My eyes went wide. “Oh my gosh…Weeny Man?”
He looked up from the book he was dusting. His beard was greyer now, his face rough with deeper lines. But his eyes…those sharp, storm-grey eyes were the same. My lungs forgot how to work, my fingers, suddenly freezing again, twitched at my side.
His bushy brows lifted. “Sanora,” he said, stunned.
I grinned. “It’s really you!”
He put down the book, slowly walking around the counter. “I haven’t heard that nickname in years.”
“I haven’t said it in years,” I murmured. The sound of my name in his voice cracked something open in me. I stepped inside, still dazed, shutting the door gently behind me as if afraid I might wake up.
Weeny Man had been the neighbourhood’s bogeyman for most kids. He lived in a house that smelled like old metal and smoke, and the rumours were that he was a retired magician or a mad scientist. But he wasn’t. He was just weird. And magical.
And incredibly smart.
He used to gather the kids around his porch during the evenings and tell the most fantastical stories, half-truth, half-myth. The first one he told that stuck with me was about the “Silver-Eyed Girl.”
“She was born under a bleeding moon,” he had said in a voice meant to frighten us, “and her soul was part fire, part water. They say when she cried, the earth cracked. And when she laughed, trees bloomed overnight. But the King feared her. So he banished her, and the forest swallowed her whole. They say her ghost still walks the hills at night…crying, laughing, and waiting.”
All the kids had screamed and ran away.
I’d gone back.
I had waited until the others were gone and knocked on his door with shaking fists, asking, “What happened to the girl next?”
That was how it started. Every afternoon, I’d visit him. I helped him tidy his tiny workshop in exchange for the stories no one else wanted to hear. He fed my obsession for forgotten things and strange myths. He let me read his books, he taught me everything I still did till date.
And then suddenly, my mother and I moved away. He gave me the medallion on my last visit for ‘protection’ and I never saw him again.
Until now.
My chest was so tight I could barely speak. “You...you’re here. You live here?”
He chuckled softly. “For a long time now. You’re the last person I expected to see in Nimorran.”
I stepped closer. “Oh my God.”
Weeny Man smiled, a real one that pushed into the deep lines of his cheeks and made him look like someone who had lived a hundred lives and still hadn’t run out of laughter. “Seeing that you walked in here, I assume you still have that curiosity in you.”
I let out a breathy laugh. The sound came out a little cracked because I still didn’t have a single fucking clue what to say to him.
“Come here and sit,” he said, gesturing to a little table by the window with two chairs that looked like they’d snap if you leaned too hard. I followed him, eyes drinking in the shop as I moved.
It smelled like nostalgia and the earthy musk of old paper. The shelves were high and slightly crooked, stuffed with books that wore their age proudly. Some were bound in cracked leather, others in fabrics that looked like they’d been sewn by ghost hands. An ancient globe sat in the corner, slightly tilted, surrounded by dangling paper stars. Tiny charms hung from a wire above the register—crescent moons, eyes, bones. Books were piled in every corner, on top of old filing cabinets, inside broken crates with no labels. It was chaos, organised only by some quiet madness.
“You must feel cold,” Weeny Man said, eyeing my scarf and layered oversized sweaters.
I unwound the scarf slowly and sank into the chair opposite him. “Don’t you? It’s weird that I don’t—I feel like I’m freezing, but everyone else is just…fine.”
He chuckled softly. “Coffee?”
“No thanks. I don’t drink coffee,” I replied, managing a polite smile. “Seriously though. Don’t you feel cold?”
“Locals don’t feel the cold you feel,” he said simply.
“What?”
He looked around. “The cold is Nimorran’s way of filtering out bad tourists. If, after a while, you don’t feel the cold anymore, it means the town welcomes you. But if, after a while, the cold gets worse—”
