The air hung thick with the smell of grilled fish and jasmine incense as Aira arranged the small glass bottles on her wooden stall. Each one contained a different remedy—dried herbs from the mountains, oils infused with prayers, charms woven from red thread and bone. Her hands moved with practiced precision, muscle memory guiding her through the ritual of preparation. Arrange. Align. Breathe. The movements were meditative, almost sacred in their repetition. She'd performed this same sequence every evening for four years, and the familiarity of it was the only thing that kept her tethered to sanity.
The night market of Nan sprawled across Sumonthewarat Road like a living organism, vendors calling out their wares in the warm glow of string lights that swayed gently in the evening breeze. The sounds were a symphony she'd learned to navigate—the melodic calls of fruit vendors announcing the sweetness of their mangoes, the rhythmic sizzle of oil in woks as street food vendors prepared pad thai and satay skewers, the low murmur of customers haggling over prices in the rapid-fire Thai that marked them as locals rather than tourists. Tourists rarely came this far north anymore. The city of Nan had developed a reputation, whispered about in Bangkok travel forums and tourist blogs. Strange things happen there. People get sick. The sky does something odd at night. The rumors had a way of keeping outsiders away, which suited Aira perfectly.
She'd positioned her stall at the edge of the market, where the string lights grew dimmer and the crowd thinned considerably. The space was shadowed, tucked between a vendor selling roasted chestnuts and an elderly man who repaired watches with the precision of a surgeon. Few tourists ventured this far into the market's periphery, and locals knew better than to linger in the dimmer sections after sunset. They hurried past her stall with quick glances, purchasing her remedies with the desperation of people grasping at straws, then disappearing back into the brighter, busier sections of the market.
Aira preferred it this way. Fewer eyes meant fewer questions. Fewer questions meant fewer lies.
She wore long sleeves despite the heat—the temperature had climbed to nearly thirty-five degrees Celsius that afternoon, and the evening had brought only marginal relief. The fabric was loose and flowing, traditional Thai cotton in muted colors: grays, blacks, deep blues. The looseness served a purpose beyond comfort; it concealed the silver scars that mapped her skin like a language only she could read. The marks crisscrossed her wrists, disappeared beneath her collar to trace patterns across her collarbone and ribs, and extended down her forearms in deliberate, ritualistic lines. Each scar told a story of defiance, of self-inflicted pain meant to sever bonds that should never have existed in the first place.
Her hair was pulled back severely, twisted into a tight bun that pulled at her scalp in a way that was almost painful. The style revealed a face that had learned not to smile—sharp cheekbones that seemed to cut through her skin, dark eyes that appeared to look through people rather than at them, lips pressed into a thin line of perpetual wariness. At twenty six, she looked older. The night terrors had stolen years from her face, leaving behind something haunted and hollow, like a photograph left too long in the sun. Her skin had taken on a grayish pallor despite the tropical climate, and there were permanent shadows beneath her eyes that no amount of sleep could erase. Not that she slept much anymore.
The evening light was beginning to shift, that particular quality of illumination that came in the hour before true darkness fell. The sky above Nan was still predominantly blue, but the edges were beginning to bleed into orange and gold, and somewhere in the distance, beyond the mountains that ringed the city, the sun was making its final descent. Aira could feel it in her bones—that familiar tightening in her chest that accompanied each sunset. The knowledge that night was coming. That the dreams would come with it.
She arranged a row of small cloth sachets filled with dried herbs, each one tied with red thread. The red thread was important—it was a color of protection in Thai tradition, a ward against malevolent spirits. Her grandmother had taught her that, back when Aira was young enough to believe that such simple things could actually protect you. Back before she'd learned what her family really was. Back before she'd witnessed what they were capable of.
"Khun Aira, you have the sleeping charm again?"
The voice pulled her from her thoughts. Aira looked up to find Mrs. Porn approaching, an elderly woman whose weathered hands clutched a worn purse that had been repaired so many times it was more patches than original material. Mrs. Porn came to the market every week, always at the same time, always seeking the same thing. She'd become something like a regular customer, though Aira tried not to think of people in terms of relationships or connections. Relationships meant vulnerability. Connections meant risk.
"Yes," Aira said quietly, her voice barely above a whisper. She didn't speak more than necessary. Words were dangerous things—they could reveal too much, expose the carefully constructed walls she'd built around herself. She reached for one of the sachets, her fingers moving with the same practiced precision she used for everything else.
Mrs. Porn's face brightened slightly, though the relief in her expression was tinged with desperation. The woman looked worse than she had the previous week. Her skin had taken on a grayish quality, and her eyes held the hollow look of someone who hadn't slept properly in months. Which, Aira suspected, was probably accurate.
