The Second Woman, A Blue Golem short story

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I keep a standing table at Varro’s, a cafe on the narrow end of Commissary Row not far from my office. It’s out of the way, which suits me. There’s a small fountain in the center of the street where the lovers and the pigeons gather. I go there to watch people—how they walk, what they talk about, who they avoid, who avoids them. A good detective learns more from a cafe table than from a crime scene, if they’re patient.

She appeared at the edge of my peripheral vision and stood there, the way people do when they’re deciding whether to approach seven feet of animated clay.

Most don’t.

She did.

“You’re the golem,” she said.

It wasn’t a question.

I looked her over. Mid-thirties, dark hair cut short like she’d done it herself with a sharp knife and a dull grudge. Alone. Her clothes were exquisite—tailored linen the color of her eyes, stitched with a precision that cost somebody real money.

But she’d shoved the sleeves past her elbows and hadn’t bothered with the top button.

“Who’s asking?” I asked.

“I need to hire you,” she said, her voice flat and cold.

I looked away, scanning the passersby, always scanning. “I’m working,” I said.

Most people drift away when I give them nothing.

She didn’t. She just stood there, patient as a creditor.

“What kind of work?” she asked.

I looked at her again. Whatever she was carrying, it was heavier than pride.

I stood and thanked my server Desi. “Let’s walk,” I said.

We walked. The crowd parted ahead of us the way it always does. I’m used to people giving me space.

A woman with a handcart crossed the street to avoid us. A man on a bench abruptly stood and flicked his half-smoked cigar onto the cobblestones.

That was more space than even I usually get, but some days are just like that.

I try not to take that sort of thing personally.

“You know my name. What should I call you?” I asked.

“That’s the problem,” she said. She stopped to face me. “I don’t have a name. I don’t know where I live. I can’t remember who I am.”

She told me the rest as we walked. Thirteen days ago she’d woken up in a boarding house on Keever Lane with forty silver crescents in a pouch, a change of very expensive, very eclectic clothes, and nothing else.

No memory. No name. No sense of who she’d been before the empty room and the sound of harbor bells.

“Well, I have to call you something,” I said.

Something flickered across her face. “How did you get your name?” she asked. It sounded like not remembering her name was a sore point for her.

I knew the feeling, but I kept that to myself. “The mage Nel Philby gave it to me while promising to help me find who I used to be.”

She stole a furtive glance at me. “You pick,” she said. “As per tradition.”

I debated going with ‘Shiv,’ because she cut her hair like she was fighting it, but that felt a little on the nose.

“How about ‘Blue Crop,’” I suggested. “Blue, for short.”

She nodded slowly. Tried the name on, the way you’d try on a coat. “Blue,” she said. “For now.”

Not to me. To herself.

“For now,” I agreed. “Well, Blue, what do you want me to find?” I asked.

She stopped. We were near the Amberwell fountain, which meant foot traffic and noise and people who weren’t listening.

“I want you to find me,” she said. “The one who was here before I was.”

She stood in front of me with the same hollow expression I saw every morning in whatever reflective surface is unlucky enough to catch my face.

“If it was just missing memory, I could live with that. Start fresh. But something’s unfinished.” She looked past me, toward something I couldn’t see. “I sense I owe a debt I can’t name to people I can’t remember, and until I settle it, I’m stuck.” She took a deep breath. “I can’t go back and I can’t go forward.”

Her eyes found mine. The flat, cold composure she’d worn since walking up to my table was gone. What was underneath was raw and ragged, like a wound that had bled for thirteen days. “What can you tell me about me?”

I should have said no.

The smart play was to walk away. She was asking me to face the one question I’d been carrying around for free my entire life, and she was offering to pay for it.

But I knew what it felt like to bleed from that wound alone.

I’m not smart, but I am thorough.

“You mentioned you have forty crescents?” I asked. Most of my clients negotiate in G’s. Forty crescents was a year’s wages for a dockworker, and she’d been carrying it in a pouch.

