The lake didn't have a name.
Seraphina had told me that on the way up, in the tone she used for facts she considered important: it had no name, it was on no map, and the only path to it ran along a goat track above a drop that made every staircase on Mount Hua look gentle. She'd found it years ago, the winter Mount Hua had been too loud and too empty at the same time, when she'd started walking every morning until she ran out of mountain.
"Nobody comes here," she said, when we came over the last ridge and it opened out below us. "Except me."
"And now me."
"And now you," Seraphina agreed, as if it were a decision she'd made some time ago and was only now reporting.
