Story recorded by bard Jim Snyder.
Illustrations by artist exmakina. Tumblr: exmakina.tumblr.com
When I was little, I was told that, one day, far away, there was a town that, simply, appeared.
Now, sometimes towns go away. Mines run out of gold, rain stops falling, a dragon decides it likes the patch of ground you happen to be standing on. Whatever the reason, people occasionally need to pull up stakes and find themselves another home.
The reverse happens too. New towns form over the course of months or years when opportunities or the stars align. This town, though, came into being suddenly, in an instant, with an audible pop.
Pop.
There are stories of wandering shops, stores crammed with odds and ends, mundane or magical, cursed or karmic, eminently useful or as useless as half an evening slipper. They might be staffed by a hag, or a mage in disguise, or a forgetful crackpot eager to usher you out the door, purchase in hand, before their establishment vanishes once more into the night.
Not here though.
No stores, just houses, row upon long straight row, and not a person to be seen, halfling nor human, dwarf nor orc. Nothing on two legs stirred.
There were an uncommon number of cats, however, and the barking of numerous dogs.
Light flickered through the windows, not the warm yellow of hearths, but cold, pale blue. The sound of far away laughter, too, and talking, but… strange and removed, as if coming from deep within a cave.
Strangest of all, the town was without walls. Each house sat upon a square of land, perhaps enough for a kitchen garden, as if the capitol of a meadow, girded with scrub and trees.
A delegation from a village nearby, half asleep and stumbling, ran to confront the marvel, be it threat or boon or, more likely, something between; a gnome hedge witch and a tabaxi priest, a skinny mage’s apprentice and the town’s goliath smith, and a few more brave or foolhardy souls.
However, as soon as the mage’s prentice — quite often the one that draws the short straw, my heart — put a foot to the town’s strange road…
Pop.
Gone forever, and never to return.
The smith rounded on the boy in the patchwork robe, standing with his foot still held three inches off the ground. “The nine hells you do, flea bait?”
“Cripes, nothing! Nothing! I just took a step and the whole place disappeared!” He waved his hand around the general direction of the vanished town.
“Umm…can I put my foot down?”
That whole week, the prentice denied doing anything, but half the town thought him cursed, either with bad luck or incompetence, and he soon needed to find himself a new town, of the more normal variety.
No one could say what had caused the manifestation or its meaning. Some thought it a relic of the mage wars, others a phantasm, still others an archfey’s inscrutable prank. It was said, though, ever after, odd scraps of paper or indescribable things could be found where it had stood, as if the town had a hole in its pocket and was trailing spare change across infinity.
Ephemera
Many Paths Bakery Receipt
A slightly wrinkled receipt from Nicodranas’s Many Paths Bakery (tagline “When you’re here, you’re home!”) is proof that someone had a lovely breakfast.
Jester's Bedtime Tales 