PART I — Morningfeast in the Shining Stacks Dawn glimmered like a shy coin over Neverwinter when Elira Relicbane trudged along North Market Lane, her boots crunching over yesterday’s gemstone shards and the faintly smoking remains of someone’s experimental lantern. The Shining Stacks always smelled of blown glass, old spell-ink, warm metal, and whatever peculiar optimism keeps shopkeepers from fleeing their own misbehaving merchandise. Elira inhaled deeply. It was home. A soft clatter echoed inside the locked ward-box she carried—four heavy iron latches, a sigil-lock, and a polite little whisper that occasionally begged to be opened. The relic within thrummed, as if it had dreamed itself awake before she had. “Quiet, you,” Elira muttered, wrestling her keyring out from a belt of a hundred tiny tools. “We’ll sort your nonsense once I have tea strong enough to stun a hill giant.” The box rattled harder. “Don’t sass me before morningfeast.” She reached her shop—Relicbane Curiosities, a narrow two-story nook stuffed with relics that hummed, sighed, glowed, or pretended they were perfectly ordinary objects—and was just fitting the key into the lock when a door three shops down burst outward with the theatrical enthusiasm only one halfling in all Neverwinter possessed. Marin Gemcutter lurched into the lane, hair a tousled halo, coat misbuttoned in three separate patterns, holding a cloth-wrapped bundle at arm’s length as if it were a hissing cat on loan from the Hells. “Elira!” he chirped, or possibly yelped. “Please tell me the street isn’t tilted.” Elira blinked. “Tilted? No. But you look like you wrestled a fever-dream.” “I did!” Marin declared, staggering closer. “Or rather—it wrestled me. And stole my breakfast roll.” He peeled back a corner of cloth. The object within—a faceted violet gemstone—was cracked right down the heart. From the fracture seeped a single droplet of shimmering silver. It quivered. Then it rolled, as if committing to mischief. “That’s—” Elira began. “Liquid luck,” Marin whispered reverently. “Fortuneblood. Tymora’s drool. Essence-of-‘everything-is-trying-to-win.’ I woke up and it was crying.” “Crying.” “Luck,” Marin clarified. “Onto my pillow. Which immediately won a tavern raffle.” Elira stared at him. Then at the gemstone. Then, resignedly, back at Marin. “You brought this outside?” “It kept trying to grant me things! I can’t have that happening before tea. That’s irresponsible.” Before she could reply, her ward-box jerked in her hands—so violently she nearly dropped it. Marin’s gemstone pulsed in answer, its silver droplet lifting as though caught by invisible fingers. “Oh no,” Marin breathed. “They’re flirting.” “Relics don’t flirt.” Marin pointed at the ward-box. “Yours does.” Elira loosened the top latch, and a flicker of bluish memory spilled through the crack—an image of trees bending inward as though listening… a ring of stones… and a ruin whose shape scraped the edges of logic. Marin’s gemstone answered with another pulse. The entire street rippled. Just once. Enough to make both of them steady themselves against the wall. Loose pebbles rolled the wrong direction. A broom leaned of its own accord, swept twice, then fell over indignantly. “Marin,” Elira whispered, “that wasn’t just enchantment. Reality shuddered.” “Is that bad?” “Marin.” “Right, right. Very bad. Quite bad. The-bakers-will-blame-us bad.” The ward-box’s lid snapped open of its own will. A beam of memory-light struck Marin’s gemstone. Images erupted in the air before them—smoky, ghostly visions that flickered with impossible clarity. A forest. An ancient ruin. A circle of mirrors broken inward. And there—etched faintly—Marin’s own shop sign. Except… not in Neverwinter. In a Neverwinter that had never been. Marin stepped back. “That’s not real.” Elira tightened her grip on her own sanity. “Except the relic shows truth. Or what it believes is truth. And that…” She swallowed. “That looks like a place north of the city. A ruin I’ve never seen. One that remembers something that never happened.” The gemstone began to weep silver faster, each droplet vibrating with hungry intention. “Elira?” Marin asked softly. “Yes?” “My gem is pointing north.” “So is my relic.” “And the street just tilted toward the gate.” “Yes.” “And… is the clocktower about to chime?” Elira looked up. The Seventh Bell tower—half a district away—rumbled ominously. It chimed. Once. Twice. Thirteen times. The silver droplets froze midair, glittering like trapped stars. Reality twanged like a plucked harpstring. The amulet murmured a phrase in a voice neither of them knew: “Tel’sareth remembers.” Marin shivered. “Who’s Tel’sareth?” Elira shut the ward-box with all four latches. “We are going to find out. Because that relic was echoing memories of you. And your jewel was crying luck toward me.” The halfling’s face lit with a mix of fear and delighted doom. “We’re connected.” “We’re in danger.” “Same thing!” he chirped. Somewhere down the alley, a