The Nightmare Shop

The shop bell rattled as the door opened with a soft exhale of verdigris and attic dust.

“Pay no mind to the bell,” my Master muttered, not bothering to lift his gaze from a simmering vat of liquid night ink. “It has a terrible aversion to visitors”.

The girl stepped in anyway, her silhouette cutting through the gloom. She was here to learn Night Alchemy. I stayed crouched behind the register, studying her through the ribs of the bannister, taking the measure of her before she could take the measure of me. Caution, I have found, is rarely wasted on strangers.

She froze just past the threshold as the shop’s curated nightmares came into focus. Shelves climbed like skeletal ladders toward the ceiling, groaning under the weight of a thousand glass jars.

Each bore a spindly, handwritten label: Drowning, The Never-Ending Chase, or the perennial favorite, Falling Teeth. Some things, it seems, never go out of fashion.

“What are those?” she asked, pointing toward the ceiling’s gloom.

Up there, the vials were not meant for display. Instead, they were sealed behind steel-reinforced cabinets, as though serving life sentences. If those were deemed safe enough for the shop, I did not care to imagine what my Master kept gagged and bound beneath the heavy iron hatch in the basement.

The Shopkeeper dipped his pen, punctuated his ledger with a final flourish, and snapped the book shut with a decisive thud.

“Those,” he said, his gaze finally snapping to hers like a mousetrap, “are my blue-ribbon trophies. Vintage nightmares. Pure, undiluted dread, left to mature.”

From my hiding place, I watched the dark masses shift inside their glass cells. My scales began to itch with a more urgent hunger. My throat ached for a gulp of that syrupy darkness. Master was economical with my feeding. He served me thin, watery anxieties, and a peculiar chalky tonic that left me feeling perpetually famished. He claimed the potent ones were dangerous, that they would dissolve my tiny heart.

If so, they had chosen a remarkably aromatic method.

I peered over the counter, my hunger outrunning my discretion, only to find the girl staring back. Her eyes were wide, glassy with astonishment, reflecting my own rather less subtle interest.

“You’re… a dragon,” she breathed, her voice caught between awe and mild disappointment.

“I am,” I replied, drawing myself up to my most respectable height. “Somnyr.”

“It can speak?” she stammered, then flushed a delicate, apologetic pink. “I mean, sorry, you can speak?”

I gave a slow, dignified nod.

She frowned, squinting as if trying to locate the rest of me. “You’re… significantly smaller than the tapestries suggest.”

“I am exactly the size I need to be,” I said.

She considered this, then nodded, as though the matter had resolved itself satisfactorily.

Promising.

“Pay the lizard no heed,” the Shopkeeper said, waving a dismissive hand. “He is incorrigibly nosy, but tolerably useful.”

I let out a sharp, indignant screech and gave my wings a brisk, theatrical flap. My performance of obedience was understood to be largely decorative.

Through the exchange, I learned her name was Liora, and I wondered whether she might prove more generous than my current arrangements.

Days passed. Customers arrived like ghosts. Sadly, no one enters a nightmare shop with aplomb.

“For a price,” Master would purr, “we can relieve you of your grievances.”

Then I would get to work. Their faces always paled with the sickly relief of being emptied. Liora always watched. She was curious in ways that rarely ended well.

“Never feed him more than once a week,” Master warned. “And never, ever open the glass doors.”

I had seen what happened when his rules were broken. Conformity was expected.

The alternative was always painful.

And never fast.

So those were the simple laws of my life: make him coin and obey.

I had no memories before my Master. He claimed to have raised me from a hatchling, but my past remained a fog of soft, uncooperative impressions. My only constant companion was hunger. The low, insistent song in my belly never, ever quieted.

***

“You’re looking… glossier,” Master remarked one afternoon, peering at me through his monocle. “Less like a dusty boot, more like a polished beetle. Are you ill?”

“I am merely thriving under your excellent management,” I replied.

Liora didn’t look up from the ledger, but her quill stuttered for the briefest moment. She had recently taken over the “monotonous” task of my feedings, much to Master’s relief. He had relocated himself to the front counter, where he could devote his attention to the more meaningful business of coin.

“It’s the dusting,” Liora said, her tone dangerously mild. “I’ve been buffing his scales. It improves his temperament.”

Master grunted, satisfied by any explanation that did not require his involvement. Once he was distracted by the clink of the till, Liora leaned over the counter and pressed a cool, humming vial of Free Falling into my palm.

“Another?” I whispered. “But Master said my heart would burst.”

“Your heart seems sturdier than he gives it credit for,” she murmured, uncorking the glass with a quiet, defiant pop. “And you do look better with a bit of color in your shadows.”

