The dunes did not look like dunes until you were on them. From a distance they were plates of sky laid on the ground—wide, convex mirrors of fused sand that caught the broken heavens and made a thousand horizons out of one. Each curve threw a different version of the world upward: a strip of violet cloud, a pale band where the sun would have been if this land still remembered sun, a smear of light that could have been tomorrow. Walking into them felt like stepping onto the inside of an eye.
Skarn disliked it at once. Animals trust ground to behave like itself, and this ground loved lying. The beast's claws clicked on glass that had once been sand and would now be mirror until someone taught it to forgive heat, which is another way of saying never. He tested a slope with his weight, found honest traction where wind had left a rough skin, and angled them along a rib of frosted silica rather than take the slick bowl where even the breeze sounded uncertain.
Lyra stopped at the crest of a hump where the sky came up to meet her shins and the reflected clouds made her look like she was standing at the edge of two atmospheres at once. She unfolded the glider with reverence and a mechanic's eye, careful fingers checking the hidden joins Torian had warned her would never forgive sloppiness. The staff sighed into its wider self—wings extending from ribs that knew their measure, locking with small clicks a body learns to love because they mean ready. Spiral-forged alloy flashed with just enough glamour to remind her it would not excuse mistakes.
"This is a poor place for vanity and an excellent one for humility," Torian said, tone neutral, as if reciting weather. He could feel the micro-currents on his skin the way old sailors feel a harbor's mood in fog. Convective pulses rose from mirrored basins in breath-long coughs; cool air slid down glass faces like a hand that had decided to forgive. Above them the fractured sky was conducting rehearsals—it would not commit to a single performance, and yet it held its cues. Perfect training.
Lyra set the toe of her boot against a line of roughness where a wind-scrape had relieved the mirror's polish and glanced at him, every muscle asking and trying not to plead. He nodded and pointed with two fingers—a gesture that drew a slender path through air without touching it.
"Short hops first. From this ridge to that shelf. Glide, don't fight. Intent, not fear. If your hands start thinking they're wings, you'll earn another scar."
"Where?" she asked, not masking her hope badly enough.
"Everywhere," he said dryly, then softened it with the ghost of a smile. "And you'll keep most of your bones."
Skarn snorted, which in the beast's language meant do not make me spend the afternoon catching you. He took station downslope at an angle that would let him intersect her small shadow if the glider spit her out. Even he respected the dunes' refusal to tell the truth about distance.
Lyra set her feet. Breath in four, hold, out six—the cadence Torian had used to make an iron grove choose gentleness. The world narrowed to the hinge between boot and glass, hands and grip, ribs and harness, wind and will. She ran three steps.
The glider took her. Not the way a hand takes a hand, but the way a wave lifts a swimmer who swims the way waves like—the shadow lift of a promise kept. Her stomach rose in that surprising, beautiful way bodies do when ground has the courtesy to stop insisting it is necessary. The alloy wings bit the thin updraft over the convex face, found purchase in a breath-wide seam between hot and less-hot air, and translated it into lift.
"Eyes on the line," Torian called—not her, not the glider; the emptiness, because emptiness is what you ride. "Don't stare at yourself. She's a liar here."
Below, the mirror threw Lyra's shape back at her in fractured strips—elbows and knees and the point of her chin dispatched to different panes in a jittering mosaic. If she watched them she would try to correct for ghosts and the glider would punish her. She looked where he told her to look: along the slight shimmering band that marked a soft thermal, the kind you coax rather than conquer. It rippled across the glass like fish under the surface of a black lake.
A gentle shift of hips, a breath-eyed nudge on the left wing. The glider obeyed because she asked the way it liked to be asked: intent forward, fear behind, hands honest about not being birds. She cleared the first shelf and let gravity argue harder than it needed to so she could feel what the fight would be like when it mattered. Boots scraped on a grit line. She stumbled, recovered, grinned, and pretended she hadn't grinned by biting her lip.
Again. Shorter run. Cleaner lift. This time she bled speed too slowly and Torian's voice lanced through before habit could ruin a good attempt.
"Speed is a debt. Pay it before it comes due."
She dipped the nose half a breath and then raised it, let the glider's complaint guide her hand, and settled with a skitter rather than a scold. Sweat slicked her palms; she didn't loose her grip to wipe them. Torian, watching the small ways fear makes itself important, said nothing—because she had not asked fear to hold the bar.
They moved along the rib, hop to hop, until the ridge opened into a bowl so wide the sky fell into it and forgot to come out. The air shivered on the far lip in bands, like heat above a road. Torian pointed once more, gentler than before, the tip of his finger bisecting a shimmer band that would lift if she treated it like a gift and would spit her if she treated it like a promise.
"Now," he said, and somewhere under the word the man who was bad at softness let softness show. "Let her carry you for longer than you want. Then decide to land."
Lyra nodded once, unable to waste breath on reply. She set her feet and went.
The bowl took her because bowls take things that want to be taken and don't insult the taking by pretending there are no teeth. She rose across the lip where the warm air left the glass and met the cooler downslope current, caught it not with the leading edges of the wings—she had learned that trap—but with the belly of the glider the way Torian had drawn with two fingers in the dust hours ago. For a breath she was exactly a creature designed for these rules: intent in front of fear, weight following will, spine a patient hinge.