lantern flickered green. A cat yowled. A hammer began hitting nails it had no business knowing existed. And North Market Lane tilted again. Just a hair. Just enough to start the day off wrong in the most Faerûnish way imaginable. --- PART II — When Luck Spilled and Memory Ran By the time the sun had climbed to the respectable height locals called “late-enough-to-open-shop,” the Shining Stacks was awake and arguing with itself. Hammers rang, doors banged, apprentices shouted up and down the lane with armloads of fabrics, gears, enchanted pots, suspiciously glowing pastries, and one obstinate broom that kept trying to enlist in the city watch. The street smelled of fresh bread, oil, hot metal, and the faint copper tang of someone’s ritual going slightly sideways behind a closed shutter. Elira had meant, truly meant, to lock the relic in her inner wardroom and leave it there. But the amulet had other plans. Every time she set it inside its sigil-lined box, shut the lid, latched all four latches, and turned away to greet a customer… the box would be on the counter again. Lid ajar. Humming like a hive of thoughtful bees. At the same time, Marin had discovered that no number of cloth wraps could fully contain a gemstone that wanted to sob probability onto things. He had placed it in a glass case. It had wept on the hinges until they won free of their screws and walked off in high dudgeon. He had put it in a drawer. The drawer had promptly won a small game of chance against the other drawers and rearranged the entire cabinet around itself. He had finally set it in a tea cup. The cup now hovered gently in the air beside him, haloed in faint silver, sulking every time he looked away. “Behave,” Marin hissed. The gemstone shed a single slow tear of liquid fortune that drifted toward the shop door like a drunk, well-meaning ghost. Outside, the Stacks were having one of those days. A burly human rushed past Elira’s window, arms full of shields stamped with the wrong crest. “Who moved my order?” he bellowed. “I was making lions, not—what is this? A marmoset? I don’t forge marmosets!” At Relicbane Curiosities, the bell over the door rang without the door opening. Elira looked up. A customer had appeared four feet inside the shop in a burst of silvery motes, hat askew, clutching a loaf of bread that was on fire in a politely contained way. “Ah,” he said, blinking. “This… isn’t the bakery.” “No,” Elira said carefully. “This is an artifact restoration shop.” He looked back at the door. “Did I… walk through the wrong reality?” “Possibly. Please hold still.” She plucked the bread from his hands, smothered it, and prodded him gently with a relic-lens. The air around him glittered faintly with silver threads, all converging toward the lane. “Have you recently purchased, touched, or insulted any gemstones?” she asked. “In this city?” he said. “All three.” The bell jangled again—this time properly, with the door. Marin’s wild head of curls popped around it, eyes bright, the floating teacup still orbiting his shoulder. “Elira,” he whispered. “We have a problem.” Elira glanced at her bewildered, half-teleported customer. “I had noticed.” “No, I mean a new problem.” Marin waved her outside. “Bring your reality lens. The one that hums when people lie about their own past.” “That’s not what it does,” she muttered, but grabbed it anyway. Outside, the Shining Stacks looked, at first glance, normal. Busy. Cluttered. Colorful awnings; shouted haggles; the usual hustle. Then Elira let the lens slip into place over one eye. The world lurched. There, overlaying the familiar brick and timber, was another version of the lane. Fainter. Like a reflection in a rippling pond. Signboards she didn’t recognize flickered in and out of existence. One of them bore a slightly different name for her own shop: Relicbane & Daughters. Her heart clenched at the sight—she had no daughters. Next to it, in the ghostly overlay, hung a sign with Marin’s sigil, except the script named it Gemcutter & Sage, and the door was closed under a strip of black cloth. In this other-street, people moved differently. Not many. But enough to suggest a life that might have been. Elira lowered the lens. The normal Stacks snapped back. “What you’re seeing,” Marin said quietly, “I think my stone is… leaking into it. Or out of it. Or—” He made a helpless noise. “Or maybe Tymora knocked over a shelf.” He gestured down the lane. The street itself was misbehaving. A cart laden with lumber rolled a good three feet uphill, stopped, thought about its place in the world, and decided to roll sideways instead. Its owner chased after it, boots slipping where the cobbles had forgotten which way gravity was meant to go. A tiny child tossed a copper coin into the air. It split into three halfway up, landed as a gold, a parchment note for a small inheritance, and a single confused beetle. Above, laundry lines sagged toward one particular tenement window, as if Fate herself had put a finger on