Lys always woke before me.

  She was like that, deliberate, radiant, one of those rare morning people who found peace in the hush before the world stirred. When I rose, the kettle was already hissing and the windows were always open, letting in the dew-laced air and the scents from last night's market beyond. She had a laugh like the melody of wind-chimes rustling in the wind and eyes like river-stone, calm and smooth, peaceful even while life was a raging torrent around her.

  We lived together in a narrow loft above our apothecary shop in the Night Market. It was never quiet, not really, especially at night when the Market was in full swing. The crowds ebbed and flowed amongst the stalls while we slept, always a low sort of murmur. The noise was soothing to us both, a sort of constant reminder that no one in the Market was ever truly alone.

  And Lys loved it. She said the shifting chaos felt invigorating. “No one here cares about the outside world,” she would say, brewing tea laced with cinnamon and dream-root from our own personal garden. “It’s the most peaceful place I’ve ever been.”

  She painted in the early hours, twisting landscapes with colors too vibrant for nature. Groves, mostly. Forests of towering mushrooms that twisted amongst each other, fungal canopies that glowed gold in the dark, veins of crimson bark that pulsed like heartbeats. She never painted people, or animals, or other landscapes. It was always mushrooms, she said it reminded her of home, before the orphanage where we both survived at years and years ago.

  She said she dreamt of them. Woke up with the shapes of the groves already in her mind and her hands naturally did the rest, manifesting the mushroom canopies with each and every stroke.

  I didn’t mind. She was odd. But she was mine.

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  But this sort of bliss was not to last forever.

  I awoke to find her standing at the window, still and alert, as if listening for something just barely audible. The market below was unusually quiet, a hush that had washed over the masses. And then I heard it too. Faint, but harmonious.

  A sound, not quite a style of song like I'd ever heard before, but not a melody, something close. Hushed notes, like music filtered through roots and damp stone. Low inhuman voices in harmony, and beneath them, a pulsing rhythm like the beat of one's heart.

  I didn’t know quite what to make of it, but I saw how Lys swayed slightly to it. How her breath caught as each chorus rose and fell, how her skin was riddled with goosebumps as the hairs on her arm stood on end.

  She looked… raptured.

  “Do you hear it?” she whispered. “They’re calling. It sounds so familiar.”

  I asked who. She didn’t answer. She just stood there, swaying and humming to herself. I wouldn't have thought anything else of it, but...

  She stopped painting after that. She stopped doing a lot of things. Ate less. Worked even less. Slept in fits, unless she could hear the song. And always, she listened intently, captivated by the music.

  The vivid dreams came next. “There’s a place,” she said once, brushing my hair away as we lay together. “A grove, below everything. Glowing like firelight. I walk it in my dreams. I.. I think we belong there.”

  I laughed nervously. Asked what she meant.

  She smiled. Kissed my forehead. “I don't know. It's just a dream, silly.”

  She vanished two nights later.

  No signs of struggle. No notes. Just her boots missing from beside the door, the window open how she liked it. It was if she had been spirited away.

  And on the windowsill, faint and almost too small to notice:

  A single pale mushroom, emerging from a crack in the wood grain.

  And so I began to search. I looked anywhere and everywhere we had been, I visited our favorite spots, I sought information from our neighbors across the market. Through the twisted corridors of the Night Market. Through alleys that changed when you weren’t looking, through the stalls of dream-readers, spirit-trackers, and bone-diviners. No one had seen her. No one knew. And few cared enough to help one tired woman in search of another.

  Late one night, while I once again fruitlessly canvased the Market as I went from stall to stall, I stopped in my tracks.

  I heard it.

  That strange, pulsing sound again. Low voices in harmony, resonating perfectly as the song rose and fell. It sounded like some sort of otherworldly choir, voices not quite human. But among the symphony, one voice stood out. I knew it had to be her. My Lys was calling to me.

  So I followed the sound. I followed the "choir."