“Thirty-nine,” she said. “I set myself up at the Chrysthenium while I figure things out.”

She’d been eating her way through a fortune without knowing it. Whoever she’d been, she hadn’t thought in small coins.

“My rate is five hundred G’s as a retainer, two hundred a week for expenses. And you may want to find someplace more reasonably priced before that pouch runs dry.”

She didn’t even blink. Blue reached into the pouch, pulled out a crescent, and flipped it over to me like flipping a copper into a fountain.

I looked at the big silver coin. That single crescent was worth more than my last three cases combined.

“I’ll have to make change,” I said, but she’d already lost interest.

I noticed the decorative stitching on her sleeve. Tight, even, deliberate—someone had been paid well for that work, and ‘paid well’ usually meant ‘remembered well.’

I asked if I could borrow the garment and told her she could find me at the café every day at the same time until I either solved the case or hit a dead end.

“Don’t hit a dead end,” she said.

#

I started where she started, on Keever Lane, at a boarding house called The Whetstone—a name that was either aspirational or accurate, depending on who walked in dull and who walked out sharp.

The owner was a thin woman named Brecca who remembered my client immediately.

That told me two things: Blue had made an impression, and the owner was afraid of her.

“Paid in advance,” Brecca said, not looking at me.

People who won’t look at a golem are usually hiding something. Brecca looked like she was hiding from something.

“Two weeks,” she said. “Cash. Paid in crescents, of all things.”

Two weeks, paid in advance. Someone had wanted to make sure Blue had a place to land—and that someone had been Blue herself, back when she still had a name.

“Did she give you a name?”

“No name.” Brecca’s mouth tightened. “She was quiet. Kept to herself. But…”

“But?”

“The other tenants moved out. Three of them. Within two days.” She finally looked at me. “They said she frightened them. Couldn’t say why. Just a feeling, they said. Like sleeping next to something that could wake up hungry.”

“Could they describe it?”

“That’s the thing.” Brecca shook her head. “They couldn’t. Not one of them. Just that they had to leave. Had to.” She stood. “That’s all I know. You really should go.”

I thanked her and left.

I stood outside and collected my thoughts. People don’t flee a boarding house because of a feeling. They flee because of a recognition, something old and animal that knows danger before the conscious mind catches up.

My client was dangerous. And she had no idea.

#

The clothes were my next thread. Tailored linen doesn’t grow on trees, and in Ahlendalay, the dye work narrowed things down.

I found the tailor on Commissary Row, a Hasudi woman named Pella who worked out of an exclusive shop barely twice as wide as my shoulders.

“This stitching.” I showed her the hem of the sleeve Blue had let me borrow. “Is it yours?”

Pella examined it like a surgeon examining a wound. “I remember this. It was three months ago, maybe four. The client ordered three full outfits at a nice fat commission.”

“For whom?”

“A woman.”

“Which woman?” I asked.

She looked at me and her eyes narrowed. “I don’t recall the name,” she said.

“You remember the stitch count on a three-month-old commission but not the client?”

Her face went blank. “I don’t recall the name because that’s what the extra was for.” She stuck the sleeve out towards me like it was contaminated. “I was paid double for the clothes and triple for the forgetting.”

And then, polite as a locked door, she shooed me out of her shop.

I stood outside. I get the bum’s rush now and again. This time, I’d gotten something for my trouble.

People don’t pay that kind of money by mistake.

#

I found three more people that afternoon who told me the same story in different words.

A landlord on Pallas Street who’d rented to a woman matching my client’s description for two years, and accepted a considerable sum to destroy the records.

A chandler who’d supplied her with lamp oil and candles weekly, and described her as the kind of person you never say no to.

And a neighbor who went the color of old milk and slammed the door in my face.

By evening, I had a pretty good picture of what had happened. I didn’t have a name yet, but I could make out a silhouette: Blue had been a woman who’d lived in the Pallas Street district—respectable, not wealthy, not poor; a woman with power enough to frighten neighbors and command silence from merchants; a woman who, over the past few months, had systematically dismantled every trace of her own existence.

