The Archive

The Discovery

There was once a woman who loved Mahjong more than anything else in the world. Every Wednesday evening she carried the same woven basket through the village square, where laughter drifted from the open windows of the tea house and familiar faces were already waiting around the table. She wasn't the best player, nor the luckiest, but no one enjoyed the game quite as much as she did. If there was one place where she felt she truly belonged, it was there.

One rainy afternoon, while wandering through the oldest part of town, she stepped into a narrow antique shop she could not remember seeing before. Dust covered nearly every shelf, and the scent of cedar and old paper lingered in the still air. Broken clocks, tarnished candlesticks, and forgotten trinkets filled every corner, yet her eyes were drawn to a weathered wooden box tucked beneath a stack of faded chessboards.

When she lifted the lid, the room seemed strangely quiet.

Inside rested the most beautiful Mahjong set she had ever seen. Every tile had been carved by hand. Delicate engravings surrounded symbols unlike any she had seen before, and the polished backs shimmered with deep emerald swirls that seemed to shift beneath the light.

The old shopkeeper watched in silence as she admired the old Mahjong set.

“You have a good eye,” he said at last. “Unfortunately, so did the woman who owned it before you.”

She smiled, thinking he was trying to make the sale more interesting.

“Don't worry,” she replied. “I'll take good care of it.”

His smile never came.

“I'm afraid that's exactly how it begins,” he quietly said.

Fortune's Favorite

The following Wednesday, the woman returned to the tea house carrying the wooden box beneath her arm, unable to hide the excitement of bringing something so unusual to the table. For years she had arrived with the same worn set that had seen countless evenings of laughter, arguments, victories, and defeats. She had never been the strongest player among her friends, but she had always loved the game itself, and that had been enough.

This time, however, everyone noticed something different before the first tile was even dealt.

The new set passed around the table as each player admired the careful engravings, the strange symbols carved into the faces, and the deep emerald patterns that seemed to move beneath the light. They traced the borders with their fingertips and wondered aloud where such an unusual set could have been made.

Only after the first tiles had been dealt did anyone begin to notice that the game felt different.

A fortunate draw here, an unexpected discard there. The sort of luck every Mahjong player hopes for but rarely receives. Yet as the evening continued, the coincidences became harder to ignore. The exact tile she needed seemed to appear at the perfect moment, and hands that should have fallen apart somehow found their way toward completion.

Her friends laughed and accused her of finally discovering her secret talent. One suggested she should buy a lottery ticket before her luck disappeared. Another joked that perhaps she had made a bargain with some forgotten spirit hidden inside the old box.

She laughed along with them, enjoying the attention more than she wanted to admit.

For years, she had been the one who watched others celebrate their victories. She had been the one who congratulated the winner, collected the discarded tiles, and returned to the table the following week hoping that perhaps this time would be different.

That evening, for the first time, everyone was watching her.

When the last hand ended and the candles burned low, she carefully returned each tile to the wooden box. As she walked home, still carrying the warmth of the night with her, she told herself it was only a lucky night, nothing more.

“Thank you,” she whispered to the tiles. As she walked away, she thought she heard something stir from within the wooden case, but she only smiled, convinced that exhaustion had played a trick on her ears.

The Tea House

The woman nudged the tea house door open with her shoulder, careful not to tip her basket balanced against her hip. Wednesday evenings always found the village there. It had been that way for as long as anyone could remember. Fields were left until morning, laundry remained hanging a little longer, and suppers were eaten early so that, by the time the church bell struck six, the first walls of mahjong tiles were already taking shape across the wooden tables.

A wave of warmth greeted her as she stepped inside. Someone had stirred another log into the stove, and the room carried the familiar scent of burning oak, black tea, and polished wood. Along the windows, candles flickered lazily against the darkening sky, while conversations drifted from one table to another without anyone seeming to finish a single story. She set the basket beside the teapot and folded back the linen cloth.

The smell of honey and cinnamon cupcakes spread through the room almost immediately.

Old Joseph wandered over with the casualness of a man who wished to appear uninterested. “I was only looking for a cup,” he insisted after she caught him peering into the basket. She smiled and handed him a cupcake before he could continue defending himself. Across the room, his wife Miriam noticed the exchange and laughed quietly. “You've encouraged him,” she said. “Now he'll expect baked goods every Wednesday.”

“He already does.” the woman said. She began pouring tea while the others drifted over one by one. Someone admired the cupcakes. Someone else complained that Joseph had taken the largest without waiting. It was an argument no one intended to win, and by the time the kettle was empty, it had dissolved into laughter.

As she carried the last cup toward the nearest table, Miriam glanced at the cloth bag hanging from her shoulder. “Did you bring your new green tiles?”

The woman shook her head. “I thought we'd play with the regular set tonight.”

“What a shame,” Miriam said. “I was hoping to see them again.”

Old Joseph looked up from the wall he was building.

“The shiny emerald ones?”, the old man said.

He clicked his tongue softly before returning to his tiles.

“Next Wednesday, then”, he announced loudly.

“Next Wednesday,” the woman promised.

The games began without ceremony, as they always did. Dice rolled across the table, walls were pushed into place, and before long the room settled into the gentle rhythm she loved most: the quiet click of tiles against wood, interrupted every so often by a groan, a chuckle, or Old Joseph insisting that someone had shuffled badly.

She was never the strongest player, but she was still pleased watching someone else complete a beautiful hand. That, Miriam liked to say, was why everyone enjoyed sitting across from her.

An Unexpected Guest

The next Wednesday arrived with a bright, clear dawn.

Awakening to the accustomed song of mockingbirds outside her bedroom window, the woman stayed still for another minute to listen. Sunlight filtered through the curtains of her grandparents' old cottage, casting warmth across the worn wooden floorboards. Even after all this time, Wednesdays still held a distinct, familiar feeling.

She stood before the mirror after washing up, drawing a brush slowly through her charcoal hair. As she did, her gaze drifted toward a faded photograph resting on the shelf nearby.

Taking a deep breath, she picked up the frame and let out a quiet sigh.

Smiling back at her were two young girls, their cheeks flushed from the winter cold, holding mahjong tiles that seemed far too large for their tiny hands.

Her thumb traced the edge of the weathered frame.

“Tonight is Mahjong night, Monkey,” she whispered softly.

A gentle laugh escaped her lips. “You'll still find something to complain about when you lose.”

The words escaped as little more than a whisper.

