The path narrowed into a canyon before opening again—sudden, wide, and strangely alive. Tents bloomed like strange flowers across the flattened valley, their colors too bright for the stone-gray cliffs that surrounded them. Lanterns hung from crooked poles, casting soft gold across dust and bone.
Corren had not meant to find it. But fate had always played its games.
The Echo Market.
He'd heard rumors—half-myths muttered in taverns and whispered in prison cells. A market that appeared in lost places, where gold bought secrets and names were traded like weapons. Nothing here was quite legal. And nothing was ever safe.
Which made it perfect.
He entered with his hood low, boots scuffed, cloak stained just enough to blend in. The air smelled of spice and copper, of ash and something older.
A woman sold songs bottled in glass spheres—when opened, they played a memory too painful to keep. A man in a vulture-feathered coat bartered in shadows. Children ran between stalls barefoot, laughing in a language he didn't know.
No one asked who he was.
That was the rule.
He drifted through the crowd, eyes scanning for something he couldn't name. He saw relics—some clearly fake, others disturbingly real. One blade hummed when touched. Another wept rust. A tooth wrapped in silk pulsed faintly in its box.
Then he saw the stall.
But just before it, something else caught his eye.
A sword. Resting alone on a cracked leather mat. It didn't glow. Didn't hum. Just... waited. The blade was a strange metallic green—not painted, but forged that way, like the color of deep forest moss mixed with something older, colder. It shimmered when it caught the light, but never the same way twice. Its hilt was wrapped in some kind of scaled leather, and the crossguard was shaped like the wings of a moth.
When he touched it, something pulsed up his arm. Not pain. Not song.
Something in between.
The vendor—a hunched man with milky eyes—grinned. "You've got a pull for strange things, don't you?"
"What is it?"
"Old. Cursed, maybe. Don't know its name. Doesn't like most hands."
Corren tightened his grip. The blade didn't resist.
"How much?"
"Too much for fools. Just enough for you."
He paid with the last of the basilisk coin. When he slid the blade into the spare sheath beneath his cloak, it felt... right. Too right.
He didn't know then that it had a name.
Virellen.
He didn't know that when the song began, the sword would sing too—its edge vibrating so fast it could slice through steel, through bone, through fate itself.
But the Songbinder's stall still waited.
Corren stepped closer. The items were stranger here. A flute carved from bone. A ring that sang when spun. A cracked mirror that showed a different face if you stared too long.
And then—
A disc of etched silver. Plain, save for a pattern around the edge. Interlocking spirals and narrow lines. He knew it.
Not from study. Not from books.
From his mother's shawl.
He hadn't seen it since he was small—stitched into the fabric, worn but carefully done. A design she'd claimed meant nothing. But she'd never thrown it away.
His hand hovered over the disc.
"Where did you get this?" he asked.
The Songbinder tilted their head. Their voice came like parchment tearing. "You shouldn't exist. Not untethered."
The words struck like ice.
Corren narrowed his eyes. "What do you mean?"
But the Songbinder was already moving. One blink, and they had disappeared behind the hanging cloth. Another, and the stall was empty.
No trace. Not even a footprint.
He spun, scanning the crowd. Nothing. Only masked faces and shifting tents.
The disc was gone.
The question remained.
He stood there long after the crowd forgot him, the name echoing in his mind.
Untethered.
What had they meant?
And why did the pattern match the only thing his mother had never explained?
Fate, as always, offered a glimpse.
Then turned away.