And then somehow erased the woman who’d done all of that.

The question I was being paid to answer—what had she been?—had a shadow behind it that darkened with every door I knocked on: Why did she need to stop being that thing?

#

I found the memory mage on the second day.

His name was Torren, and he operated out of a cellar beneath an apothecary in the Splits. Memory work was technically illegal in Ahlendalay in the same way that carrying a blade was illegal—against the rules, beneath respectability, but indispensable to the kind of people who kept the city running.

He kept fidgeting. I thought at first that he was afraid of me. Then I realized he was afraid of who’d hired me.

“She came to me,” he said. “A few weeks ago. She wanted relief. A suppression.”

I pretended to study the tools on his desk. They looked like surgical instruments that had given up on precision. “But that’s not what you did,” I said.

He hesitated. Then the words came faster.

“She wanted it all gone. Everything. Not just suppressed—removed. Like pulling threads from a tapestry.”

“And you did it,” I said. I turned back and looked down at him. “I know what kind of work this was. You didn’t just pull threads, you went after the loom.”

He shrank back, one arm half-raised. “I tried to talk her out of it. A full wipe—that’s not a haircut that grows back. That’s amputation.” He rubbed his hands together, a nervous habit that had probably cost him steadiness over the years. “She was… insistent.”

“Insistent, how?”

He looked at me for a long moment. “She told me that if I didn’t do it, the woman she was would eventually kill someone.”

I shook my head, but he barreled ahead, the words spilling out like a confession I hadn’t asked for.

“She said it like a weather report,” he said. “Not a threat. A forecast.”

“Did she say who?”

“No. And I didn’t ask. Some questions, you’re better off not knowing the answer to.” He looked at me differently this time. “You understand that, I think.”

Yeah. I understood it very well.

I turned and left him there in his darkness.

He let me get halfway up the stairs before calling after me. “A full wipe holds because the mind doesn’t know what’s missing. If someone names it for her, if she gets the shape of it back…” He shook his head. “Memory is a tapestry. Remove the threads and the pattern’s gone. But the loom is still there. If you give the loom a pattern to follow…”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

He didn’t have to.

#

I found her apartment on the third day through good old-fashioned detective work.

Everyone pointed me toward Pallas Street without quite meaning to.

I approached the apartments with a growing sense of both excitement and foreboding. There was a common building with an arched entryway leading to the office. I clapped outside the landlord’s door, aware that the concussion created by my hands sounded like thunder.

There wasn’t much I could do about that.

When his door opened and I explained what I was looking for, I expected denial. What I got instead was resignation.

“Those rooms are empty,” the landlord said. “You can look.”

He directed me to one of 12 doors arranged in a semi-circle around a small interior courtyard. When I stepped inside, I knew I’d found the right place—the rooms had been emptied like a crime scene.

Her rooms had thick stone walls, terracotta floors scrubbed clean, heavy curtains that kept the light muted and the street distant.

I noted nothing sharp, nothing reflective, nothing personal.

It wasn’t a place someone settled into. It was a place someone designed to live safely inside.

I finally found her name in the lone desk. She’d scratched it into the back of a drawer, the one thing her landlord had missed when he’d scrubbed the place clean. She must have carved it herself, the way a prisoner marks a cell wall. A record that someone was here, even if no one would remember.

Maren Ghael.

I thanked the landlord, left a small tip for his trouble, and thought over what I’d learned, what I knew, what I was still missing.

And then I knew I had one last stop to make.

#

I trotted across town to a small cottage over on the edge of the city. The name I’d found meant nothing to me, so I took it to Lan Lupos—a cleric whose eyes glowed orange in the face of untruth, and who knew where every secret in this city was buried.

His wife, Koomi, met me at the door and ushered me into Lan’s study.

“I’m working a case,” I said. “A woman hired me to find out who she used to be.”