For a moment she could almost hear it all again. The crackling fireplace, the sound of tiles clicking across the table and the smell of her grandmother's honey cakes and black tea. Her grandfather winking whenever he drew a good tile, convinced it brought everyone else luck too. Her grandmother pretending not to notice him stealing sweets before supper. Monkey laughing so hard she could hardly keep her tiles in her hands.

Her smile lasted for only a few short moments. The silence that followed reminded her that memories were poor company.

She returned the picture to its place, chose the crimson dress she had sewn herself, and reached for the basket waiting beside the door. Today she still needed to gather herbs from the forest, tend the little vegetable patch behind the cottage, bake honey cakes for the evening, and somehow arrive at the tea house before the first game began.

She had barely cracked the door open when something green exploded through the gap.

It slipped past her feet before the door was even fully open.

She screamed and stumbled backward, her heart lurching into her throat. Her hand found the broom leaning against the wall before her mind had caught up. Instinct took over.

She swung.

The crack of wood against something soft echoed through the cottage.

The creature tumbled across the floorboards and came to a stop. Silence. Her breath caught as she edged closer.

Only then did she see it.

A tiny green toad no larger than her hand lay curled against the leg of the table. Its skin was the deep green of moss after rain, speckled with darker patches. What caught her attention, however, were its eyes. They were an unusual shade of red, bright against the green, watching her with frightened confusion.

The broom slipped from her fingers.

“Oh no!”

She lowered herself onto the floor, her knees striking the wood harder than she noticed.

“I'm so sorry!”, she cried.

The little toad tried to hop away.

Its injured leg folded beneath it almost immediately.

She pressed both hands to her head.

“I frightened you... and now you're hurt.”

She put the little injured toad in her woven basket and walked from cottage to cottage searching for someone who knew how to care for injured animals. The herbalist had gone into the woods. The miller pointed her toward the blacksmith's wife. The blacksmith's wife sent her across the creek to an old shepherd who finally knew where the village healer could be found.

Twice the woman walked the same woodland path, too distracted to realize she had already searched it. Every few minutes she lifted the cloth covering the basket just enough to make sure the little toad was still breathing.

By late afternoon, her dress was dusted with dirt, her shoes soaked from crossing the stream twice, and the honey cake batter still sat untouched on the kitchen table. The herbs remained unpicked. The garden had gone unwatered. But none of it mattered.

When she finally found the healer, the old woman examined the little creature with patient hands before wrapping its tiny leg in a narrow strip of linen. “It will heal,” she said with a reassuring smile. “It simply needs rest.”

Only then did the woman feel the tightness leave her chest.

She rushed home leaving the little toad in the basket on the kitchen counter. “I'll be back soon”, she promised. It was half past five in the afternoon. She washed quickly and changed her clothes. She hurried toward the tea house with the new tiles from the antique shop she promised to bring last time.

The Missing Joker

By the time she reached the tea house, the familiar sound of conversation had already begun to spill through the open doorway. Someone laughed from the back table, cups clinked together, and the scent of fresh tea drifted through the room.

She had barely stepped inside before Miriam noticed the wooden box tucked beneath her arm.

“You brought them!”

Within moments the emerald tiles had made their way around the table. Miriam turned one slowly beneath the candlelight, admiring the delicate carving, while Old Joseph adjusted his spectacles and held another close enough to inspect every tiny detail.

“They're even prettier than I remembered,” Miriam said quietly.

Old Joseph nodded without looking up.

“I've seen craftsmen spend months on work with half this care”, Miriam said.

The woman could not help smiling.

Old Joseph rubbed his hands together expectantly, “Now then... where are the honey cakes?”, the old man asked.

“I'm afraid there aren't any this week”, she said with an apologetic smile. “Today didn't quite unfold the way I'd planned.”

Joseph sighed with such theatrical disappointment that Miriam burst into laughter beside him.

“Well,” he declared, placing a hand dramatically against his chest, “I'll try not to hold it against you.”

“I'll bake twice as many next Wednesday”, the woman promised.

“I shall remember those words”, the old man said as he took a sip from his cup of tea.

Before long the tiles returned to their box, chairs were drawn closer together, and the familiar rhythm of Wednesday evening quietly settled over the room. Tea was poured, walls were built, and conversations wandered easily between the games. Someone spoke about the coming harvest. Another complained that the blacksmith had once again forgotten to repair a gate. Old Joseph insisted he had been dealt the worst hand in the village three weeks in a row, though no one seemed willing to believe him.

The first game unfolded much as it always did. Conversation drifted easily around the table, interrupted only by the familiar click of tiles and the occasional good-natured groan whenever someone drew exactly the wrong piece. Outside, the last traces of daylight faded beyond the windows, while inside the candles burned a little brighter with each passing hand. When at last she quietly placed her final tile upon the table and called “Mahjong,” the room fell silent for the briefest moment before warm congratulations rose from every side.

When she won again, the remarks became louder.

“I'll have whatever luck she's carrying,” Joseph grumbled, shaking his head as he pushed his tiles together.

“It isn't luck,” Miriam replied, “You're simply terrible tonight.”

“I've always been terrible. Tonight I'm exceptionally terrible”, the old man said.

The table erupted into laughter.

By the fourth game, people had begun paying as much attention to the woman as they did their own hands. She laughed every time another fortunate draw found its way onto her rack, covering her smile with one hand as though she still couldn't quite believe it herself. Each victory left her cheeks a little warmer, her eyes a little brighter, until even those across the table found themselves smiling simply because she was.

By the end of the evening she had not lost once.

The applause that followed her final hand filled the little tea house.

Everyone seemed delighted, except for Cassandra.

Cassandra accepted defeat with the same calm expression she always wore, carefully stacking her tiles before returning them to the box one by one. Anyone who knew her would have recognized the habit. Cassandra always became meticulous when something troubled her.

During the break she wandered toward the tea table, though her attention remained fixed on the woman across the room, who was laughing with Old Joseph as several villagers admired the green tiles once again.

Miriam joined her, setting two cups of tea upon the table.

“You've hardly said a word all evening.”

Cassandra accepted one without taking her eyes off the gathering across the room.

“Tell me honestly,” she said after a long silence. “Does none of this strike you as unusual?”

Miriam followed her gaze before smiling into her cup.

“I think she's simply having a fortunate evening,” Miriam said, taking a slow sip of her tea.

“A fortunate evening is one thing.” Cassandra stirred her tea absently. “Winning every hand is another.”

Miriam broke a biscuit in half.

“You've spent so many years being the best player in the village that you've forgotten what it feels like when someone else has a good night”, she said.

