The central market of Val Harm never felt like chaos to those who belonged to it.
It felt like breathing the same stale lie every morning until the lungs forgot there had ever been fresh air.
Sellers muttered prices that sounded more like apologies, buyers answered with coins they both knew were already spent in their heads, and the whole square moved in the slow, practiced rhythm of people who had long ago stopped expecting anything better than more of the same.
Children slipped between legs like shadows too tired to cast themselves properly, their small hands grabbing at scraps of bread or fruit that fell from overloaded carts, eyes wide but already empty, learning early that survival was a game of quick fingers and quicker forgetting.
Old women clutched baskets that had carried the same disappointment for decades, their backs bent under the weight of years spent bargaining for less and less, voices hoarse from shouting down prices that only rose like the tide of their own bitterness.
Men bartered for bread that tasted of dust and for moments of flesh that tasted of nothing at all, their faces lined with the quiet defeat of those who had once dreamed of more but now settled for the numb routine of trade.
Stalls leaned against each other like drunks too weary to stand alone, piled with wilted vegetables, rusted tools, and trinkets carved from bones whispered to be lucky—though no luck had touched this place in generations.
The air was thick with the mingled scents of overripe produce rotting in the sun, unwashed bodies pressed too close, and the faint, acrid smoke from cookfires that promised warmth but delivered only ash.
In the shadowed alleys branching off the square, the market's true desperation played out: a man and woman pressed against a crumbling wall, grunting in frantic rhythm, her skirt hiked up, his trousers around his ankles, chasing a fleeting oblivion in each other's sweat-slicked skin—oblivious or uncaring that passersby averted their eyes, or didn't.
It was all part of the same tired spectacle: life reduced to transactions, whether in coin or flesh, each one a small surrender to the nothing that waited at the end.
Then the air changed.
Not dramatically.
Not with thunder or sudden wind.
It simply… noticed something new had arrived.
He walked through the parting crowd the way night walks through an open window—without hurry, without sound, without permission.
The vendors' voices faltered mid-sentence.
A child froze with half a stolen fig in his mouth and did not chew.
An old man's prayer died on his lips as though the god he was addressing had suddenly died.
No one stared outright.
They simply found urgent reasons to look elsewhere while every nerve in their bodies tracked him anyway.
Tall—unnaturally so, his frame towering over the hunched figures around him like a shadow stretched too long by a dying sun—he moved with the careless grace of someone who had never once worried whether the ground would hold him.
His coat was long, dark, the color of wine spilled years ago and never quite cleaned.
One glove—red, deep, the shade that only looks black until you see it in firelight.
The other hand bare, pale, almost luminous against the grime of the square.
As he passed one of those shadowed alleys, the grunting couple froze mid-thrust, their eyes widening not in shame but in something colder, deeper—the instinctive recognition that this man, with his calm crimson gaze and faint, charming smile, saw through their desperate act as easily as he saw through the market's entire pretense.
He didn't pause, didn't judge, didn't even glance their way fully—but the way his lips curved ever so slightly, as if amused by their pathetic attempt at meaning in the midst of nothing, left them both shivering, unfinished, exposed in a way no nakedness could match.
And when his eyes—crimson, calm, faintly amused—slid across the faces around him, it was not with interest.
It was with recognition.
As though he already knew every secret they were still pretending to keep from themselves—knew the lies they told at night to sleep, the small betrayals that kept them alive, the quiet rot eating them from within.
He saw the sagging tent.
The crooked board nailed above it read one unsteady word: Fortuneteller.
He entered without breaking stride.
Inside the canvas the world became very small and very quiet.
The smell of old incense and older fear hung thick.
The woman behind the low table did not lift her head at first.
Her fingers—gnarled, stained—continued tracing invisible lines on the scarred wood as though she could will the next visitor to be ordinary.
He placed his bare hand on the table.
She looked up.
For one heartbeat nothing happened.
Then her breath caught like cloth tearing.
Her chair scraped backward.
Her staff clattered to the ground.
Her eyes—sunken, ancient—widened not in surprise, but in the slow, sick recognition of someone who has just brushed against something that should not exist in the daylight.
"You…" she whispered.
Her voice cracked like dry earth.
"You will die a hideous death."
He did not move.
Did not blink.
Only tilted his head the smallest fraction, as though she had told him the weather would be cold tomorrow.
"That," he said softly, almost kindly, "has always been the likeliest ending."
Her hand shook so violently the rings on her fingers rattled against each other.
"You're mad," she rasped.
He gave the smallest, most charming of smiles—the kind that makes people lean closer even when every instinct screams to run.
"Perhaps."
Then, quieter still, with perfect courtesy:
"But your reading is not worth paying for."
She stared at him.
Not with anger.
Not with fear alone.
With the glassy horror of someone who has just seen the shape of her own grave reflected in another person's eyes.
Then she pointed at the flap with a trembling finger.
"Get out," she said, voice splintering.
"Now."
He inclined his head—polite, almost courtly.
Adjusted his coat with one smooth motion.
Turned.
The canvas fell shut behind him.
Outside, the market tried to remember how to breathe again.
Voices started up, hesitant, like instruments that had forgotten their tuning.
But the air felt thinner.
The light felt colder.
And every person who had watched him pass carried away the same unasked question lodged somewhere beneath their ribs:
Who—or what—had just walked among them wearing human skin?
He scratched his smooth chin with two fingers of his bare hand.
Whispered to no one in particular, voice low and amused:
"A waste of time."
And kept walking.
Val Harm had not yet understood what had arrived in its heart.
But it had already begun to bleed.