“You have my attention,” he said. He sat back in his chair. “How far have you gotten?”

“I have a name,” I said, and then I shared it with him.

On hearing “Maren Ghael,”the big cleric went quiet.

That was never good. Lan’s silences have weight.

“Have a seat,” he said.

Lan kept a heavy wooden bench in his office for just such conversations. I carefully sat and waited for him to continue.

He poured himself tea while he was thinking. He didn’t offer me any, which was polite because, you know. “Maren Ghael was a magistra,” he began. “Not powerful in the formal sense, not ranked or guilded. But gifted, unusually so.”

He said that the way you’d say unusually sharp about a knife you’d just cut yourself on.

“Maren Ghael worked with emotional manipulation,” Lan continued. “Fear, specifically. She could reach into a room and turn the air to dread.”

“Turn the air to dread,” I repeated.

“It’s not a metaphor. She could project terror into anyone nearby. Not an illusion, but genuine physiological panic. Heart racing, sweat, the conviction that something is about to kill you.” He sipped his tea. “Imagine living with that ability and not being able to fully control it.”

I didn’t have to imagine very hard.

“So she frightened people,” I said.

“Clay, she destroyed people. And once she understood what she could do—she leaned into it. Built wealth, built influence, built a life on the fear she put into everyone around her. She told herself it was just how the world worked.” He set the cup down, the ceramic rattling slightly on the plate. “Until the incident at the market square.”

I leaned forward a little. “What incident?”

“There’s a small open-air market in the Splits. She was just passing through. A child was nearby. Maren Ghael lost control completely. The panic hit thirty people, maybe more. They just stampeded. Blind terror reigned, the kind that doesn’t see what’s underfoot.” He paused. “The child was trampled. She survived, but only barely, and she’ll never walk right again.”

He stared into the fireplace, lost in painful memories.

“Why haven’t I heard about that?”

“There were witnesses, of course,” Lan muttered. “But none of them agreed by morning.”

I sat with the math. Maren Ghael had leaned into her power, built a life on it, told herself the damage was just the cost of doing business.

Then a child paid the price.

And then the woman who’d hired me—the one with the hollow eyes and the bleeding wound—that’s where she started.

Lan continued, almost talking to himself. “After that, she went alone to the abandoned quarry outside the city walls.” He took a deep breath. “The light show lasted three days; the sound echoed for three nights. People thought it was a storm. She was trying to burn it out of herself, or burn herself out, whichever came first.”

The flames from the fireplace reflected in his eyes. “She tried to control it after that. Studied with three different magisters, but nothing worked. The ability was part of her, like a heartbeat. And then, a few months ago, she started to disappear, piece by piece, until about two weeks ago, when she was just… gone.”

I leaned back against the wall. “I know the rest from there, I think. She started by covering her tracks. And then she found a memory mage to cut it out.”

“Cut what out?” Lan asked.

“Everything,” I said. “Her ability was tangled into her identity, her memories, her sense of self. Torren told her a partial wipe wouldn’t work, that it was all or nothing.”

Lan sat in silence with that for a long time.

I sat there in Lan’s study and felt something I don’t have a word for.

Not sympathy—that was too soft.

Recognition.

The bone-deep understanding of looking at what you are and finding it monstrous.

“So now you know,” he said eventually. “What will you do with this information?”

I had no answer.

I stood to leave. Lan’s voice caught me at the door. I looked back.

“Clay. The wipe severed her from her ability. But the ability isn’t learned; it’s innate. It’s in whatever she is in the way strength is in whatever you are. Right now she can’t reach it because she doesn’t know it’s there.” He looked up at me. “What happens when she does?”

#

She was waiting for me at my table at Varro’s. Same spot where she’d hired me. She sat in her chair with her hands around a coffee mug, watching pigeons fight over bread crusts, looking like any other person in the city.

Ordinary. Harmless. At peace.

I almost walked away.