“People don't change overnight,” Cassandra said, folding the linen napkin neatly beside her cup.

“Sometimes they surprise us”, Miriam smiled.

“You really believe that's all this is?”, Cassandra asked.

Miriam nodded.

Cassandra looked across the room once more. “Well, I hope you're right”, she said.

The games carried on until the candles burned low and the villagers, one by one, gathered their things before disappearing into the quiet night, still talking about the woman's extraordinary run of luck.

She walked home through the forest with the mahjong box tucked beneath her arm, her thoughts drifting between the little toad and the evening at the tea house. The day had begun with guilt and worry, yet somehow it had ended with an unexpected sense of peace.

Before doing anything else, she crossed to the basket beneath the window. The folded linen had been pushed aside, and the little toad was gone.

She rested a hand on the edge of the basket for a moment before noticing the open window.

“I'm glad you're feeling better,” she whispered.

She hoped it had found its way safely back into the forest.

Only then did she return the tiles to their places. It was a habit she had never broken, each piece carefully set back into its row before retiring for the night. As she reached the final compartment, her hand hesitated. She counted once, then again, before searching the box a second time.

One of the Jokers was missing.

After checking beneath the table and around the chair, she quietly concluded that it must have been left behind at the tea house. She would collect it next Wednesday.

Satisfied with that explanation, she closed the wooden box, extinguished the candle, and went to bed.

The Empty Chair

The following Wednesday, the woman returned to the tea house as she had the week before, carrying her wooden box beneath her arm and expecting another pleasant evening among familiar faces. By then, everyone had grown accustomed to her remarkable luck, and her arrival was usually met with good-natured teasing about who would be brave enough to sit across from her that night.

She laughed along with them, taking her usual place at the table. Someone joked that she must have made a secret bargain with Lady Luck herself, while another insisted that he would finally be the one to beat her. She wished them both good luck and began arranging her tiles.

She won that game too.

By the end of the evening, she had won every game she played.

The room filled with groans and laughter, and someone joked that perhaps the tea house ought to start charging her for the privilege of taking everyone's money. She laughed, thinking nothing of it, and promised that surely their luck would turn the following week.

But the weeks passed, and she kept winning.

Soon, the stories travelled beyond the tea house. The city players had begun hearing about the woman who never seemed to lose, and some of the villagers who played for money started inviting her into their games, certain that their experience would finally put an end to her streak.

It did not.

They lost money to her, then came back the following week and lost again.

What had once been amusing began to feel expensive.

The jokes became less frequent. The laughter after her victories became quieter. Some players still congratulated her, but their smiles disappeared more quickly than they once had.

Then she began to notice the empty chair across from her when a game was about to begin.

At first, she thought nothing of it. There were plenty of players, after all. But soon she noticed people looking toward her before quietly choosing another seat. Once, she approached a table just as someone was asking whether there was room for another player, only for the conversation to stop when they saw her.

She stood there for a moment before turning toward another table.

Miriam noticed and immediately waved her over.

“There is always room here,” she said, patting the empty chair beside her.

The woman smiled gratefully and sat down. Joseph joined them soon afterward, and for a little while, things felt as they always had.

That became the pattern.

Miriam and Joseph still welcomed her without hesitation, along with the few others who had known her long enough to become close friends. They played with her, laughed with her, and never made her feel as though she had done something wrong.

But there were fewer of them each week.

She still enjoyed the games. She loved the sound of the tiles, the little rituals around the table, the conversations between rounds. Winning was exciting, of course, but what she enjoyed most was having a place where she belonged.

By the fourth or fifth week of her winning streak, she was almost always playing with the same small circle of people.

She did not understand what she had done. She had never boasted about winning or mocked anyone who lost. If someone was particularly upset, she would often try to make a joke of her own luck to lighten the mood.

Still, the distance grew.

Cassandra noticed it too.

Unlike the others, however, she said very little. For weeks, she spoke quietly with people between games, usually when the woman was seated elsewhere. A few words beside the tea table, a brief conversation near the entrance, a folded sheet of paper passed from one pair of hands to another.

Then, one Wednesday evening, the woman walked into the tea house as she always did, carrying her wooden box in one hand and a woven basket of her famous honey cakes in the other. But something immediately felt different. The room, usually loud with laughter, conversation, and the clatter of tiles, had fallen strangely quiet. People spoke in hushed voices, and as she stepped farther into the room, the silence seemed to grow louder with every step.

“Good evening,” she said, but no one seemed to hear her.

Across the room, Miriam looked up and pushed back her chair. Her face had gone pale as a ghost, and she hurried to her feet, calling toward the woman, “Cassandra is…”

But it was too late.

Cassandra was already approaching her.

There was a small, satisfied smile on her face, and in her hands she carried a folded sheet of paper.

The woman looked at it with confusion.

“What is that?”

Cassandra held it out proudly.

“It's a petition. Read it.”

The woman took the paper with a confused glance. Her fingers tightened around the folded sheet as she opened it, her eyes moving across the first few lines until the meaning of the words began to sink in.

“We, the undersigned, ask that this woman be forbidden from the Wednesday games at the tea house. Week after week, she takes the winnings from honest players while claiming it is nothing but luck.”

Her eyes moved lower.

“No honest player wins as she does. We have been made fools long enough. Let her take her cheating elsewhere, for she is no longer welcome at our tables.”

The words blurred before her eyes. She blinked, but the tears came anyway.

Her fingers loosened around the basket. It slipped from her hand and fell to the floor, spilling the warm honey cakes across the cold stones.

She barely noticed.

Her breath caught as she looked down at the names beneath the accusations. She knew almost every name on the page, people she had played with, spoken to in the village, and thought of as friends. Then she reached the bottom and realized whose names were absent. Only five of her closest friends had refused to sign, yet not one of them had stood up for her.

“I never cheated,” she said, her voice breaking.

Cassandra looked at her without a trace of sympathy.

“Then perhaps you should ask yourself why no one believes you.”

The woman looked around the room, waiting for someone to contradict her, to tell her there had been some mistake, but no one spoke. Not a single soul said a word.

Miriam stood beside her table with tears gathering in her eyes, yet even she remained silent, and in that silence the woman felt the room slipping further and further away from her.

She looked down at the paper once more, but the names had begun to swim beneath her tears. Her throat tightened, and she swallowed against the sudden lump that seemed to rise there, struggling to draw a proper breath as the sounds around her faded into a dull murmur. The edges of the room seemed to darken, the faces before her blurring into shadows, and she reached instinctively for the table to steady herself.

