It was a quiet afternoon, one of those rare summer days when the wind carries with it the scent of blooming flowers and distant laughter. The cobbled streets were warm beneath the shoes of the two wandering figures—Father Hearth, stoic and reserved in his familiar dark coat, and Mother Goose, expressive as ever, her sunhat flopping slightly with every dramatic tilt of her head as she spoke of the children's latest chaos.
They were enjoying the breeze, letting the sunlight paint their path gold, when they heard murmurs ahead.
A small crowd had gathered near the fountain square. Curious but not concerned, the two drifted closer, just enough to glimpse what had everyone whispering.
There, at the center of the onlookers, stood a young woman. She looked no older than twenty, though something about her made time feel irrelevant. Her skin was pale like the moon's reflection in a lake. Her eyes mismatched—one a calm, endless aqua, the other a luminous, unsettling yellow-green. She moved slowly, hesitantly, as though unsure how to walk through the world. Her hands fluttered like butterflies near her face, brushing invisible strands of thought from the air. Her clothes didn't match—stripes, lace, mismatched shoes, and a scarf tied around her waist for no apparent reason. Her hair shimmered in pastel shades that changed subtly when she turned her head.
"She seems… lost," Mother Goose whispered.
"Or distracted," Father Hearth added quietly, his gaze steady but unreadable.
They watched in silence as the girl looked around, blinked slowly at a pigeon, whispered something unintelligible, and then began to walk—if it could be called that. Her steps were unsteady, like she wasn't entirely sure where the ground was.
The crowd dispersed gradually, more curious than alarmed. Father Hearth and Mother Goose eventually continued on, the girl vanishing into a side street behind them.
"Well, that was strange," Mother Goose said, brushing her skirt. "Poor girl must be from one of the outer realms. Perhaps a dream walker?"
"Perhaps," Father Hearth replied, already checking his pocket watch, even though they weren't on a schedule.
They walked a while longer, enjoying the hush of a rare uneventful day.
Until they saw her again.
This time, she was seated cross-legged on the low stone wall of the bridge overlooking the river. Her hair was now a different hue—sunset pink with streaks of starlight blue. She was humming to herself and feeding invisible fish with crumbs of a cookie she had no memory of acquiring.
When she spotted them, her entire face lit up.
"Ohhh! Hello!" she chirped, waving both hands enthusiastically, nearly toppling backward into the water. "It's you two! Of course, it's you two! I knew I would see you again before we ever met!"
Father Hearth raised an eyebrow. "We've… met?"
"No, not yet. Not then, anyway. Or maybe it was during the jellyfish opera," she answered, tapping her chin with a piece of chalk that hadn't been there a second ago. "But it doesn't matter now because it's now! Now-now. Hello-now!"
"…Do we know you?" Mother Goose asked slowly.
"Oh! Silly names and namey sills!" she giggled. "I'm Delirium. Not a goddess, not a ghost, not a dream. I'm what happens when the world turns sideways and the stars forget their lunchboxes."
She smiled like that made perfect sense.
"Delirium," Father Hearth repeated, his voice carefully neutral. "A concept."
"Mmhmm! Personified, glorified, magnified and definitely not classified!" she nodded, her eyes flickering between colors now—stormy blue, rose gold, pale lime. "I was fish once. I think. Or was it a balloon?"
Mother Goose tilted her head. "Are you alright, dear?"
"I'm always alright when I'm not alright," Delirium said, picking up a pebble and handing it to a passing moth. "Except when I'm sideways. Sideways makes me sneeze metaphors."
Her speech bounced like a dropped marble—fast, then slow, then fast again, jumping from topic to topic with no warning or logic. She spoke about time as if it were soup, about shoes that walked backwards, about jellybean prophecies and rubber duck kingdoms. She recited a poem halfway through a sentence and switched to a lullaby mid-laugh.
Through it all, Mother Goose and Father Hearth listened.
Or at least, they tried.
Delirium twirled suddenly, her scarf fluttering like a kite, and looked at them with surprising clarity.
"I like you both," she said quietly. "You're warm places. Safe. Like stories told under quilts or the smell of bread before it's finished baking."
Then just like that, she grinned again and skipped away—actually skipped, shoes making a joyful racket on the cobblestones, scattering pigeons and laughter behind her.
She turned the corner and was gone.
The silence that followed her absence felt louder than any noise.
Father Hearth stared in the direction she vanished. "Did any of that make sense?"
Mother Goose was blinking rapidly. "I'm not sure… but I feel like we were just hugged by an existential riddle."
"She said we were warm."
"She also said she used to be a fish."
"…Should we be concerned?"
"I think we'd lose our sanity if we were."
They stood there a moment longer. Then, like all things in the House of the Hearth, they simply accepted it, as oddities were their constant neighbors.
"She talked to a moth," Father Hearth said as they resumed walking.
"I've talked to worse," Mother Goose replied.
Neither of them noticed that one of Delirium's mismatched socks had somehow ended up in Mother Goose's purse. Nor that the pebble Delirium gave to the moth was now on Father Hearth's coat lapel, perfectly balanced and humming ever so faintly in an inaudible lullaby.
Delirium had passed through their day like a dream.
And dreams, after all, were the House of the Hearth's most frequent and most unpredictable guests.