By midday the coast had thinned to a smear of iron behind him and the Glass Steppe took the whole horizon—tawny grasses driven by a constant wind, and between them the black panes laid like scars. Some were no bigger than a shield, some ran like frozen rivers. They caught the sky and broke it, turned the sun into shards.
Jalen walked the seams where earth met mirror. His reflection kept pace a heartbeat late, as always. When he lifted a hand to shade his eyes, the man in the glass lifted his a blink after, the delay tugging at Jalen like a snagged thought. He had learned to ignore it. He did not learn to like it.
The first sign that the west was watching him was small. A band of grass ahead lay pressed flat in a clean line, as if something long and low had slid through it. No hoofprints, no paw marks at the edges—just a path like a dragged rope. He stepped wide of it and didn't look back.
Wind shouldered him from the south, then switched without warning and came cold from the east. The panes turned dusky, reflecting a sky that wasn't there yet. Once, far off, something moved like a cloud against the ground. Thunder-herds, he thought, and kept his pace even.
He ate standing: a strip of dried fish, hard bread that scraped his gums. While he chewed, a faint clicking reached him—the delicate tap-tap-tap of something hard skittering over glass. He turned, slow. Grass moving. Light flashing. Nothing else. When he looked down, his own reflection looked back, the lag a little longer than before, as if the man beneath the world were deciding whether to follow.
He went on.
By afternoon he had learned the new silence. The steppe never truly went quiet—grass hissed, glass sang under sun, wind bulled the air—but some sounds were missing. No gulls. Few birds. The rare animal he saw stood too still and stared too long before springing away, its body leaving and its reflection finishing the leap after. Twice he caught a low red glimmer in a pane at the edge of his vision, like coals breathing. Both times it vanished when he faced it.
The ruin found him as the light thinned. A watchtower, once square and stern, had cracked across the middle and slouched against a cradle of fused earth. Fallen stones lay half-swallowed by grass; the base still stood, a single archway open to shadow. The lintel bore marks the weather hadn't managed to eat completely—lines curled into spirals, straight strokes crossing at deliberate intervals. Old work. Older than Everlock's crown.
He stepped through the arch and the air changed—still, dust-sweet, with a cold that felt like the absence of breath. Ash smeared one corner black. He knelt, ground it between finger and thumb. Fresh, for ash. Weeks, maybe. A bed of coals, once. Human bones, small and clean, lay scattered in the rubble. Not a grave. Picked. He set them gently aside without pretending a prayer he didn't feel.
On the inner wall he found the carvings. Moss hid them like old scars until he pulled the green away with his knife. The lines beneath ran simple and sure: a trunk; branches spiral into roots; fruit like circles, many, some intact, some cut with a single narrow stroke. He brushed grit from the grooves with his thumb and felt a hum there, faint as a remembered song.
The click came again, closer. Not from the door. From the floor.
He looked down. The ruin's center had been paved with square stones once. Heat had come here later—enough to turn some squares to a single plate of glass. In that plate, the doorway's dark was mirrored, and at its edge something low and thin and wrong slid past, the reflection arriving first, the body a blink after.
Jalen laid a hand along his sword's invisible hilt. Light slicked his palm. He didn't draw yet.
Night falls fast on the steppe. He knew better than to light a large fire, but the ruined tower's belly took a cupped flame well. He fed it thin slivers, enough to warm his hands. Shadows crawled along the crack lines in the walls. The carvings drank the orange and gave back a dull sheen, as if the lines had been oiled. Once the click skittered across the plate beside him, twice around the far corner, circling as if measuring the distance between one breath and the next.
He let it circle. He sat with his back to the carvings and his eyes on the door, the small flame making a house of his shadow. The clone tugged at him, the way a second step waits when you're already walking. He let that wait too.
When the beast finally showed itself, it did so like a thought you didn't want and couldn't stop. One moment there was only the arch. The next it was full.
Wolf-long but too lean, cats' shoulders under hide, ribs like a cage too big for the body. Where the skin stretched thinest, lights pulsed—dull red, like embers under ash. Its head was narrow, toothed with glass-sharp fangs. It didn't pant. It didn't breathe. It lowered itself until its belly nearly kissed the floor. Claws clicked. The reflection under it lagged by your heartbeat and then split—one shadow-beast turned to two in the glass, then three, flickering out of time.
Jalen stood. Light slid down his arm like a poured blade. His sword took shape rough and whole. The clone unspooled from him a beat later, its own blade humming. The beast did not rush. It shifted weight. The red coals in its sides glowed a shade brighter.
"Come on," Jalen murmured, because he'd learned that words sometimes snapped taut the silence on which a thing hung.
The thing came.
It moved in two places at once and neither was where Jalen's instincts put it. The body lunged left; the reflection leapt right. He cut for the body and the reflection struck his ribs with claws that weren't real and tore anyway. Pain burned along his side, hot and wet. The clone intercepted a snap at his legs and the teeth scraped sparks as if biting steel. Jalen pivoted, shoulder to wall, and drove his blade into the shallow of the beast's chest, feeling the resistance of something not bone and not stone. The body staggered back, red lights in its flanks guttering. The reflection kept coming, late and inexorable.