The paper slipped from her fingers.

She lowered her head and hurried toward the door, desperate to get out before the tears completely overwhelmed her. As soon as she stepped outside, she broke into sobs and ran down the village street.

“Wait!”

She heard Miriam shouting desperately behind her but kept walking.

“Please, wait!”

The footsteps came closer, and the woman wiped at her face, refusing to turn around. Miriam caught up with her near the end of the street and reached for her arm, but she pulled away sharply.

“Did you know?”

Miriam stopped, breathless.

“I wanted to tell you.”

“How long did you know?” the woman asked, her voice shaky beneath her sobs.

Miriam hesitated, her eyes dropping to the ground.

The woman stared at her, her voice trembling. “How long?”

“A few weeks,” Miriam finally admitted.

The woman's face crumpled. “A few weeks?”

“I thought it would pass. I thought I could talk to them,” Miriam said, her voice breaking.

“Then why didn't you?”

“I was afraid,” Miriam said, her voice breaking. “I thought if I spoke against them, they would turn against me too. I thought I could make them change their minds before you ever had to know.”

The woman stared at her through her tears.

“And while you were trying to change their minds, I was walking into that room every Wednesday, smiling at people who had already decided I was a cheat.”

“That isn't what I wanted,” Miriam pleaded. “I never believed you were cheating. Not once.”

“But you let me stand there alone in that room.”

Miriam lowered her eyes.

“I didn't know what to do,” she said.

“You could have stood beside me,” the woman cried.

“I should have,” Miriam whispered.

The woman shook her head, tears spilling faster now. “I walked into that room tonight and they looked at me like I was some kind of monster. Do you understand? Like I was something terrible they needed to be rid of. And you knew they felt that way for weeks! And you still let me walk in there without ever warning me.”

Miriam covered her mouth, fighting back a sob.

“I'm so sorry.”

The woman looked at her, her face filled with hurt.

“You were the one person I thought would stand beside me.”

Miriam reached for her once more, but the woman stepped away.

“I trusted you,” the woman said, her voice dropping to a whisper.

“I know,” Miriam whispered back.

“No,” the woman whispered, shaking her head. “You don't.”

She turned and walked toward the forest, leaving Miriam standing alone in the road.

By the time she reached her cottage, her face was wet and her breathing uneven. She was about to reach for the door when something caught her eye.

A black cat sat quietly beside the entrance. She had never seen it before.

Its eyes were a deep, luminous emerald, watching her with an almost unsettling calm.

The woman crouched down, wiping her cheeks with the back of her hand.

“Where did you come from?” she asked the cat.

The cat did not move.

She reached toward it anyway, and when her fingers touched its fur, the animal leaned gently into her hand. Something about its warmth and quiet presence steadied her, if only for a moment.

Then she remembered the betrayal. She stood and entered the cottage.

The wooden box was still beneath her arm.

She placed it on the table, opened it, and stared at the emerald tiles through blurred eyes. Then, with a sudden movement, she swept them onto the floor.

“I hate you,” she whispered.

She did not know whether she meant the people, the tiles, or the strange luck that had brought her to this moment.

She fell onto the bed, buried her face in the pillow, and cried until there was nothing left to hold back.

The Forsaken

For the next few days, she barely left the house. She had taken the days off from work, though she could hardly remember making the decision. She ate when hunger finally forced her to, slept at odd hours, and spent long stretches lying awake in the darkness.

Again and again, she saw the petition in her mind: the names, Miriam's face, Cassandra's smile, the silence of the room.

There was a hollow inside her that seemed to have no bottom. It was not simply sadness. Sadness, at least, had somewhere to go. This was heavier and quieter. She felt as though something had been taken from her and, in its place, left a great empty space through which every thought seemed to echo.

She wanted nothing more than to return to bed and pull the covers over her head until the world had forgotten she existed. But it was Monday, and it was time to return to work.

Eventually, she forced herself out of bed. She prepared two eggs and toast, as she did every morning. She sat at the table and broke the toast into smaller and smaller pieces, arranging them on the plate without ever bringing one to her mouth. After nearly ten minutes, she pushed the plate away.

She dressed slowly, gathered her basket, and stepped outside.

The forest was quiet that morning. Usually, she would have noticed the little things along the path without thinking: a bird moving through the branches, a patch of moss growing over a stone, the first signs of a flower opening beneath the trees.

That morning, she noticed none of them.

She walked until the trees thinned and the first houses of the village came into view.

The streets felt narrower than she remembered. The houses seemed closer together, their walls crowding the road, and the old fence beside her path leaned farther than usual, its crooked posts looking almost ready to give way.

People watched her as she passed. Some looked away when she met their eyes. Others did not bother to hide it. She kept her gaze lowered.

When she passed the bakery, she saw Rufus through the large front windows. He had been one of her regular partners at the Wednesday games, always ready with a joke about her impossible luck. He had also been one of the first to praise her honey cakes, once telling her that if she taught him the recipe, he would sell them in his bakery.

Rufus looked up and saw her.

Their eyes met through the glass, and for a moment she could see the disappointment in his face. Then his gaze fell, and he slowly reached for the curtain.

She stopped in the middle of the street as the curtain closed between them.

She stood there, staring at the darkened window, until she felt the familiar pressure behind her eyes again. Of all the people in the village, she had thought Rufus would understand.

She swallowed the tears. She could not go home. Not yet.

She took a deep breath and forced herself to keep walking, putting one foot in front of the other toward the flower shop.

When she reached the flower shop, the door was closed. She reached for her key without thinking, only to find that it no longer fit the lock. She looked closer and realized the lock had been changed.

Through the glass, she could see the flowers and plants exactly where she had left them, waiting for the morning care she had given them for nearly twenty years. The sight of them made her chest ache. She stood there for a moment, staring at the garden beyond the shop, then turned and walked toward Hector's house.

He took some time before answering. When he finally opened the door, he looked at her with the weary irritation of a man whose morning had been interrupted.

She asked him why the lock had been changed without telling her.

Hector looked away toward the street before answering. “Because people are talking. I can't have you working for me anymore.”

She stared at him.

“After twenty years?”

“I know how long you've worked there,” he said dismissively.

“Customers have been asking questions all weekend. They don't want to buy their flowers from a place associated with you.”

She felt her throat tighten.

“So you believe them?” she asked.

He rubbed his forehead and finally looked at her. “I believe what I can see. Your name is being talked about all over the village, and now my business is caught in it.”

“You didn't even ask me”, she said.

