It began, as most oddities do in the House of the Hearth's life-extended circle, with a breeze that smelled faintly of ink, ash, and rain-on-forgotten-pages.
The market had already been strange—produce with attitude, bread with abandonment issues—but this was something else entirely.
Mother Goose was in the middle of wrestling a loaf of sourdough back into its bag when the shadows bent sideways. Not longer, not darker, just… wrong.
A figure stepped forward—or appeared, depending on one's perception of time.
He had no singular shape.
One moment, he was a young boy with wild curls and starbright eyes.
The next, a man in his prime, robed in shifting fabric like parchment unraveling mid-sentence.
And then, an old man with a hunched back and a cane made from quills and clocks.
His face never fully formed. It changed every few seconds—nostalgic, unfinished, aching.
And when he spoke, his voice echoed thrice.
"The river runs backward, and the candle remembers its flame."
Mother Goose blinked.
Then slowly turned to Father Hearth.
"Did he just say a candle remembers its flame?"
Father Hearth, silent as always, stared at the being. His brow was still calm.
But a single vein throbbed near his temple.
The being smiled—or at least, his current mouth did. "Ah, the fire and the feather. You walk again."
"Unfortunately," Mother Goose muttered. "If you're selling eggs that hatch into riddles again, I swear—"
"The egg was never the point," he interrupted with a twinkle in his shifting eyes. "It was the shell. The boundary. The illusion of containment."
Father Hearth's hand twitched. The air warmed slightly. The cabbage in his basket sighed nervously.
Mother Goose took a step forward, trying very hard not to scream. "You. Who are you today? Storyteller? Inkwright? That nightmare I had after too much cinnamon tea?"
"I am," the being said with a polite bow, "the echo of a tale never written, and the author who forgot his own name."
"So yes to cinnamon tea hallucination," she muttered, exasperated.
"I saw a dream of yours once," he continued, pointing at her, now a young boy again. "You tried to trap time in a music box. It almost worked."
Mother Goose blinked. "I knew that was real!"
Father Hearth finally spoke, his voice low and like shifting earth. "What do you want?"
The being aged into the middle years again, tilting his head as if listening to a song only he could hear. "Want? Want is a human word. I come not to want. I come to warn."
Mother Goose groaned. "Oh, stars above, again with the warnings. Can't anyone just say things plainly anymore? Like, 'the world is ending Tuesday,' or, 'don't eat the bananas?'"
The old man smiled now. "The sixth child turns in their sleep. The dream bends. The tide changes, though no moon calls it."
Silence.
Then Father Hearth muttered flatly, "Wonderful."
The shifting man began to walk away, body flickering between stages of age like pages in a windstorm.
But just before he vanished into the crowd of sentient melons and suspicious parsley, he turned once more and said, very softly:
"Tell the flame... that the ink remembers."
Then he was gone.
A beat passed.
Another.
"Okay," Mother Goose said slowly. "Was that a threat, a warning, or just interpretive poetry?"
Father Hearth remained quiet.
The cabbage in the basket exploded.
"…I'll take that as a 'yes,'" she muttered.