"Captain," the man rasped, voice like torn parchment. "You walk like a man who's outrun death. Tell me… do you ever dream of flying?"
Khalen didn't answer. His gaze swept the tent's edges, exits first, then hands, then the shadows that didn't match the lanternlight: banners of fallen Houses, Expedition guilds long erased, symbols even he barely recognised. This was no ordinary trader.
"I've heard many things," Khalen said carefully. "But flights of fancy aren't worth coin."
The peddler chuckled, revealing more gaps than teeth. "Not fancy. Memory." He leaned forward, candlelight rippling across his face. His fingers worried a bead of bone between thumb and forefinger, polished smooth by too much time. "Tell me… have you heard the old sky-story. The one archivists call a lie, and children call a dare."
Khalen stilled.
He'd seen a version of it once, not in a public ledger, but in a margin scratch, cramped and furious, like the writer hated their own hand for remembering.
He kept his face flat. "I've heard a lot of stories."
"This one isn't a story," the peddler whispered. "It's a wound that won't close, no matter how many years you press cloth to it."
From the crystal skull at Khalen's belt, OH muttered, "That's cheerful. I love a vendor who commits to the mood."
Khalen ignored him.
"What is it," Khalen said, and made it sound like impatience.
The peddler's grin sharpened. "A breathling," he said, as if naming it was blasphemy. "Not the kind that gnaws through tunnels. Not the kind that screams and dies. A massive one, sky-old and wrong, old enough that the clouds learned to give it space."
Khalen's eyes narrowed. "Breathlings don't—"
"I know," the peddler breathed, pleased by the resistance. "That's why it sticks." He tapped the table once, soft. "Old accounts claim during a great conflict, when the ground ran red and the air burned black, a prophet of the ancients learned its true name."
Khalen didn't blink. His fingers settled near his coin pouch without meaning to.
"A prophet," he repeated.
The peddler nodded, slow. "Not a priest. Not a guild man. Something older than institutions. Someone who listened to Breath the way delvers listen to stone, and heard an answer nobody wanted."
He leaned closer, lowering his voice like the tent had ears. "They say the prophet didn't conquer it. He didn't chain it. He didn't spear it until it bowed. He climbed until his bones shook, and he sang to it."
Khalen's jaw tightened. "Sang."
The peddler's eyes gleamed. "A song shaped like command. A song shaped like grief. A song shaped like the end of options."
Outside, the market wind worried at the tent seams. The fabric shivered, as if the market itself resented the words.
"And the thing listened," the peddler whispered. "It let them live in its shadow."
Khalen's expression didn't change, but something in his stomach went cold.
"Not houses," the peddler added quickly, like he could feel the protest forming. "Not proper ones. Ribs of wood. Lashings. Platforms. Lanterns. Wards. A moving nest for people who had nowhere left that would hold them."
Khalen's voice came out flatter than he meant. "So it was their weapon."
"It was their salvation," the peddler corrected. "During the war, it carried them over armies, over siege-lines, over the places where Breath was thick with death. They struck where nobody could follow. They vanished into weather. They became a rumour that won battles before the blade ever hit."
He paused, letting the candle gutter.
"And then," he said softly, "the Earth tried to swallow them up."
Khalen's gaze flicked to the tent flap, to the canals outside, to the ordinary world pretending it wasn't built on buried teeth.
"The ground failed," the peddler murmured. "Old stone cracked. Valleys folded. Whole regions sank like they were being pulled under by unseen hands." His grin went thin. "So the people who lived in its shadow made the same choice every desperate soul makes."
Khalen's throat worked once. "They went higher."
"Higher," the peddler agreed, almost reverent. "Above ash. Above poison. Above the reach of hungry things. Above the maps."
For a moment his face softened, not kind, but distant, like he was watching it in his mind.
"And it worked," he whispered. "For a while."
Khalen didn't move, but his thumb worried the edge of the coin like it might confess something. The silence between them felt heavy, like a door almost closing.
"You can't feed a world up there," the peddler said, and the softness died. "No soil worth anything. No rivers. No herds. Only wind and wonder and the slow truth of hunger."
Khalen's voice came out quiet. "So it became their grave."
The peddler's grin returned, crooked. "That's what sensible minds insist." He tilted his head as if listening to something Khalen couldn't hear. "But sensible minds don't wake up to shadows sliding across the moon."
From Khalen's belt, OH muttered, "I am once again asking people not to build civilizations on top of monsters. It never ends well."
The peddler's eyes flicked to the skull, just once, too quick to be an accident. Then back to Khalen.
"Some swear it still wanders," the peddler whispered. "Not hunting. Not fleeing. Just moving, like an old animal that forgot why it started walking and can't remember how to stop."
Khalen's brow furrowed. "And people believe that."
"They believe what they see," the peddler said. "Some mornings, a ridge-line crowd looks up and swears the clouds are wrong. The wind tastes of old lightning. Birds refuse to cross a patch of sky. And then, days later, something falls."
Khalen's eyes sharpened. "Falls."
The peddler's fingers drummed the table, patient. "A blade in a field that doesn't belong to any smith. Glass-metal that hums when no one touches it. A gauntlet half-buried in stone like a tooth spat from a jaw. Things too clean for ruins, too old for hands, too hungry to be called inert. Some of it drinks nearby Breath like it's tasting the room."
He didn't call them artifacts. He didn't need to. The word lived in the air anyway.
"People call it a blessing," he went on. "Or a curse. Or proof that the ancients never really died, they just climbed too high to reach." His grin widened. "Either way, it makes fools brave."
"And you tell me this," Khalen said, "because you enjoy making fools."
"No," the peddler breathed. "Because some stories don't end. They circle." His eyes sharpened, hungry again. "And because you have the look of a man about to chase something that doesn't want to be caught."
Khalen tossed a coin onto the dusty table.
"For the tale?" the peddler asked, eyes bright.
"For the memory," Khalen replied. "And because I want to know what kind of salvation still drops teeth."
The peddler smiled, slow and knowing, and entirely unhelpful.
Outside, the wind stirred the lanterns, their flames bending east, toward the Core, as if even the market had decided to keep the secret.