The more she tried to explain, the more Hector seemed to retreat behind his business. He spoke of customers, money, reputation, and the name of the shop, as though those things were the only ones in the world worth protecting.

“What difference would that make?” he snapped at one point. “You think customers will suddenly forget what they heard because you tell me you're innocent?”

She stood there, trying to collect her words.

Twenty years of opening the shop in the morning, staying late when the gardens needed tending, nursing sick plants back to health, making bouquets for weddings and funerals and every ordinary occasion in between.

And he simply didn't care.

At one point, his voice rose sharply, a vein standing out at his temple.

“You have ruined my reputation,” he said bitterly. “Do you understand that? People think I have been employing a dishonest woman all these years. I have a business to protect.”

The words settled heavily between them. She fought to keep the tears from spilling down her cheeks.

“But what will happen to the garden?” she asked, her voice trembling. “The flowers and herbs? They need me.”

Hector gave a dismissive shrug. “Someone will handle it.”

She tried to explain that some of the plants needed particular care, that she had spent years learning exactly what each one required. Hector barely listened. He gave a weary sigh and waved the concern away.

“They're flowers. They'll be fine,” he said. “And if they don't, perhaps they shouldn't have been there in the first place.”

She stared at him, stunned by his indifference.

He continued, almost casually, “The roses, orchids and lilies are worth keeping. The rest of it is becoming a nuisance. Those herbs, those strange little flowers no one ever buys, all the plants you insist on fussing over… they take time, space, and money.”

“They are part of the garden,” she said.

“They are part of your obsession,” Hector replied angrily.

Her face tightened.

“They are living things,” she said, her voice rising.

“They are just flowers,” he said again, this time with a cold impatience that made the words sound like an insult. “And frankly, they are spoiled. They demand attention and bring me almost nothing in return. I don't need them anymore.” Hector crossed his arms with impatience.

He could call her a cheat. He could believe strangers over a woman who had worked for him for two decades. He could throw her out of the place where she had spent half her life.

But not this.

Her eyes filled with tears as she thought of the plants waiting behind the shop. The ones she had raised from tiny cuttings. The ones she had brought back after harsh winters. The ones whose needs she knew by instinct.

After a moment, she pleaded, “Let me take them. I'll pay you for them.”

That caught his attention. His eyes shifted toward the garden, and for the first time since she arrived, he seemed interested.

“You want them?” he asked.

She nodded, and Hector named a price so high that she stared at him in disbelief.

“But you just said they're barely worth anything”, she said.

A faint smile touched his mouth. “You seem to think they're worth quite a lot.”

She looked toward the garden and understood then that he knew exactly what he was doing.

“I don't have that kind of money,” she said.

Hector merely shrugged. “Then I suppose you don't want them badly enough.”

Something inside her shifted.

She stared at him for another moment.

“You will regret this.” She threw the words at him before walking away.

That night, long after the village had gone quiet, she returned to the flower shop.

She stood before the locked door in the darkness, looking at the place that had once felt like home. Now she stood outside it like a stranger.

Then she broke the lock. Inside, she moved through the garden by lantern light, collecting the plants she knew would be neglected. She lifted each pot carefully, choosing the ones that needed her most, until her arms were full and the garden began to look strangely bare.

By the time she returned home, the night was nearly over.

She carried the last pot inside and lowered herself onto the floor among them. Leaves brushed against her shoulders, and the familiar scent of damp earth filled the little room.

For the first time in days, she could breathe.

At least they were safe.

The Gnomes

Sleep had found her only in fragments, and even those had been stolen from her by morning.

She had carried the last of the pots inside as the sky was turning blue, and had fallen onto her bed still in her clothes, asleep almost before her head found the pillow. She could not have slept more than a few hours when the knocking came, the sun already well above the trees, violent enough to rattle the door in its frame, three, four blows in quick succession, as though whoever stood on the other side meant to break it down before she could even reach it.

“Thief!”

She sat upright before she understood why.

“Scum! Come out and answer for what you've done!”

The second voice was joined by others, a ragged chorus rising from somewhere just beyond her garden wall, and beneath it she could make out the particular cadence of men who had worked themselves into a fury on the walk over and had not yet decided what to do with it.

She went to the window and immediately wished she hadn't. Her legs nearly gave beneath her. There were perhaps twenty of them crowded along the path, carrying pitchforks and hay-hooks and the long-handled axe the miller kept by his door, weapons meant for the field or the woodpile now aimed, absurdly, at her cottage. Hector stood a little apart from the rest, his arms folded, saying nothing. He did not need to. Word travelled faster than shame did, and he had clearly seen to it that both arrived at once.

Her heart was slamming so hard she could feel it in her throat. She did not remember deciding to run. She found herself already in the back room, on her knees among the pots she had carried home only hours before, her arms around as many of them as she could hold at once, her breath coming in short, useless gasps.

“It's over,” she whispered to them, because there was no one else left to say it to. “They're going to kill me.”

The door came apart behind her with a sound like something breaking inside her own chest.

Two men filled the doorway, tall against the grey morning light, a scythe and a fowling piece held before them the way men hold things they have never truly had to use. “Come out,” one of them shouted, though she could not have said which. “Surrender yourself!”

She pressed her face into the leaves, every part of her braced for the blow, and squeezed her eyes shut.

What came next was a deafening crack, sharp and unnatural, that seemed to come from everywhere in the room at once.

When she finally forced her eyes open, the two large shadows that had filled the doorway a moment before were shrinking, folding down into themselves until where two grown men had stood there were now two garden gnomes, squat and painted and perfectly still, their little painted eyes fixed on nothing at all. The scythe and the fowling piece lay abandoned on the floorboards beside them, monstrously large now for the hands that had carried them in.

She stared at the gnomes where two men had been a moment before, a slow, creeping dread climbing up through her chest until it was almost more than she could bear. A sound climbed her throat and she clamped a hand over her own mouth to keep it in.

Someone outside screamed, a raw, terrified sound that tore through the morning air, and within seconds it was joined by a dozen more voices shrieking over one another. Chaos broke out along the path: pitchforks and hay-hooks clattering to the ground, bodies colliding as people shoved past one another to flee, someone falling and being dragged upright by the arm. Within moments the road was empty, littered with dropped tools, the mob having unmade itself entirely, as though it had never gathered at all.

She stayed frozen where she was, unable to move a single muscle, her breath shallow and her whole body rigid with terror.

When she finally did, it was on legs that barely carried her, to find the wooden box lying open on the floor, though she was certain she had latched it the night before.