"How much?" Mrs. Porn asked, though they both knew the answer. Aira never changed her prices, never haggled, never deviated from the established routine. Consistency was another form of protection.
"Fifty baht," Aira said, placing the sachet in the woman's palm. The cloth was soft, worn from handling, and it released a faint herbal scent—dried bai maengda, holy basil, mixed with chamomile and something else. Something she'd learned from her family before she'd cut herself free from them. The ritual words had been whispered over the herbs as she'd prepared them in her small room, prayers to spirits that might listen, might take pity on the desperate. Whether the spirits actually heard her was a question Aira had stopped asking years ago. "Burn it before sleep. Let the smoke fill your room. It will help you rest."
Mrs. Porn's eyes glistened with something that might have been gratitude or might have been tears. "Will it work this time? My grandson, he screams at night now. Says he sees things in the red sky. Says—" She stopped abruptly, glancing around nervously as if afraid someone might overhear. Her voice dropped to barely a whisper. "Says the sky is watching him."
Aira's jaw tightened. The aurora. Of course. The aurora had been burning brighter each week, more intense, more present. She'd noticed it in a hundred small ways—in the behavior of the stray dogs that usually haunted the market, scavenging for scraps. They'd disappeared entirely three weeks ago, and no one had seen them since. In the way the vendors spoke in lower voices, their conversations becoming more guarded as the sun descended. In the way people hurried home before full darkness fell, their movements taking on an almost frantic quality. In the way the air itself seemed to change as evening approached, becoming heavier, charged with an electricity that made her skin prickle.
And in the way her scars burned.
"The charm will help," Aira said, though she wasn't certain of anything anymore. Certainty was a luxury she'd surrendered years ago. "Tell him to keep it under his pillow. The smoke will protect him from bad dreams."
It was a lie, or at least a half-truth. The charm might help. It might not. What Aira had learned in her four years in Nan was that protection was largely an illusion, a comforting story people told themselves so they could sleep at night. But people needed those stories. They needed to believe that something—anything—could shield them from the darkness that was creeping across their city like a stain.
Mrs. Porn pressed extra bills into Aira's hand—payment for hope, for the illusion of control. Aira didn't refuse. She needed the money to maintain her invisibility, her small room above the closed tailor shop, her solitude. Money was another form of protection, a way to keep the world at arm's length.
As the woman shuffled away, disappearing back into the brighter sections of the market, Aira's fingers brushed against the scars on her wrist, hidden beneath her sleeve. They tingled slightly, a sensation like electricity running through her veins, like something beneath her skin was trying to wake up. It happened more often now, especially as the sun descended. Her family's blood responding to something in the air. Something calling to it.
The market continued its evening symphony around her—the sizzle of oil in woks, the melodic calls of vendors announcing their wares, the low murmur of customers haggling over prices. The sounds were comforting in their familiarity, a white noise that allowed Aira to retreat into her own mind while still maintaining the appearance of being present. She'd become expert at this kind of dissociation, at existing in a space between engagement and complete withdrawal.
A young couple passed by her stall, their hands intertwined, their heads bent close together as they whispered something that made them both laugh. Aira watched them with a detached curiosity, trying to remember what it felt like to be that comfortable with another person. She couldn't. The memory was too distant, buried beneath years of isolation and self-imposed exile.
She'd been in Nan for four years now, ever since she'd fled Bangkok in the middle of the night with nothing but a backpack and the clothes on her back. Four years of working at the night market, of renting a small room above a closed tailor shop on a quiet side street, of keeping to herself and speaking only when necessary. Four years of building a life so small and quiet that it barely existed at all. She had no friends, no family connections, no romantic entanglements. She had her stall, her remedies, her small room, and the night terrors that came without fail every evening.
It was supposed to be safe. Isolation was supposed to be a shield.
But the night terrors had followed her north anyway, as if they were tethered to her by invisible threads that distance couldn't sever. Every night, without exception, she woke gasping, her sheets soaked with sweat, her heart hammering against her ribs with such force that she thought it might break through her chest. The dreams were fragmented, dreamlike in their illogic, but they carried a weight of terrible significance that lingered long after she woke.
The images came in flashes: candlelight casting dancing shadows across stone walls, the smell of incense mixed with something metallic and wrong, her mother's voice chanting in a language that predated modern Thai—something older, something that belonged to the mountains and the spirits that dwelt there. She saw a young woman's face, beautiful and terrified, twisted in agony as something dark poured out of her eyes like ink dissolving in water. She saw her own hands, younger hands, moving in ritualistic patterns, tracing symbols in the air that seemed to burn with their own light.