the scales and pointed: here. Here is where probability is draining. All threads led to the same point: the narrow little canyon between Relicbane Curiosities and Gemcutter’s Fortune. “Watch,” Marin said. He held his hand out. The hovering teacup turned so the cracked gemstone faced Elira’s shop. A string of luck-droplets spilled into the air—slow, shimmering beads of liquid silver. They drifted toward Elira’s sign. Her ward-box, from within the shop, banged against its own shelf in response. The droplets hit the sign. For a heartbeat, the words Relicbane Curiosities shimmered and became something else: Relicbane & Tel’sareth Restoration House. Elira’s breath hitched. “I have never written that name.” “But your relic has,” Marin said. The letters snapped back. Her pulse did not. It was getting worse. Doors opened onto not-quite-right corridors. A man stepped into a cobbler’s shop and briefly appeared on a snowy, empty street before popping back with his hat on blue fire, sighed, and kept walking. A gnomish lensmaker stood in the lane muttering, “That’s not the sky I licensed.” The Shining Stacks itself felt as though it were forgetting which version of itself it wanted to be. “We’re at the center,” Elira said. “Your jewel leaks luck. My amulet leaks memory. Together, they’re inviting something that remembers us wrong. A Neverwinter that never was is leaking into the one we’ve got.” “Say that again,” Marin said slowly, “only slower, so I can be appropriately horrified.” “After we survive it,” she said. They closed their shops. Marin clapped for attention inside Gemcutter’s Fortune. “Due to an unexpected visitation from the goddess of Probability Having a Laugh, we’ll be closing early to prevent further duplication of outcomes. If you stay, you will either win immense fortune, lose your shoes, appear briefly in someone else’s childhood, or marry a minor duke by accident. Only one of those is survivable.” The controlled panic that followed emptied the shop quickly. Elira simply raised her voice in her own doorway: “If you value a world where objects remain what they are and the past does not argue with itself, come back tomorrow.” The ones who understood left at once. The lane quieted. The district held its breath. Elira and Marin stood in the middle of the cobbles, shoulders nearly touching. The ward-box hummed. The gemstone glowed. “You feel it too, right?” Marin asked. “Yes.” “The pull.” “Yes.” “North,” he said. “North,” she agreed. Then the voice came, from the air between them: “Return what was taken. Return what was borrowed. Return what was never yours.” Marin went pale. “I didn’t borrow reality,” he whispered. “Not on purpose, anyway.” “Regardless,” Elira said, “someone thinks we’re holding pieces of a broken thing. And if we don’t bring those pieces back, it will keep reaching through us to fetch them.” “Meaning,” Marin said, “the Shining Stacks will keep… forgetting itself.” “And more of that other Neverwinter will leak in,” she said. “The one where you’re a Sage and I have daughters. Where Tel’sareth is a name more people know.” He looked at the crooked lines of home—the shouting vendors, pitted stones, crooked signs—and his face set. “Well then,” he said. “We can’t have that.” They wrote apologetic signs. They locked up. And together they walked toward the northern gate, carrying a sobbing jewel, a restless amulet, and the uneasy certainty that tomorrow might not remember them the same way. For a heartbeat between chimes of the distant clocktower, every sign in the Shining Stacks flickered. For those with eyes to see, they all spelled the same mismatched word: TEL’SARETH. Then reality steadied, and the city pretended nothing at all had happened. --- PART III — The Place That Remembered Too Much The road north of Neverwinter always had a hungry look to it—pines leaning inward, breath held, as though waiting for travelers to drop secrets like crumbs. Today, though, the trees listened. Marin felt it in the scritch at the edge of hearing, like needles whispering to bark. Elira felt it in her bones, in the strange cold blooming inside her ribs where her pulse should have been ordinary. Every step they took, the amulet in her hand grew warmer. Every step they took, the gemstone in Marin’s teacup sobbed louder. “This is fine,” Marin muttered. “This is a perfectly normal, rational walk into a possibly sentient ruin that definitely hasn’t been stalking our shops through space-time.” Elira pushed aside a curtain of boughs. “You’re talking more than usual.” “I talk a healthy amount.” “You’re babbling.” “I babble a healthy amount!” The deeper they went, the more the forest seemed to double. A tree trunk with two shadows. A moss patch flickering through greens it had no right to. The faint impression of a second trail overlapping the first—not twisted, but parallel, like a sketch drawn over a finished painting. Elira slowed. “You see that?” “The ghost-trail?” Marin said. “Yes. And no. And also yes.” The