Four Red Dragon tiles lay scattered across the floor, each one still bearing its familiar painted dragon. She had barely knelt beside them when the paint began to shift, the dragon's coiled shape bleeding and reforming before her eyes, red pigment sliding across the tile like something alive, until where the dragon had been there was now a witch astride a broom, hunched low over the handle as though caught mid-flight. She could not look away. Then, as if drawn by unseen thread, the tiles rose from the floor and returned themselves to their compartments in the box, one after another, until the lid fell shut on its own and the room was silent again.

A cold, sick understanding climbed up through her as she stared at the closed lid.

Then it hit her.

This was all their fault. The tiles. They were cursed, and had been from the very first night she carried them home.

The months that followed seemed to pass before her all at once, the way she had heard people describe the moments before drowning. The endless winning streaks. The laughter at the tea house, the jokes about her impossible luck. Then the same faces turning, the same warmth curdling into suspicion. The petition in Cassandra's hand. Miriam in the road, begging to be forgiven for a warning she had never had the power to give. Twenty years at the flower shop, undone in a single morning. None of it had ever been something she could have stopped. None of it had ever truly been hers to stop.

The shopkeeper's voice came back to her then, as clearly as if he stood beside her. I'm afraid that's exactly how it begins.

“How could I be so stupid,” she whispered, and the tears came before she could stop them. “I ruined my own life with these tiles.” She pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes, her whole body shaking with the force of it, and let herself cry until there was nothing left to cry.

Then she stood.

Enough. She would put an end to this herself.

She changed out of her nightclothes and packed the box with hands that would not stop trembling and walked back through the village and into the oldest part of town, retracing the path she had taken on that first rainy afternoon.

But the narrow shop she remembered, the dust, the smell of cedar and old paper, was not there at all.

In its place stood a stretch of unbroken wall, older brick set flush against newer, as though a door had once existed and someone had gone to great trouble to make certain it never would again.

She asked a woman selling eggs from a cart, who only frowned and said there had never been a shop on that corner in her lifetime. She asked a boy sweeping the step of the bakery, who shrugged and hurried away.

It was an old lady sitting in a doorway across the street, her hands folded over a cane, who finally beckoned her closer.

“You're looking for the old place,” the old lady said. It was not a question.

“There was a shop here,” the woman answered. “I bought something from it.”

The old lady's face did not change, though something in her eyes did. “There was, when I was just a little girl. Run by a ring of smugglers. Whatever came through that door hadn't come by any honest road: goods no decent merchant would touch, and no decent buyer would ask too many questions about.”

She paused, working her jaw as though the next part cost her something to say. “It happened near closing, the story goes. No customers in the shop by then, thank God. Only the owner and the men who worked under him, and by morning every one of them was dead. No mark on any of them. No sign of a struggle, no blood, nothing broken. Someone passing by swore they'd seen a shadow slip out from under that door, long after the shop should have gone dark. No one ever saw who it belonged to.”

“What happened to the shop?” the woman asked.

“What do you think happened to it?” The old lady nodded toward the wall behind her. “They pulled it down to nothing and bricked over where the door had been. Folk around here didn't want to walk past an open doorway to a place like that. Wasn't the dying that frightened them so much as no one ever understanding why.”

She did not remember thanking the old lady, or walking home, or how long she stood at the edge of the forest with the wooden box heavy in her arms. She remembered only kneeling in the soft dark earth beneath the old oak, digging with her bare hands until the hole was deep enough, and lowering the box into it the way she might have lowered something that had once been alive.

She did not look back as she walked home.

But when she reached her door, something familiar was waiting for her on the step, set there as neatly as if a hand had placed it only moments before.

The missing Joker.

The Grimoire

The Joker was waiting on her doorstep when she got home, the same tile she'd torn the shop apart looking for over weeks, sitting there in plain sight as if it had never been lost at all. It looked ordinary: the traditional Joker face, the same emerald back every tile in the set wore.

She picked it up, and that was when it started.

The painted face rippled like water disturbed by a stone, and the traditional Joker symbol dissolved into something else: a black cat, sharp-eared, wearing a small pointed witch's hat. She nearly dropped it. Her hand was shaking, or so she thought at first. Then she realized it wasn't her hand shaking at all. It was the tile.

It lifted out of her palm and began to spin, faster and faster, and then came the sound. She'd heard it only once before: the night the two men at her door had folded in on themselves and become gnomes right in front of her. That same low hum, less like a noise and more like something moving through the inside of her skull. Purple fog rolled across the doorway, thick and cold, and she pressed her hands over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut until it passed.

When she opened them, a cat was sitting exactly where the fog had been. Charcoal-black, with emerald eyes fixed on her.

She knew this cat. It was the one that had wound around her ankles the night she came home from the tea house, the worst night of her life, back before any of this had started making even a little sense.

It padded over and pressed its head against her shin. When she crouched to scratch behind its ears, its little hat slipped off and landed at her feet. She picked it up. Tucked inside the brim was a scrap of paper, folded twice, the handwriting cramped and slanted:

Do not bury what was never meant to be forgotten.

She read it twice. Turned it over, looking for more, a name, anything, but the other side was blank.

“Who wrote this?” she asked, as if the cat might actually answer.

It only watched her, tail curled neatly around its paws.

She looked down at the tile still in her hand. The cat was gone from its face. It was an ordinary Joker again, the traditional symbol still and quiet, its emerald back cool against her palm.

The cat turned and started for the tree line.

“Where are you going?” she called after it. For one moment it stopped and looked back at her, really looked, the way a person does when they're deciding whether you're worth waiting for. Then it slipped between the trees and was gone.

She stood there a while, the note in one hand and the tile in the other, thinking about how she'd spent the whole day certain these tiles had ruined everything. Now, for the first time, it occurred to her that maybe they'd been trying to lead her somewhere all along.

She followed the cat into the woods.

The forest at night wasn't the forest she knew. She'd walked these paths a hundred times gathering chamomile and wild mint for the shop, always in daylight, always along the trails she'd worn smooth over the years. But the cat cut onto a narrower path she'd never once noticed, leading her farther from the house than she'd ever gone alone.

It moved fast, its black coat swallowed by the dark between the trees, only its eyes catching the moonlight now and then to check she was still behind it. Finally it stopped at the base of an enormous oak, and her stomach dropped before her mind had caught up to why.

She knew this tree. She'd knelt at its roots only hours ago with a shovel in her hands, burying the Mahjong box she'd sworn she wanted nothing more to do with.

The cat sat and began pawing at the dirt.