Aira never remembered the details clearly when she woke. The dreams had a way of slipping away like water through her fingers, leaving behind only impressions and emotions. But the feeling of them remained, heavy and suffocating. The weight of guilt. The certainty that she was responsible for something unspeakable. The knowledge that she'd been complicit in something that had destroyed another person.
And the scars on her skin would burn, as if in response to the guilt, as if her own flesh was punishing her for crimes she couldn't quite remember committing.
She'd performed the ritual herself, three years ago, in her small room by candlelight. She'd taken a knife—a ceremonial blade that had belonged to her grandmother—and she'd carved symbols into her own flesh with deliberate precision. The symbols were meant to sever spiritual bonds, to cut the threads that connected her to her family's legacy. Each cut had been an act of defiance against the darkness they cultivated, a declaration that she would not be like them. That she would not use blood magic for profit and power. That she would not become a vessel for the ancient, hungry things her family had learned to bargain with.
The pain had been exquisite. Clarifying. For a few months afterward, the night terrors had lessened. She'd thought she was free. She'd thought the ritual had worked, that she'd successfully severed herself from the curse that ran through her bloodline like poison through water.
But the dreams had returned, worse than before. And now, as the aurora burned brighter each night, painting the sky in shades of crimson that seemed almost alive, Aira had begun to suspect that the scars weren't a shield at all. They were a beacon. A signal. A call.
She began organizing her bottles more carefully, arranging them by color and purpose. The oils infused with jasmine and sandalwood went on the left. The herbal sachets went in the center. The charms woven from red thread and bone went on the right. The organization was meticulous, almost obsessive, but it gave her something to focus on besides the growing dread that accompanied each passing minute.
The sun was sinking lower, painting the sky in shades of orange and gold that were almost painfully beautiful. The light had taken on that particular quality that came in the hour before true darkness fell—golden and thick, like honey, casting long shadows across the market. The vendors were beginning to move more quickly, their calls becoming more urgent. The evening rush was beginning, those final desperate hours when customers hurried to purchase what they needed before the market closed and the real darkness came.
Aira prepared herself for the influx. She straightened her stall, made sure all her bottles were visible and accessible, arranged her change in neat piles. The routine was soothing, meditative. It allowed her to exist in a state of semi-consciousness, performing the necessary actions without engaging her mind too deeply.
A group of teenagers passed by, their uniforms marking them as students from the local school. They were laughing, their voices bright and unconcerned, seemingly unaware of the way the light was changing, the way the shadows were growing longer. Aira envied them their obliviousness. She tried to remember what it felt like to be young and unaware of the darkness that lurked beneath the surface of the world. She couldn't.
The market was filling up now, the evening rush in full swing. Vendors called out their wares with increased urgency, and customers moved between stalls with purpose, purchasing what they needed before the sun completed its descent.
Aira watched the flow of people with the detached observation of someone watching a film—present but not truly participating, observing but not engaging.
An elderly man stopped at her stall, his weathered face creased with concern. He purchased a charm for protection without speaking, pressing bills into her hand and hurrying away. A middle-aged woman came next, seeking a remedy for headaches. Then a young mother with a feverish child, desperate for anything that might bring down the temperature. Aira served them all with the same quiet efficiency, her movements automatic, her voice barely above a whisper.
With each transaction, her scars tingled slightly, as if responding to the desperation of the people who came to her. She'd learned to read people through their purchases—the sleeping charms indicated insomnia and anxiety, the protection amulets indicated fear, the healing oils indicated pain both physical and emotional. The night market of Nan was a place where people came seeking solutions to problems that had no real solutions, grasping at the hope that a charm or a remedy might somehow change their circumstances.
Aira understood that desperation intimately. She'd been grasping at straws for four years, hoping that isolation and ritual and careful control might somehow protect her from the darkness that ran through her veins. So far, it hadn't worked. The darkness was still there, still calling to her, still manifesting in the night terrors and the burning scars and the way her blood seemed to respond to the aurora.
The sky was deepening now, the orange and gold giving way to deeper shades of purple and blue. The sun had nearly completed its descent, and soon the real darkness would come. Aira could feel it approaching like a physical presence, like something alive and aware, moving toward her with inexorable purpose.
And with the darkness would come the aurora.
She'd first seen it three months after arriving in Nan. She'd been in her small room, unable to sleep despite her exhaustion, when she'd noticed the sky beginning to glow.
At first, she'd thought it was a fire somewhere in the city, but the glow had been too uniform, too vast. She'd gone to her window and looked out at the sky, and her breath had caught in her throat.
