In a crooked corner of the Night Market, between the tea-leaf readers and the spell scroll-mongers, sat an author at a weathered desk in a dimly lit office. No sign outside with his name, no accolades on a wall to present to clients. Only a chair, his writing tools, and a bottle on his desk.

  His hands cradled his head, fingers threading through his fading wispy hair. His eyes, somehow weary and still restless, stared blankly at the pages. Waiting for inspiration. Dreading the ever-present silence that instead took its place.

  The bottle perched beside him was green and glassy and alive. Inside it, something writhed about seductively, a shape like smoke and a woman both, her body twisting lazily against the walls of her prison. She never stopped moving. She never stopped whispering.

  "Fated lovers, and an amoral soothsayer," the muse crooned, voice curling up from the just beyond the cork. "a man that bears the weight of humanity..."

  He pressed his palms harder against his skull. The whispers danced just on the edge of his hearing, loud enough to tease, too faint to catch wholly. Half-formed fever dreams that gnawed at the corners of his every thought. Beautiful concepts, yet maddeningly incomplete.

  He hated her. He needed her.

  Each story she gave him had been brilliant. They made strangers at book stands stop and read. They made the Night Market a setting where people believed anything and everything could happen. They let his name carry the kind of small, important weight among the populace that opened doors to publishers and filled coffers with coin.

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  But each story gained in this manner took something from the man, something he had been paying for far too long by this point.

  Happy moments were just memories in the years past. Friends and families willingness to keep in touch, to see how he was fairing. The brightness in his smile that used to come so easily, now a distant scowl as his mind leapt from one story to the next.

  He barely remembered who he used to be before her now. It didn't matter to him, only the prestige of the next great story.

  "Or perhaps," the muse sighed, lounging languidly inside the glass, "a man who bargains away his pathetic soul for just one more tale."

  He cried a humorless laugh into his palms, the irony all too apparent for him. There were no new stories left without her. He knew it, he had known it for some time now.

  The pen lay beside the book, feather cracked, ink well drying. No stories came from his mind alone anymore. Only from her, when he drank deep of her influence.

  The man sat there a long time, while the Market drifted by outside; vendors shouting, minstrels playing, rowdy children laughing like mischievous fae engaged in wicked little games.

  Finally, with the slow inevitability of a small stone sinking into a still pond, he reached for the bottle. The muse smiled, radiant and terrible. He uncorked the glass and inhaled deep of her vapors as she spilled forth from the bottle. She swirled forth, filling his lungs and intoxicating his mind.

  The whispers became words. The words became stories. And somewhere inside himself, another small light flickered out, snuffed out as fuel for the next tale. He bent over his ledger with furious focus, ink scratching onto page after page as he whipped her tale onto the page. Beautiful, mournful tales. A tragedy framed poetically, the awful wrote in a way to inspire awe, a macabre masterpiece.

  As he frantically worked, the muse smiled wickedly. She knew he was nothing without her. He wrote and wrote, never realizing the man he was before her had ceased to exist long ago and its place was an empty shell, addicted to the whispers of his muse.