The Market Between Stalls

Being a treatise on the nature, structure, and perils of the Shard Realm know asn the Market Between Stalls. Compiled from first hand accounts, merchant testimony, Fey … poerty and songs … and one regrettable personal visit the chronicler does not intend to repeat.

I. The Crooked Lane

Nobody goes looking for the Market Between Stalls. Or rather, some do, and they rarely find it. The Market finds you, or it doesn’t, and the mechanism by which it decides is not well understood by anyone who has not spent considerably more time in Fey company than is generally recommended.

What is understood, through accumulated accounts across centuries and dozens of mortal cultures, is the approach. It always begins the same way. You are at a market. A real one, a mortal one, with mortal vendors selling mortal goods at mortal prices. You are walking between the stalls, heading from the cheese seller to the cloth merchant or from the spice vendor to the ironmonger, and you take a turn. Not a wrong turn, not a turn you did not intend to make. A turn that was not there a moment ago but which, once taken, feels as though it was always there and you simply had not noticed it before.

The locals call this turn by different names in different places. In Lepidstadt, the old women call it the Krumme Gasse. In the markets of Absalom, it is called the Sidestep. In the bazaars of Katapesh, it is the turn you take when you are looking at a vendor’s wares and your feet decide to go somewhere your eyes were not pointed. But the most common name, the one that appears across enough independent sources to constitute a genuine folk tradition, is the Crooked Lane.

The Crooked Lane is not a physical location. It is a condition. It is the moment when the space between two stalls becomes wider than it should be, when the gap that should hold nothing holds something, when the sounds of the mortal market grow slightly muffled and the light shifts by a degree that most people would not notice and that those who do notice find difficult to describe. One takes the Crooked Lane by walking into a space that was not large enough to walk into, and arriving somewhere that the space, by any reasonable measurement, should not contain.

Not everyone can take the Crooked Lane. Children find it more easily than adults. People who are slightly lost find it more easily than people who know exactly where they are going. People who are looking for something specific but do not know what it looks like find it with remarkable consistency, which suggests the Lane has opinions about the quality of desire that earns admission. The idle, the rigid, and the aggressively purposeful tend not to find it. The curious, the open, and the slightly desperate tend to find it whether they meant to or not.

The Crooked Lane can appear at any market, anywhere, at any time. It has been documented at the great permanent bazaars of southern Garund, at weekly village markets in the Shudderwood, at festival grounds during harvest celebrations, at trade fairs in Cheliax, and at a fish market on the docks of Riddleport that the vendor in question insists was perfectly normal until the afternoon he found himself haggling over a silver fish that sang. The Market Between Stalls does not require a large market to attach itself to. It has been found in the gap between two farm carts at a crossroads where three families had gathered to trade butter and eggs. It has been found in a single alley between two permanent shops in a city that has no other market activity. It has been found, in one account I consider credible, in the space between two bookshelves in a private library where no market of any kind was taking place, which suggests that the Market’s definition of “market” is broader than ours and may encompass any space where exchange is occurring or has recently occurred.