The aurora was unlike anything she'd ever seen. It wasn't the gentle, ethereal aurora borealis of the far north—those dancing curtains of green and blue light. This was something else entirely. This was crimson, deep blood-red, and it seemed to pulse with its own rhythm, like a heartbeat made visible. It covered the entire northern sky, and it was alive in a way that natural phenomena shouldn't be. She could feel it, even from her window, a presence that was almost sentient, almost aware of her watching.
She'd stood at her window for hours that night, unable to look away, unable to move. And as she'd watched, she'd felt her scars burning, felt her blood responding to the light as if recognizing something in it. Something familiar. Something that called to the darkness within her.
The aurora had appeared almost every night since then, though its intensity varied. Some nights it was barely visible, a faint reddish tint to the sky that most people probably didn't even notice. Other nights it burned so brightly that it cast shadows across the city, and the locals hurried home with fear in their eyes, speaking in hushed tones about death and omens.
The locals had a name for it: Fah Daeng—the Crimson Sky. And they'd learned to read it like an omen. The brighter it burned, the closer death walked among them. In the weeks when the aurora burned brightest, people died. Animals disappeared. There were accidents, illnesses, suicides. The city seemed to be slowly consuming itself from within, and the aurora was the visible manifestation of that consumption.
Aira had begun to suspect that the aurora was connected to her somehow. That her presence in Nan had triggered it, or awakened it, or called to it across some distance she didn't understand. The thought terrified her. The thought that her mere existence might be causing harm to the people around her, that her isolation and her scars and her family's dark legacy might be poisoning the city itself.
She'd considered leaving. Many times. She'd packed her backpack and stood at her door, ready to flee into the night, to disappear into another city and start over again. But something always stopped her. A kind of paralysis, or perhaps a kind of resignation. The knowledge that running wouldn't help, that the darkness would follow her no matter where she went.
So she stayed. She worked at the night market. She sold her remedies and her charms. She tried to help people in small ways, even as she suspected that her very presence was slowly killing them.
The sun had nearly disappeared now, and the vendors were beginning to pack up their stalls. The market was entering that liminal space between day and night, that moment of transition when the world seemed to hold its breath. The string lights overhead glowed more brightly now, casting the market in a warm, golden illumination that felt almost defiant in the face of the approaching darkness.
Aira began organizing her stall for closing, moving with the same careful precision she used for everything else. She wrapped the bottles in cloth, secured them in their wooden crates, counted her earnings and placed them in a small leather pouch. The routine was soothing, meditative, a way of marking the passage of time and the transition from one state of being to another.
The market was emptying now, the evening rush having passed. Most of the vendors were packing up, their calls becoming less frequent, their movements taking on the quality of ritual closing rather than active commerce. The tourists and casual shoppers had disappeared, heading back to their hotels or homes. What remained were the hardcore regulars, the people for whom the night market was a necessity rather than a leisure activity.
Aira was nearly finished packing when she noticed the light beginning to change in a way that had nothing to do with the sunset. The sky above Nan was beginning to glow, a faint reddish tint creeping across the horizon like blood spreading through water. Her scars began to burn.
Not yet, she thought, her hands stilling in their work. It's too early. The sun hasn't even fully set.
But the aurora was coming anyway, arriving earlier than usual, burning brighter than it had in weeks. The glow intensified, spreading across the sky like a living thing, and Aira could feel it—that presence, that awareness, that terrible hunger. It was calling to her, reaching across the distance between them, seeking her out with the persistence of something that knew exactly where to find her.
She gripped the edge of her stall, her knuckles turning white, trying to ground herself in the physical world. The wood was solid beneath her fingers, real and tangible. The sounds of the market continued around her—vendors calling out final prices, the clink of coins, the rustle of plastic bags. These were real things, present-moment things, things that existed independent of the aurora and its terrible pull.
But her scars were burning so intensely now that she thought she might scream. The silver lines on her skin seemed to glow with their own light, responding to the crimson aurora above, resonating with it like tuning forks vibrating at the same frequency. She could feel her blood responding, feel something ancient and hungry stirring in the depths of her being, something that had been sleeping but was now beginning to wake.
She closed her eyes, trying to breathe through the sensation, trying to center herself. You are safe. You are in control. You are alone.
But even as she repeated the mantras that had sustained her for four years, she knew they were lies. She wasn't safe. She wasn't in control. And she was about to stop being alone.
"Do you have anything," a voice asked, soft as silk and twice as dangerous, "for someone who can't sleep because they're afraid of what they'll dream?"