shimmering second trail curved toward a bend in the world where the real path did not go. They stepped through. The air changed. Not colder—older. They walked into a memory that remembered them. The ruin of Tel’sareth waited in a bowl-shaped clearing. Stones half-buried in moss formed a circle, each slab etched with runes too eroded to read. Above them drifted the faint double-impression of a city—not Neverwinter, but something older, gentler, silver-lit. Towers curved like horns. Banners rippled in invisible wind. People moved faintly—halflings, dwarves, half-orcs, elves—like afterimages of a world that had blinked. “It’s a memory,” Elira whispered. “Someone’s memory of what Tel’sareth once was.” The amulet pulsed in her hand. The jewel floated higher, weeping silver. Beyond the circle, a presence unfurled like a great unseen cloak. “At last,” it said—a voice like wind caught between two realities. “The echo-bearer and the fortune-broken come home.” Marin straightened his vest. “We’re not broken. We’re just… misaligned.” “Who speaks?” Elira asked. The air thickened. A figure stepped into sight where there had been only a shimmer. Tall. Cloaked in memory-light. Humanoid, but features blurred, as though carved from half-forgotten dreams. “I am Tel’sareth,” it said. Marin swallowed. “The ruin is talking to us.” Elira nudged him. “Don’t panic.” “I’m not panicking, I’m… pre-panicking.” The spectral city behind the figure brightened. “You walk in the shadow of what I was,” Tel’sareth said, “a sanctuary of old worlds, where memories were kept safe from time’s unmaking. But I have grown empty. Forgotten. Cracked. Your relic and your jewel are pieces of myself you found by chance.” Elira’s breath caught. “Pieces? These belonged to—” “To me,” Tel’sareth said gently. “A memory-keeper’s heart and a probability-stonesong. They were lost when the weave around this place—the world around this place—came undone.” “So you’re telling us my gemstone and her amulet are your—your—” Marin began. “Organs,” Tel’sareth supplied. Marin swooned. Elira caught him by the collar. “Why now?” she demanded. “Why appear to us? Why reach through our shops? Why show us that other Neverwinter?” The figure stepped closer. “Because I am dying.” The spectral city shuddered. Stones groaned. A ripple of wrongness passed through the clearing like a wave through a mirror. “Memory leaks,” Tel’sareth whispered. “Probability spills. Two worlds brush like banners in the wind. Without your pieces, I unravel. And if I unravel…” The trees flickered. For an instant, each had two trunks. Two crowns. Two histories struggling to be true at once. “So too will Neverwinter.” Marin licked dry lips. “W-we can fix this, right?” Elira held the relic close. “Tell us what to do.” Tel’sareth extended two hands: one toward Elira, one toward Marin. “Return them,” it said. “Put my heart back where it belongs.” Elira stepped forward. “Will this hurt?” Marin asked. “Only if you hold on,” came the answer. They shared a look—fear, awe, defiance, the shared madness of shopkeepers who’d simply wanted a quiet morning and now were saving the fabric of existence. Together, they placed the relic and the gemstone into Tel’sareth’s hands. The world inhaled. The ruins glowed. The air cracked like breaking ice and then poured like melting stars as probability rewove itself. Elira saw flashes: A Neverwinter where she had daughters. A Neverwinter where Marin wore sage-robes and smiled less. A Neverwinter where Tel’sareth never fell. A Neverwinter where Tel’sareth never was. Beneath it all, one thread: the true world, the one they stood in, the one they were choosing. Tel’sareth dissolved into gentle radiance. “Thank you, keepers of the shops-that-stood-between,” the voice whispered. “I remember myself now. And I remember you.” The light folded into the stones. The flickering second-world dissolved like fog. The ruin quieted. The forest exhaled. “Did we… win?” Marin asked, sagging. “We survived,” Elira said. “Same thing.” They left the clearing arm in arm—a halfling humming nervously, a half-orc steadying his steps. When they reached the Shining Stacks, the world was right again. Signs spelled what they should. Shops sat where they belonged. Nothing was on fire. Except the tailor’s broom, but that was its own problem. Marin unlocked his door. “So… same time tomorrow?” Elira grinned. “Only if your gemstone doesn’t develop a cousin.” He laughed, and the lane seemed warmer for it. Above them, unnoticed, a faint shimmer played across the rooftops—a ripple of polite gratitude from a ruin that once had no voice. Tel’sareth remembered. And the Shining Stacks did not forget. Later, in the Ledger, the Soul Bearer inked: > In the Shining Stacks, where crafters stitch the day together piece by piece, > two shopkeepers returned a heart to a ruin that had forgotten itself. > For a little while, the city walked beside another life it might have lived— > and chose, quietly, to remain the one it was.