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“Maybe I should just sell rue of hair falling over eyes that I’d repeatedly been told looked so much likethis way and that “I’h I think”

I sighed again I had a burnout dryad for a roo of the modern world for company, one who either had access to soner knockoffs or secretly had the power tofor it, then I had to do so to make rent And I really, really had to find soels and entities

That settled it I needed to drop by the Black Market

6

There are certain parts of the world accessible only to those who knohere to find theled corners, and in the layers of reality just behind our own, that’s where the supernatural is hiding The normals don’t need to know about that stuff, all the tethers that link the domiciles of bizarre, terrible entities to the city of Valero, or the weird and wonderful interdiround has come to know as the Black Market

Somewhere near Valero’s central business district is what’s known as Silk Road, a painfully high-end shopping strip that attracts the city’s wealthy along with tourists in search of wildly expensive designer goods I sauntered anored the sidelong glances of people who clearly didn’t think I belonged there Silk Road was beautiful, admittedly, lined with trees on either side of the boulevard The air itself se blossoeraniue

So Silk Road itself is a manhole surrounded by caution tape This manhole has always been open, and it’s always been bewitched to ward away the nor by will know it for the nuisance it is and give it a wide berth Adive a construction site or any kind of public lance?

That’s how the arcane underground thrives in the ht The manhole is a portal to the Black Market, and all you have to do is hop in I’d been a couple of times, accompanied by my same old buddies who showed me around tohen I was still new to Valero, the boys that everyone had co bunch of misfits if ever there was one, and it was a ed better than I thought You had a vae, and el

I scratched under y with reht at home with the Boneyard, in a sense But I couldn’t stay with them I missed my friends, sure, hadn’t been in touch with them since I left, but I had to leave to protect them, because of what happened

Belphegor, specifically Belphegor hat happened, his wanted me Bad people, bad entities I’d taken sooing to catch up withthe Boneyard forever was the best way to protect s that wanted to find el that were bound to have Mason Albrecht on their shit list

But now I had to keep myself safe, and I could only hope that the Black Market would have what I needed to help me disappear, put rah the manhole

I kept falling for what felt like minutes The first time I came to this place,caught in soht that the descent was going to go on forever, htly on the unifor darkness, cos, black booths, and black streets, the darkness only really broken up by odd scatterings of neon lighting, or e the bazaar’s residents could scrounge up And the biggest sign of theht where the entrance of Silk Road would have been

“Welco pinks and yellows of the enchanted lights searing my eyeballs

The best way to describe the Black Market is to fraative equivalent of Silk Road Here, everything was constructed out of an odd black ests, this here the denizens of the underground henever they needed so you couldn’t exactly pick up from your c

orner bodega, especially if acquiring that soal Eye of newt, soically prepped rolls of blank parch