Aira's eyes snapped open.
The woman was standing at her stall, and Aira had no idea how long she'd been there. She hadn't heard her approach, hadn't sensed her presence until she spoke. The woman was pale—unnaturally so, like someone who hadn't seen sunlight in years, or perhaps someone who had never been entirely alive in the first place. She wore dark clothing despite the heat, layers of black fabric that seemed to absorb the light rather than reflect it. Her movements were fluid, almost boneless, as if her body was only loosely connected to the physical world.
But it was her eyes that made Aira's breath catch in her throat.
They were the color of storm clouds, gray and turbulent, and they held the weight of decades of loneliness. There was something ancient in those eyes, something that had seen too much and survived too long. They were the eyes of someone who had loved and lost, who had been broken and never quite healed, who had learned to exist in the spaces between life and death.
The woman's gaze met Aira's, and in that moment, something shifted. The night terrors that had plagued Aira every evening for four years, the constant background hum of dread that had become as familiar as her own heartbeat, simply stopped. The sensation was so sudden, so complete, that it felt like waking from a nightmare into blessed silence.
In its place was something else—a pull, magnetic and irresistible, like gravity itself had shifted to draw her toward this stranger. Like the universe had suddenly realigned itself around this single moment, this single encounter.
"I…" Aira's voice came out hoarse, barely recognizable as her own. She cleared her throat, trying again. "I have something."
The woman smiled, and it was the saddest thing Aira had ever seen. It was a smile that carried the weight of impossible choices, of love that could only end in destruction, of beauty that existed in the shadow of tragedy.
"I know you do," the woman whispered, her voice carrying a note of recognition that suggested she knew far more than she should. "I can feel it."
Above them, the crimson aurora burned brighter, painting the sky in shades of blood-red that seemed almost alive. And Aira understood, in that moment, that her carefully constructed isolation had just come to an end. That the darkness she'd been running from had finally caught up with her. That her life, as she'd known it, was about to change in ways she couldn't predict or control.
Aira's hands trembled as she reached for one of her sachets, though she wasn't entirely sure which one she was selecting. Her mind felt scattered, fragmented, unable to focus on anything except the woman standing before her. The woman's presence seemed to fill the entire stall, seemed to displace the air itself, making it difficult to breathe.
"What's your name?" Aira asked, the question escaping before she could stop it. She never asked customers their names. Names created connections, and connections were dangerous.
"Nyx," the woman said simply. "And you are?"
"Aira." The name felt strange in her mouth, as if she was speaking it for the first time, as if the woman's presence had somehow made her real in a way she hadn't been before.
Nyx reached out and took the sachet from Aira's hand, their fingers brushing for just a moment. The contact sent a shock through Aira's entire body, a sensation like electricity, like recognition, like coming home after a lifetime of wandering in the dark. She gasped, pulling her hand back, but it was too late. The connection had been made.
"Thank you," Nyx said softly, tucking the sachet into the folds of her dark clothing. "I think this is exactly what I need."
She turned to leave, moving with that same fluid grace, and Aira found herself reaching out, her hand grasping at empty air.
"Wait," she called out, her voice desperate in a way that shocked her. "Will you… will you come back?"
Nyx paused, turning back to look at her. In the light of the aurora, which was now burning so brightly that it cast everything in shades of crimson and shadow, her pale skin seemed almost translucent, as if she was only barely tethered to the physical world.
"Yes," Nyx said, and there was something like sadness in her voice, something like resignation. "I will come back. I don't think I have a choice."
And then she was gone, disappearing into the shadows at the edge of the market, moving toward the darkness beyond the string lights. Aira stood frozen at her stall, her hand still outstretched, her scars burning so intensely that she thought they might consume her entirely.
Above, the crimson aurora pulsed like a heartbeat, and Aira understood with absolute certainty that her life had just split into two distinct parts: before Nyx, and after. There was no going back. There was no returning to the small, quiet existence she'd constructed for herself. The darkness had found her, and it wore the face of a beautiful, tragic woman with storm-cloud eyes.
She stood at her stall for a long time after Nyx disappeared, unable to move, unable to think, unable to do anything except feel the burning of her scars and the terrible, wonderful silence where her night terrors used to be.
The market continued around her, vendors finishing their closing routines, the last customers hurrying home before full darkness fell. But Aira existed in a separate space now, a space where nothing else mattered except the memory of Nyx's touch and the knowledge that everything was about to change.
When she finally packed up her stall and headed home through the darkened streets of Nan, the aurora followed her, burning brighter with each step, as if celebrating the moment when two broken souls had finally found each other in the darkness.