The city always smelled of rain, even when the skies were dry. The streets shimmered with a sheen of neon light, reflections stretching across puddles that never seemed to dry. Vendors shouted in a dozen languages, selling everything from counterfeit jewelry to fragments of memory sealed in small, glowing vials.
Lina pulled her hood tighter, pressing herself into the shadows as she walked. The Market of Forgotten Things was no place for the clean or the hopeful; it was a place for those who wanted to leave parts of themselves behind. Tonight, she was one of them.
She passed a stall where a woman sold childhood summers in glass spheres. If you held one to your temple, you'd smell the salt of a sea you had never visited, hear the laughter of cousins you never had, feel sun-warmed skin that wasn't yours. Another man offered "first kisses" bottled in red vials, promising you could taste sweetness and awkwardness all at once.
Lina ignored them. She hadn't come for cheap tricks. She had come for erasure.
Her chest ached the way it always did when his face appeared in her mind—his laugh, his hands, the way his absence carved a hollow through her like acid. Her lover had been gone two years, but grief had a way of mutating, growing stronger instead of weaker. She had tried everything: distraction, time, even the expensive therapy where machines smoothed over memory. None of it worked.
Tonight was her last attempt. Tonight, she would find the Sculptor.
She had heard his name whispered in the market before, always with caution. Memory dealers could cut, trade, or copy—but the Sculptor could reshape. He could sand down the jagged edges of grief, alter a face into a stranger's, turn sorrow into indifference. Some said he was a myth, an invention dealers used to lure the desperate. Others said he was real—and dangerous.
Lina had nothing left to lose.
A boy with metal implants for eyes stopped her near an alley. "Looking for dreams, lady?" His voice was too eager. "I've got first loves, weddings, even deaths if you're into that sort of thrill—"
"I'm looking for the Sculptor," she said.
The boy froze. The mechanical lenses in his eyes clicked as they narrowed on her. For a long moment, the only sound was the dripping of water from an overhead pipe. Then he smiled, though it didn't reach his eyes.
"Follow the red lights," he whispered. "And don't tell anyone I sent you."
Lina nodded, pulling her hood lower. She turned into the alley, her boots crunching against glass. The further she went, the quieter the market became, until the only sounds were her own breathing and the faint hum of electricity.
The alley opened into a narrow street, lit only by a row of red lanterns. They swung in the wind, their glow faint and sickly, painting the walls in streaks of blood. At the very end of the path was a single door, old wood reinforced with steel.
Her hands trembled as she raised them to knock.
The door opened before she could.
A man stood there, tall, his frame cloaked in shadow. His hair was black, his face sharp, carved with an elegance that felt deliberate, dangerous. But it was his eyes that caught her—the strange glint in them, as though they carried the weight of hundreds of lives.
"You're late," he said softly. His voice was neither welcoming nor cruel—merely inevitable, as if he had been expecting her all along.
Lina's breath caught. "You're the Sculptor."
"You came to be broken," he said, not asking. "Or to be healed. The two are the same."
Something in his words made her throat tighten. She wanted to run, but her feet carried her inside.
The room was nothing like she expected. No machines, no wires, no glowing screens. Only shelves stacked with glass vials that pulsed with faint light. Each vial shimmered as though it held a living fragment, a piece of a soul.
"This is where I work," the Sculptor said. He moved with deliberate grace, his long fingers brushing against the vials as he walked past them. "The dealers out there cut with knives. I use finer tools."
"What do you take?" she asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
His eyes lingered on her. "Pieces of you. A memory to replace a memory. A truth for a lie. Love, perhaps."
She shivered. "I don't care. Just… take him out of me."
He studied her in silence, then stepped closer. She felt the weight of his presence, the pull of something magnetic, dangerous.
"Be careful what you ask me to remove," he murmured. "When you erase grief, you also erase love. Without one, the other cannot exist."
"I don't care," she repeated, though her voice cracked. "I just want the pain gone."
For the first time, he smiled. It wasn't kind. It was the smile of someone who saw the outcome before it happened, and knew it couldn't be stopped.
"Then sit," he said, motioning toward the single chair in the room. "Let me carve.".