He forced the clone past him with a thought, and they worked together—Jalen at the body, the second him at the lagging shadow, each needing to trust the other's timing even when timing meant nothing. The beast learned quickly. It dragged its mirrored tail to scythe across his ankles while its real forelimbs feinted at his throat; snapped at the clone's blade to knock it off-line and then went for the man with the blood. Jalen took three shallow cuts that felt deep, and one deep one that felt like fire poured into him slow. He tasted iron and couldn't tell if it came from his mouth or the air.
He pushed power higher. The sword in his hand brightened until the edge lost its line and became a line's idea. The clone steadied. He let the thing commit, a real lunge and a mirrored pounce, and then stepped into the wrong space—the place between body and reflection—and cut across both. The blade bit hide and glass at once. The beast shrieked, a sound like stone tearing.
It bolted. He followed, because letting it choose the ground would give it back the advantage. Out through the arch, across the rough lip of stone, onto a wide tongue of mirror slick with frost. Boots slipped; he angled his weight; the clone's steps stuttered and then matched his. The beast spun, real and not, and drove at him with everything left.
"Enough," he said—not to the beast, not to the steppe, but to the part of him that remembered how to make a storm in a room.
Light burned out of him. The clone struck high; Jalen struck low. Steel sang. The animal came apart in an arc that sprayed black and red and not-colour. Its body hit the glass and smeared. Its reflection shattered into a hundred small beasts that leapt nowhere and were gone. For a breath, all the panes around them showed the same thing—Jalen doubled, swords bared, a second heartbeat out of sync with himself—then darkness took their shine again.
Silence returned, hard and bright as the stars.
His side burned. He pressed a hand there, and it came away red. The wound would close. It hadn't yet. He stood until the world steadied around the shake in his legs, then went back under the arch and sat where he had been sitting, by the carvings, because moving his camp would be pretending he was more afraid than he was.
The beast's blood had spattered the inner wall. Where it ran across grooves, the lines drank it and glowed. He watched that happen with the calm of a man who has burned out his startlement for the night. Roots curled, fruit darkened and then lit from within, a thin seam of light running through each circle like a crack in an egg. He wiped his hand clean on the floor and touched the trunk carved in stone.
Warm, again. Warmer.
"You were here," he said to the wall, to the old man, to the tree. It wasn't a question. He set his blade across his knees, leaned his head back, and let the glow soak into his chilled skin.
The pain dulled. Fatigue came in like a tide. Outside, wind crawled back into the steppe and pulled the grass in long strokes. The panes reflected a dark sky salted with stars and faint, low curtains of green and blue light that moved like sighs. Somewhere farther than he could measure, thunder-herds rolled the rim of the world, hooves muttering in a language older than masonry.
His thoughts slid, one after another, with the slow inevitability of stones rolling downhill. The fox carving was tucked deep in his pack. Mira's eyes steadied like a braced door. John's hand on his cheek, damp and warm. Rhea's name carved in frost.
He looked down. The floor beneath him held his reflection and the tiny flame as two moons next to each other. He lifted his hand, and for a moment, the man in the glass didn't lift his. When the double finally did, light leaked from its eyes like threads of gold drawn through a needle.
"That's not how you work," Jalen told the world, or himself. His voice sounded far from his ears.
He blinked.
The ruin slid away.
There was no falling. There was only a change in the kind of stillness. One heartbeat, he heard wind worrying the canvas, glass chiming, the soft digesting crackle of a little fire. The next thing he heard was nothing at all.
Black water stretched forever, smooth asa mirror, no ripple, no scent. Above it, a white sky without sun. Jalen stood on the skin between them, and it took his weight like glass takes light.
And the tree was there.
Not broken. Not groaning. Whole. Bark pale and veined, roots the size of ships sunk deep into the black. Branches cradled fruit that pulsed slow like sleeping hearts. The air around it hummed a tone he knew well enough now to know he had never truly known it.
Beneath the tree, the old man sat cross-legged with his back to the trunk, hands folded in his lap. He was thinner than last time, or the worry in his face tricked the eye. He looked up when Jalen's steps sent ripples across the not-water, and for the first time he did not tip his mouth toward a smile. The lines at the corners of his eyes cut deeper.
Jalen came to the roots and lowered himself onto the smooth not-ground. The hum from the tree moved through him like heat does through cold hands. He didn't touch the bark. He didn't need to.
Overhead, leaves had the colour of old bone shifted and gave the soft sound of cloth in the wind. No wind moved.
The old man's voice carried, not loud but heavy, each word landing like a pebble dropped into a deep well.
"You've come at last."
Jalen nodded once, because anything more would have been too much, and sat with him in the white light while the black water held the world very still.