The bell above the door chimed, a lonely sound that cut through the scent of cedar and old parchment. The woman who entered did not look ook like the typical clientele of Oakhaven. She didrit wear the tattered wool of the laborers or the stiff silks of the merchant class. She was draped in a veil of heavy, shifting mist that seemed to defy the wind. When she pulled back the shroud, Elias caught his breath-a rare occurrence for a man who had seen the interiors
of a thousand minds.
Her face was a masterpiece of grief, beautiful yet
eroded, like a marble statue left out in a century of rain. She didn't speak at first; she simply placed a small, lacquered box on the workbench. "I have heard you are a man who can fix what is broken." she said, her voice sounding like dry leaves sKittering across a grave. "But I do not a repair. I want a removal And I want a transplant."
Elias frowned, his fingers twitching toward his needle. "I usually stitch things back in. Madame. Taking things out is... dangerous. The mind abhors a vacuum. If I remove a memory of significance, something else will rush in to fill the space, often something darker."
"Then fill it with yourself" she replied, her eyes burning with a terrifying intensity. She opened the box. Inside lay a single thread, but it wasn't the dull gray or flickering blue of ordinary memories. It was a radiant, pulsing gold, so bright it cast shadows against the walls of the dim shop. It hummed with a frequency that made Eliass teeth ache.
"This is a memory of absolute, pure happiness," she whispered. "It is the afternoon my husband proposed to me by the Sunlit Lake. It is the smell of crushed mint, the exact temperature of the breeze, and the feeling of a future that was supposed to be infinite." She began to tremble.
"But he is gone now. He died in the Great Fire, and this memory... it is a poison. Every time I see the gold, I am reminded of the black ash that followed. I cannot live with the contrast. It heavy to carry, vet too beautiful to destroy. I you to take it. Wear it. Keep it in your own mind where it can no longer burn me.
Elias should have refused. The ethics of his trade
forbade the "consumption" of client memories. But the gold was hypnotic. In his gray world of borrowed sorrows and discarded pasts, the golden thread looked liKe a lifeline. He imagined what it would feel like to have a sun inside his head instead of the cold, damp fog of Oakhaven. Without a word, he picked up the silver needle. He didn't realize that in seeKing to feel alive, he
was inviting a parasite into the only part of him that was still his own.