I kept hearing Torren’s voice on the stairs—the loom is still there—and Lan’s question at the door, “What happens when she does?”

She’d burned her entire life down to stop herself from hurting people. Paid nearly everything she had.

And it had worked. She was free. If I opened my mouth, I’d be handing it all back—the fear, the destruction, the poison she’d paid a mage to cut out of her.

But if I kept my mouth shut, I’d be the thing I hated most. The one who decided what someone else deserved to know.

Someone did that to me once, wiped me clean without asking. And I hated them—whoever they were, wherever they were—with the only thing I had left: the choice to be different.

I sat down across from her on my sturdy wooden bench. It complained a little, but held.

“You found something,” she said. Her hands left her mug and dropped into her lap.

I looked at the pigeons. I looked at the fountain. I looked at everything that wasn’t her face.

“I found everything,” I said finally.

I started with the room on Pallas Street, designed for someone who didn’t trust herself with sharp edges. The people who were relieved she was gone. The fear that followed her without permission. The market square, and the little girl who’d never walk right again.

Every word I gave her was a thread. Every thread was a pattern the loom could follow.

I saved the name for last. Not because she didn’t deserve it—because once I said it, there was no taking it back.

“You were Maren Ghael,” I said.

Her face did something complicated—not shock, not grief, but a kind of stillness, like a lake when the wind stops.

“The other tenants at The Whetstone,” she said quietly. “They left because of me.”

“Residual, probably. Torren cut the memories, but some part of the ability might still be there. Fainter. Like an echo.”

“An echo.” She looked at her hands. “I did this to myself.”

“You did,” I said.

“And the person I was—everyone’s better off without her?”

I could have said yes. It was close enough to true, and it would have been a kindness, and she would have walked away clean.

But she hadn’t paid me for kindness.

“I don’t know if they’re better off, Blue”, I said. “That’s not what I found. What I found is that you already answered this question once. You looked at who you were, and you decided to change the answer. You paid everything you had—your name, your history, your self—because you thought becoming no one was better than staying someone that dangerous.”

She was quiet for a long time. “And was it?” she asked. “Was it the right choice?”

I thought about the question. I thought about the abandoned chapel where I’d first awakened, the darkness where my past should be, the unnamed someone who decided I didn’t need to know who I’d been.

I thought about how I’ve spent every day since trying to build a person out of choices because I didn’t have an origin to fall back on.

“I don’t know,” I said eventually. “But it was your choice. That’s worth more than the answer.”

She sat with that. The pigeons had resolved their war and were coexisting in a state of mutual suspicion. Nearby, the fountain burbled. Somewhere in the Lantern Quarter, a bell marked the hour.

“Maren Ghael,” she said, tasting the name.

I stayed silent.

She stood. Brushed off her tailor-made clothes. “Maren Ghael is dead,” she said. “My name is Sera Blue.”

Then she looked at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. Gratitude, maybe, or the thing that lives next door to it and keeps quieter hours.

The good thing about being expressionless was that she couldn’t see what that did to me.

I held out the fabric I’d borrowed. “What will you do now?”

As she accepted it, a thoughtful look passed over her face. “I think I might go into fashion,” she said.

She paid me what we’d agreed on, plus a tip I didn’t argue with. Then she walked south toward the harbor, where the salt air scrubs everything clean, the ships don’t ask where you came from, and the gulls don’t care who anybody used to be.

I sat there for a long time after that, a stone in a city of flesh, carrying the question nobody was ever going to pay me to answer.

# # #

Author’s acknowledgements

Stories don’t happen in a vacuum. Here are some people I’d like to thank who had a hand in ushering this story from inception to completion in a few short days. In no particular, big thank-you’s to the following:

• Kevin Chiche, who started all this off on LinkedIn
  (I wrote a short post about how this all came about on Substack.)
• Author L.S. King, my first reader
• Author Margo Ann Sullivan
• Mohammad Khan
• Author Linnie Thomas
• Author M. Cameron Harris