One morning, Master announced his departure with a flourish of his travel cloak, leaving the keys (and the shop’s silence) in our hands. The afternoon light played lazily with the dust motes, promising a day of tranquil boredom.

Then, the door didn't just open. It was positively unhinged. What mannerless brute announces himself so?

Liora vaulted over the counter, and I dropped from a high shelf, my wings snapping with a sudden, starved ferocity.

A man had burst in, a child clutched in his arms like a fragile offering. He held the boy’s head with a white-knuckled grip, as if trying to keep the child’s soul from leaking out. Or perhaps, to keep something else from getting in.

“Make it stop!” the man wailed. “My boy is trapped! He’s succumbing to a sleep fiend!”

Liora gripped his shoulders, her eyes darting to me for a solution. What a preposterous idea to believe I knew how to manage the situation.

But then, I smelled the answer before knowing it. Thick, caramel-scented tendrils of darkness coiled around the boy, an aroma that felt achingly like home. It was a warm, ancient rumble in my gut, a scent identical to the forbidden vintages locked behind the steel-reinforced glass.

“No,” I rasped, my scales prickling. “Master was explicit. We do not touch the High Terrors.”

“I’ll pay anything! Every coin I have!” the father pleaded.

I do enjoy a good pleading.

“Somnyr, damn the rules” Liora shouted, her voice a sharp edge. “Even you could not let an innocent child be consumed.”

In all truthfulness, I cared not for the child. The silky tendrils of nightmare that looked so delicious, so natural, tempted me to suspect my Master had been operating with a rather flexible definition of “dangerous.” And now, with her permission to break the rules, I gave heed to my instincts. And the matter of payment! I could almost hear the Master’s delighted cackle at such a windfall.

It was enough of an excuse to shroud my own growing greed.

“Fetch a containment phial,” I commanded.

I clamped my jaws over the boy’s face. His father trembled, but I was already inhaling. The void was cold, jagged, and magnificent. My instructions were to spew it into the glass, to bottle the rot. But my stomach had other plans. It screamed for the nectar to stay. It demanded to be fed.

For a moment, I tried to be good.

To obey.

The habit of docility clung to me like a second skin.

But I felt it as it began to tear.

Liora saw the struggle in my throat, the way my eyes rolled back. “Don’t,” her expression warned.

I did.

I swallowed the nightmare whole.

My wings creaked like rusted iron gates as they stretched, my muscles knitting together with a newfound density that felt less like growth and more like correction. My claws lengthened, testing the floorboards with a deliberate, curious pressure.

The child’s frantic gasping smoothed into sleep. I truly am marvelous at my job! But my own mind did not steady. Fragments surfaced, uninvited and disorganized: a sky too vast to belong to this place, a slow drift between sleeping minds, the quiet architecture of dreams unfolding without glass or label or price.

And a figure… he carried dust that was not dust. Fine, pale grains that slipped between fingers and settled over closed eyes, softening the edges of waking things.

I had moved beside him once. Not as something owned, nor as something bound.

The memory did not complete itself.

I drew in another breath, deeper this time, and turned toward the upper cabinets.

The locks gave way with a satisfying lack of argument.

Locked cabinets shattered, yet the vials did not scatter. I pulled their contents out with precision. Each one settled into me, filling spaces I had not known were waiting. My wings extended further, my body adjusting into proportions that seemed, in retrospect, more appropriate. For years I was tricked into depletion. Keeping something weak means it never grows strong enough to leave you. But look at me now, more grand than any tapestry could have captured!

Behind me, Liora was frantic but her words struggled to retain their structure as the room diminished in relevance.

“I must go,” I said, though the statement felt less like a decision and more like an observation arriving too late.

“Somnyr! You can’t leave!” she called. “He won’t allow it!”

I turned toward her, if only to examine the premise.

“Allow,” I repeated.

The figure in my thoughts did not ask permission. And I found that I preferred this arrangement.

“I remember enough now,” I said. “And what I remember does not include permission.”

My wings extended fully this time, displacing the remaining shelves with a series of small, offended collapses. The lesser nightmares escaped, thin and unconvincing, dissolving before they could be of use.

The window stood between myself and a more accommodating arrangement of space. It courageously resisted. Then, like most things that mistake structure for permanence, it reconsidered.

Glass followed.

Liora, the father and the child stood among its fragments as I left it behind.

“What have I done?” her voice carried into the night.

“You have done more than you know,” I called back with enough intention that the words might find her.

The night opened around me, wide and uncontained. I could smell each presence, each coiled dream. The urge to consume pressed down on me. For a moment, I considered it. Then for the first time, I rebuked my nature and followed the faint trail of sand settling over closed eyes.

Somewhere below, a shop bell sighed. I chose to interpret it as criticism.

I had someone to find, and hungers that could wait. I continued anyway.