The Emporium opened without him.
Not to a visitor.
But to something else.
The front door—sealed since twilight—creaked inward on its own, spilling no wind, no light, only silence.
Something slid across the threshold. A box. Small. Old. Wrapped in paper scorched at the edges and tied with a thread made of soundless string. It didn't appear with flourish or flare. It simply was, as though it had always belonged here and the Emporium had finally remembered it.
He didn't hear it arrive.
He felt it.
Like a word pressed against the base of his skull, trying to be spoken.
The fox noticed it first. It leapt from the rafters, eyes narrowed, fur standing.
"Don't touch it yet," it warned.
But the god was already moving.
---
The box was warm to the touch.
Not with heat—but with tension, like a whisper trapped in glass. The thread unraveled on its own, falling to the counter in perfect silence. The paper peeled back. Not ripped—retreated.
Inside, nestled in velvet scorched to ash at the edges, was a mask.
Obsidian.
Veined with silver.
Shaped to fit no one exactly, yet everyone imperfectly. The edges curved in ways the eye couldn't quite follow. And behind the eye slits: nothing. Not darkness. Not hollowness. Just absence.
He reached for it—and the Emporium reacted.
The forge hissed. The garden curled its vines back behind the curtain. The red book flipped open violently and then closed again, as if in refusal.
The mirror shimmered. The pendant on the back shelf blinked violet.
A memory, half-formed, pressed against the room like a storm cloud preparing to bleed.
Then the rift opened.
And the visitor stepped through.
---
He was a man worn thin by his own choices.
Not old by years—but by weight. The kind of wear that comes not from time, but from sustaining a lie long enough that it begins to rot you from the inside.
He wore healer's garb, but it had been patched too many times. The scent of alcohol clung to him—not medicinal, but ritualistic. Not for cleaning wounds. For scrubbing away identity.
He paused when he saw the box open.
So did the shop.
The fox said nothing.
But the forge flared blue.
"You opened it," the man said.
His voice cracked.
"I didn't know what it was," the god replied.
"You wouldn't," the man said, placing a worn satchel on the floor. "Because I buried it in a part of the world that no longer remembers its own name."
He stepped closer.
"It's mine."
---
The god lifted the mask.
It felt heavier than it should have. Not in weight. In presence.
It didn't hum like a relic.
It breathed.
He turned it over—and saw something scratched faintly along the inside. A name. No, half a name. The rest had been burned away.
"Why is it here?" he asked.
The visitor didn't answer.
He only collapsed into a chair the Emporium offered him—unbidden, but perfectly placed.
The fox finally spoke.
"This mask is not made of material. It's made of memory. The kind that rewrites what you think you know."
"It wasn't meant to deceive others," the man said, voice low. "It was meant to deceive me."
---
He told the story slowly, as the forge dimmed and the garden fell still.
How he had once been a battlefield medic—not a healer, but a collector. How he had walked among the wounded not to save them, but to gather what they left behind. Regrets. Final confessions. Dying hopes.
How he had bottled those echoes and worn them, piece by piece, until he no longer knew which were his.
Until he was praised for a kindness that wasn't his to claim.
Until he began to believe it.
The god said nothing.
The mirror showed a battlefield. Rows of bodies. A man standing in the middle, unscathed, clutching a mask like it would save him from himself.
He didn't need to ask.
It was the visitor.
The man's hand shook. "There's a kind of comfort in forgetting you were the one who walked away," he murmured. "That comfort becomes a shell. And eventually, you forget you ever lived without it."
The god placed the mask down gently.
"We can give it new meaning," he said. "Or let it rest. But you have to decide which."
The visitor stared at it for a long while.
Then nodded. "Let it become something else. Something no longer mine."
---
The Emporium understood.
The forge lit—not with fire, but with intention. The same glow as memoryroot sap. The pendant near the window gleamed in harmony. The red book whispered, but remained closed.
Instead, the mirror pulsed.
And the mask... melted.
Not like metal, but like an identity coming undone.
The silver veins twisted and wove upward, forming a ring. The obsidian cracked and reformed into a shard, then split again into three.
He used the dream-thread tongs. He reached for the basin near the hearth—newly revealed, shaped like an open eye—and set each piece inside.
The Emporium sang, just once.
---
What emerged was not a mask.
It was a mirror pendant.
Palm-sized. Softly glowing. Framed in silver veins that pulsed like a heartbeat. It didn't reflect your face—it reflected your intention.
He handed it to the man.
"This is your lie," he said. "But it doesn't have to be your burden."
The man looked into it.
And for the first time in years, saw himself without the mask.
Tears ran down his face.
He placed the pendant back in the god's hand.
"No," he said. "Let someone else carry it forward. Maybe they'll make a better truth out of it than I did."
He left with no relic.
Only silence.
---
The pendant remained on the shelf.
Not under Relics.
Under Warnings.
The mirror in the garden shimmered.
And the red book, finally, opened again.
One line etched across the new page:
> Some masks lie. Others forget they're wearing one.
The god read it once.
Then he sat in the quiet.
And wondered which kind he'd worn.
Above the counter, the lanternlight flickered once—then steadied.
From the forge, a single ember rose into the air, drifting like a memory that refused to burn out.
And in the garden, one bloom folded inward, as if in mourning for something the world would never see again.
The god closed his hand around the pendant.
Just once.
Then let it go.