Page 1

1

Nepheli

Today was going to be great. The morning light blazed through the arched windowpanes and illuminated every small and large corner of the Shop with a golden, sun-scrubbed kind of beauty. The old, hardwood floors were freshly polished, eager to be worn out once again. The porcelain vases were overflowing with a merry collection of spring blossoms—bluebells and daffodils and little cheerful violets. The cherrywood shelves had been dusted down and fully stocked with all kinds of marvelous curiosities, and I was determined to share them with the world.

Today, I was going to make a sale.

It’d been a full year since my parents retired and moved to the West, and seven whole months since the Shop’s last sale—a wooden mystery box with a large lapis lazuli stone in the middle. I remembered it distinctly. Seven months of watching my savings dwindle to practically nothing. Seven months of idle days and sleepless nights, worrying and pondering a future where the Shop would no longer be a part of me.

The issue here, unlike what one might be inclined to believe, wasn’t with the Shop or with my way of managing it. The issue was with theworld.

Well, maybe not the whole, entire world, but with Elora at least, our little bleak, uncurious corner of the universe.

Elora had once been the most magical city in the Southern Kingdom. Not as exceptional as the grand cities of the East with their illustrious Universities and Magical Academies or the mysterious wonderlands of the North, butaliveat least. Every neighborhood had been bursting with Curiosity Shops and Oracle Parlors and our once famous upside-down Tea Houses, their colorful structures erected on grounds where gravity was feeling particularly funny—indeed, magic liked to linger in certain places in an almost religious manner.

All kinds of magical peculiarities had made our city extraordinary, with its people’s hearts inwrought with an unremitting sense of wonder. Then the Dreadful Mundane arrived in Elora, and everything here changed.

According to our most assiduous journalists, the Dreadful Mundane was a sickness of a sort. No one knew exactly when or how it had started, only that it was as relentless as a plague and as formidable as the weight of the sun. The sickness squeezed into people’s hearts and obliterated any curiosity and evidence of individuality, leaving them, well,mundane.

The humans of the South never had magic in their blood to begin with, but at least they used to live with it. They used to work with it, cherish it, celebrate it. Now they avoided it like an evil witch’s curse.

The Shop was the last scrap of curiosity left in Elora. It was why my parents had decided to move back to their hometown, where magic was still alive. But I could not bring myself to join them and leave the Shop behind.

Looking around the Shop, all I could see was a capsule of memories. Old books, velvet curtains, and dusty sunbeams pounding on hardwood floors, the sediment of comfort everywhere. There was the dim-lit little alcove in which I’d read all those great, heart-rending books—books that had utterly transformed me. There simmered the black cauldron on the stone hearth, the Shop’s mind and heart pulsing with a relentless crackle. There lay the endless rows of charms and trinkets, the jars of magical serums, the collection of mirrors that showed you silly things, true things, lovely things, the bundle of potions for laughter and joy, and strange, colorful dreams. There hung my favorite pink and burgundy plant pots, purplish offshoots drooping over my neat desk. There glinted the crystals behind the cabinet, refracting the light in countless, uncanny colors.

The Shop slowly but unshakably became the physical manifestation of my very personhood. I was certain that I could not exist without it. It was a part of me as much as my limbs were a part of my body.

I was trying not to be too judgmental of people. It was neither their fault nor their responsibility to see the world the way I did, but it was still hard for me to grasp how someone could simply stop being curious. If there was a sickness, then why wasn’tIaffected by it? And why did no one care about finding a cure?

The weavers of the North, the old spirits responsible for weaving magic into the fabric of reality, had to be able to help us with this. So why was no one asking for help?

With a little sigh, I shrugged off my coat, folded it over the back of my chair, and smoothed my palms over the pleats of my skirts. I’d made sure to look presentable for my customers today. I’d fixed my hair in loose curls instead of braiding it and even worn my favorite, most expensive dress. It was the color of a sugarplum, with a pretty, square neckline trimmed with tiny pink roses. It really wasn’t fit for the daytime, but it was my only dress with skirts long enough to cover my worn-out boots.

As I bent down to pick off a loose thread from the hem, a flash of metal caught my eye; the entry’s three silver bells were sprawled in the corner just behind the door.

“By the gods, what are you doing down there?” I muttered under my breath and quickly went to fix them.

From the other side of the Shop, the cauldron made a low, almost gasping sound. I cast a quizzical look at it over my shoulder.

Surprisingly, it was burning very low.

“Wait a second, I fed you yesterday!” I huffed.

The hearth of the Shop didn’t need any logs to maintain a nice, crackling fire. It only took a healthy serving of stardust into the cauldron, which was always brewing something of its own volition, and roaring flames would emerge from the dark stones to lick the aged metal.

Surely, I could be forgetful at times, but not so much as to forget to feed my own cauldron.

I hooked my hands on my hips and narrowed my eyes at it chidingly. “This is not the time to get greedy, you know. I’ve been eating bread and olives for two weeks, so you can have your stardust.”

The cauldron gurgled, its frothy green liquid forming tiny mossy bubbles, and the fire upsurged at once.

“Much better,” I permitted, checking from the Shop’s windowpanes the daily bustle of Diagonia Alley.

The cobblestone street had been worn flat and sleek by the countless passersby hurtling to and fro day after day. The ladies with their spring cotton dresses and lace-trimmed parasols, the gentlemen with their black hats and golden pocket watches, the glossy carriages dragging up a thin layer of dust while heading downtown. Such a restless place was Diagonia Alley. Yet the Shop was drowning in an ocean of silence, my breaths the only reoccurring sound like soft waves sighing on an empty shore.

I strolled back to my desk, lit the oil lamp—I had not yet gotten my hands on one of those fancy electrical ones that were the latest fashion in Elora—and perched on the large upholstered chair behind it.

I fiddled with the silver necklace around my neck as I sorted through my correspondence, and the small butterfly pendant was, as always, inexplicably warm between my fingers. I had bought this pendant from another Curiosity Shop here in Elora before it closed down. Most of our curious merchandise came from The Faraway North, a kingdom blessed with ceaseless magical resources, and I always liked to think that my little pink butterfly had traveled all across the Realm and seen all the marvelous places I’d only ever read about in books before it finally found me.