“No,” she said, though she wasn't sure who she was talking to.

It kept digging.

She knelt beside it. The soil was still loose from that afternoon and gave way easily under her fingers, until her nails caught wood and she drew the box up out of the earth and into the moonlight.

The moment it touched her palms, it began to change.

The wood softened, then thickened, then wasn't wood at all anymore. It was leather, or something that only remembered being leather, darkening from raw pine to a green so deep it read as black until the light caught it right. Gold bled up through the surface like ink rising through water, curling itself into letters she didn't know how to read and didn't need to, because she understood them anyway, the way you understand a name you've always known.

She was no longer holding a box. She was holding a book.

It fell open across her forearms on its own, pages parting like something exhaling, and the tiles inside rose off the felt lining and hung in the air above the open spread, dozens of them, catching a light that wasn't coming from the moon or the house or anywhere she could name. Their emerald backs turned over one another in a slow, unhurried spiral, and as each tile came face-up she watched it stop being what it had always been.

The Dots went first. Nine small circles on a tile blurred and drew inward, pulling themselves into a single peaked shape until they were no longer dots at all but a witch's hat, black and slightly crooked, exactly the kind the cat had dropped at her feet an hour before.

A Bamboo tile rippled and sprouted: the straight green stalks bent and clustered into a knot of mushrooms, their caps banded in two shades of green, one dark as the shadow under the oak, one pale as new moss.

The Chinese characters folded down at the edges like paper, and the tile beneath became glass: a small corked bottle, black as the fog had been, with the characters reforming down its side in red, as if something inside had written them there itself.

A Wind tile shed its four straight brushstrokes and became a broomstick, handle first, then bristles, and instead of settling back down with the others, it hung there above them, hovering on its own, as if flying were the easiest thing in the world.

And the Flower tile split down the middle, and out of it came herbs and flowers she knew on sight, some she'd gathered a hundred times off the forest floor, some she'd raised herself in the pots along her windowsill, leaves and petals crowding out of the small space the tile had given them until there was almost too much green to see the tile at all.

The Joker changed too, though slower than the rest, as if it hadn't yet decided what it wanted to become: the shape flickering between creature and object and back again, never settling long enough for her to catch what either one was, until it stilled into something that was plainly both and neither.

She didn't move. She didn't think she could have, even if some part of her had wanted to run. The book hung open in her arms, the tiles turning and dancing above it in their slow, private spiral, and for the first time since the Joker had changed on her doorstep, she wasn't frightened.

She was being shown something.

And whatever it was, she understood, standing in the dirt at the foot of the oak with a grimoire breathing in her hands, she was not going to be able to bury it again.

The Greenhouse

She did not sleep that night, not properly. She sat at the kitchen table with the grimoire open before her and the tiles spread across the wood in a loose half-circle, and every time her eyes grew heavy she made herself look at them again, as though looking hard enough might finally make sense of what she was looking at.

They were still mahjong tiles. She understood that much, turning them one by one beneath the candlelight. Only they were no longer the plain, ordinary ones she'd carried to the tea house and back a dozen times. Whatever disguise they'd worn all these weeks had thinned in that clearing under the oak, and what showed through now was something she had no polite word for.

The Bamboo tiles had sprouted green toadstools that looked almost too real. The Character tiles had grown small dark bottles up from their painted numerals, stoppered with wax, something shifting behind the glass whenever she tilted the candle. Each Dot tile now wore small crooked witch's hats in place of its painted circles, one hat for every dot the tile had always carried. The Wind tiles had grown handles and bristles, thin brooms lying flat across their faces as though only just landed.

And the Flowers.

One by one, the flower tiles had softened into blossoms she knew by name without needing to think: marigold, foxglove, rosemary, its scent rising faint and sharp even from the painted grooves. Plants she'd grown herself once, or gathered wild along the hedgerows on her way home, or picked for Hector's shop a hundred times. She hadn't expected to find them here, of all places, waiting inside a box she'd bought on a whim in the rain.

She sat with that for a long while.

She had grown up on stories of witches, the same as anyone in the village. Old Agnes down the lane still hung rowan over her door on May Eve. The miller's wife swore her grandmother had seen a dragon once, or the shadow of one, over the eastern hills the year the crops failed. Magic was not a stranger thing in this world, not something whispered about only in the dark. It simply had never before happened to her, not directly, not in her own two hands, and there was a particular kind of vertigo in that difference she hadn't expected.

Why had it been her? she wondered. Of all the people who might have found that shop on that rainy afternoon, why had she been the one to step through its door?

She had no answer. She only knew, gathering the tiles back into the grimoire one by one, that her curiosity had overcome her initial fear.

Over the days that followed, the cottage stopped feeling entirely like her own.

She began noticing the pattern before she let herself believe it was one.

The hearth was swept clean each morning before she came downstairs, the ash gone and kindling already laid for the next fire. Some mornings, the kettle sat warm on its hook, as though something had thought to have it ready before she'd so much as opened her eyes. Once, she caught the broom moving on its own across the kitchen floor in a rhythm too familiar to be anything but hers, working at a corner she always meant to get to and never did. It stilled the instant she cleared her throat in the doorway, propping itself back against the wall as though it had never moved at all.

She went on finding her boots set neatly by the door each morning instead of wherever she'd kicked them off, her mending folded instead of left heaped on the chair. Small, quiet kindnesses she hadn't asked for and had, after the first week, stopped questioning.

Sometimes she woke in the grey hour before dawn to the sound of something crossing the floorboards below, unhurried and deliberate, and understood without needing to check that it was only making its rounds.

It should have frightened her more than it did, she thought. A house tending itself around her while she slept. But there was something underneath the unease, something she was slower to name, that felt less like invasion and more like company.

She had lived alone in this cottage since her grandparents died. She had grown so used to the particular silence of an empty house that she'd stopped hearing it as silence at all. Now the silence had guests in it. Small, strange, uninvited guests who swept when she was too tired to, stood watch while she slept, and made her house, for the first time in longer than she wanted to think about, feel tended.

The cat came and went as it pleased, appearing on the windowsill some evenings with no more announcement than a pair of emerald eyes catching the last of the light. It never stayed long. But it would press its head against her hand if she reached for it, and once, on a night when the loneliness had crept up on her worse than usual, it curled itself against her side on the hearth rug and stayed there until she fell asleep.

By the end of that first week, she had stopped flinching at the small sounds and grown used to them.

The pots along her back wall had sat there too long. One morning, she decided to build them a proper home.

The plants had been well-tended, she made certain of that, turned toward the light each morning and watered on schedule, the way twenty years at Hector's had taught her. But they were crowded all the same, roots pressing hard against the sides of pots too small to hold them much longer. And, turning the thought over, she found that she wanted to build something with her own hands again. Something whole and useful, after a month that had taken so much apart.

She did not build it alone.

The broom was the first to help, and the plainest about it. She had barely gotten the frame's first wall standing before it wedged itself between two boards and held them steady, bristles braced against the ground. It did not move again until she'd driven the last nail through. When she reached for the next plank, it was already there, swept neatly into place ahead of her hands.

The rowan tile took longer to understand. She only realized what it was doing when she went looking for a support beam she was certain she hadn't cut and found instead a length of pale wood grown overnight where none had been, bent into exactly the angle the frame needed and holding there, patient, as though it had always meant to be a beam and nothing else.

The toadstools kept her company while she was building. They bounced and bobbed around the edge of the clearing as she worked, their little caps wobbling with every hop. Sometimes they chased one another in circles, sometimes they leapt over the grass in quick, joyful bursts, and sometimes they simply bounced in place as though they were dancing to music only they could hear. She found herself stopping often to watch them, completely fascinated. Before long, their antics had her laughing aloud.

By the third day, the walls stood true and the glass was fitted into place. She stepped back to look at what her own hands, and theirs, had made.

It was only afterward, when she went back to fetch the last of the pots, that she found the marigold bed already thick with new growth. There were far more marigolds than she had ever planted, crowding one another for space in a way no garden she'd tended had managed in under a season, let alone a single afternoon.

She planted the last of the pots, kneeling in soil that smelled more alive than any soil had a right to, and sat back on her heels when she'd finished to look at what they had built.

It didn't feel like a greenhouse she owned, she thought. It felt like somewhere they all lived now.

The Wolf At The Door

The wolfsbane's flowers had never once opened. Every other bloom in the greenhouse turned itself toward the sun by midmorning, but the wolfsbane stayed shut, its dark hooded petals pressed close together no matter how warm the day got.

The woman was on her knees in the marigold bed tending the garden when she heard the gate.

Miriam stood at the edge of the clearing with a basket full of eggs held in both hands. She hadn't come to the cottage since before the petition.

“I wasn't sure if I should come,” Miriam said.

The woman sat back on her heels and didn't answer right away.

“I've been meaning to for weeks,” Miriam said. “I kept putting it off. I don't have a good reason for that. I just did.”

Miriam's eyes went past her to the greenhouse, then came back. “I wanted to say I'm sorry. About the petition. About staying quiet when I shouldn't have.”

The woman stood and brushed the dirt from her hands.

“I let them believe it,” Miriam said. “I never believed it myself, not for a day, but I let them think what they wanted because I was afraid of what it would cost me if I didn't. That's the truth of it. I've been ashamed of it every day since.” She held the basket out. “I brought you something. It isn't much.”

The woman crossed the few feet between them and reached for it.

Suddenly, the wolfsbane came off the fence.

It closed around Miriam's wrist before either of them understood what was happening. Miriam cried out and the basket fell, and eggs broke open across the dirt in bright yellow smears. The vine tightened. Miriam went down on one knee, clawing at it with her free hand, and it only pulled tighter.

“Let go of her!” the woman screamed.

She was already on her knees, both hands on the vine. It didn't move. She dug her nails beneath the coil and pulled and felt thorns open her palm.

“She is not a threat to me, do you hear me?” Her voice came out flat and hard. “Let go!”

The vine held a moment longer. Then it went slack all at once and drew back toward the fence, low along the ground.

Miriam sat in the broken eggs with her wrist scored red, staring at the fence as if she could see straight through it.

“It's never done that before,” the woman said, and heard how weak it sounded even as she said it.

Miriam was shaking, but she didn't get up and run, and the woman would think about that later, how much it must have cost her to stay still. “What is that thing? What do you have growing out here?” Miriam asked.

There was no honest answer that wouldn't frighten her worse than the cut already had. The woman helped her to her feet instead and walked her to the gate, apologizing the whole way, and watched her go with her wrist held against her chest until the path bent out of sight.

Then she turned around.

The wolfsbane sat coiled where it had drawn itself, thorns still wet. She crouched in front of it.

“You do not get to decide that for me.” No softness in it. “She came here to apologize. She has never once raised a hand to me, and you do not touch her, or anyone, for any reason. Do you understand?”

It gave her nothing. It curled in tighter than she'd seen it go before, and it stayed that way the rest of the day.

That night she sat with the grimoire open on the kitchen table and made herself look at it properly, the way she hadn't since the night she'd dug it up. Her palm still stung where the thorns had caught her. She wanted to know why.

She turned to the flowers first, running her finger down each blossom pressed flat between the pages, looking for anything that might explain what she'd seen that morning. Wolfsbane held nothing back. It had been ready to kill someone she loved for no better reason than that she'd let a stranger get close. That wasn't loyalty. Or it was, but loyalty twisted into something she didn't recognize and hadn't asked for.

Was it evil? She turned the question over the way she'd turn a stone looking for what lived beneath it. It hadn't seemed to enjoy hurting Miriam. It hadn't seemed to feel anything at all, watching it, only certainty, the way a dog is certain when it corners something it's decided is a threat.

Was it good, then? Something that would tear a person's wrist open to keep her safe?

She didn't know which frightened her more, that it might be neither, or that it might be both at once.

Who had taught it to be like that. That was the question underneath the other two, the one she kept circling back to and couldn't answer. Something had made this thing what it was before it ever came into her hands. Someone had owned these tiles before the antique shop, before her, someone whose habits and fears it still seemed to be carrying.

She turned page after page looking for a name, a date, anything written in a hand that wasn't hers, and found nothing until she reached the very last leaf and went to close the cover.

Scratched into the leather inside, small and worn nearly smooth, were initials that weren't her own. Not any name she had ever heard spoken under this roof.

She sat with her finger against the letters for a long while. Whoever had carved them had held this book before she had. Had turned these same pages, maybe watched these same tiles rise and change the way she had under the oak. No one in her family had ever spoken that name. No one had ever spoken of this book existing at all, not until it came back to her doorstep in the shape of a cat.

She closed the cover slowly.

“Who were you,” she said, to no one, to the book, to whoever had left those letters behind. “And what did you teach them to do?”

The grimoire gave her nothing back. But she did not put it away that night. She set it on the table where she would see it first thing in the morning, and told herself she meant to keep asking until it answered her.