"Good," Torian said—one word for three choices done right.
Skarn paced her shadow along the bowl's inner arc, muscles bunching and releasing under dark fur as if his body were trying to remember the shape of something with different bones. He watched the wind with his ears and Lyra's breath with his nose and the mirror with mistrust.
The third pass around the bowl taught her the first important lie the dunes tell: rising air is smooth until it isn't. A ribbed cross-current rattled the right wing hard enough to pitch her into the bad reflex. Her left hand clenched the bar. The glider interpreted the fist as a demand and started to drop its shoulder to honor it.
"Hands!" Torian snapped, the syllable hitting like a thrown pebble.
She loosened, cursed at her own instinct, and rode the tremor out with knees not elbows, translating shiver into swing. The wing settled with a vindictive shake as if to say that was you, not me. She laughed—too breathless to be embarrassed and too alive not to find this beautiful.
On the fourth pass she thought about showing off and, because sometimes grace requires reminders, the world offered her a specific, personal hazard.
She didn't see the time-shear first. She saw what it hunted: her shadow.
It was a thin line of wrongness racing along the mirror two dunes away, sharp as a knife edge and as indifferent. Where it passed, reflections slipped out of sync just enough to make stomachs tell the truth about how much they liked being inside. It moved with more intelligence than wind and less malice than god—purpose without person. Lyra watched it separate a stunted bush from its moments; brittle twigs winked like teeth, then lay perfectly still, a little behind where they'd been.
"Torian," she said, the same way someone says a name when a tide surprises them at night.
He had already seen it. His body didn't change. His voice cut the space between her and panic into something useful. "It's hunting your shadow. You are not your shadow. Keep the shadow off the glass."
"How?"
"Climb where it forces reflection and lower where it breaks it. You're riding a thought. Think better than it does."
Skarn angled to intercept and stopped halfway through the first stride. Even he understood this was a gambit made of glass. If he crossed the shear's path at speed he might commit to a version of himself he had not consented to, and beasts do not love arguments with identity. He bristled, then forced the bristle back down, furious and wise.
Lyra breathed in four, held, out six, and made a decision that forced the world to be as simple as her body needed it to be right now. She edged toward the inner arc of the bowl where the mirror's curvature threw returns high, rolled the glider with a shoulder and a breath so her shadow pulled up and off the surface, and let the center of the canopy wear it instead—light on light, shapes arguing on air where the shear could not sort them.
The line of wrongness turned with the dopplered insistence of a bee that thinks your ear is a hive. It came for the long, thin shape it had been promised and found only the blindered glare of a high canopy. It stuttered, hesitant in a way that would have been frightening if she hadn't decided to find it funny.
"Good," Torian called, not loud. "It thinks quickly. You think kinder. Keep it confused."
It veered, hunting anything that looked like a strip of darker motion. It found Skarn's long shape at his feet and lunged and Skarn stepped sideways with a contempt that would have started wars in a different century. The shear missed him by inches and hissed across empty glass, slicing a reflection of cloud into two moments and then losing interest because clouds have all the time in the world to make fun of knives.
Lyra couldn't stall it forever by pretending to be light. It adjusted with each pass, relearning her edges. She needed to land without offering the glass her shadow like a sacrifice. She needed to bleed speed without drawing a long dark line behind her to tell the shear where to cut. She had watched Torian trace a figure as patient as calligraphy in the iron orchard. She had felt the way a shape could be a law.
"Figure-eight," she said aloud to fix the thought into a tool. "Shallow. High into light, low into ripple."
"Say it like it's true," Torian replied. "Then do it."
She banked the glider into the first loop, gentle, committing to no deep arc the shear could track. The mirrored dunes gave her the tell she needed: a faint banding in the surface where micro-ripples had fossilized the memory of a less perfect wind. The air above those bands was less slick, less proud. It accepted weight. She rode the first loop high across glare where her shadow was a little nothing under the canopy, then dipped into the ripple band to trade height for obedience. The glider huffed its brief disapproval and then did what all loyal machines do when someone handles them like partners: it helped.
The second loop bled the rest of her speed without making a confession of it. She kept her legs quiet, knees soft, wrists no tighter than they had to be for honesty. The shear slid past under her twice, confused by a shadow that refused to take a single name, then lost patience with specificity and carried its rule onward to find an easier lie to eat. It knifed a reflected bird in half a quarter-mile away; the actual bird, unconcerned, kept flying.
Lyra brought the glider in low over a grit seam and let it scold her boots as they found a skidding path like flint under snow. She ran the last three steps on legs that remembered ground and stopped in a spray of powdered glass that would have been pretty if she had not still been busy being alive.
Silence came down in a sheet, then folded neatly at the edges so the day could keep happening. The dunes stopped asking to be oceans and returned to the strange business of being sky you could walk on. Lyra kept her hands on the bar and her eyes forward until her breath was something she could own again. When she dared, she looked at Torian.
He was already there, close enough that she could see the fine lines cut in his face by a life that learned to count by damage and chose not to be owned by it. He did something he did not do often enough for anyone to mistake it for habit: he set his hand on her shoulder. Not a warrior's clap. Not a teacher's corrective tap. A sure, brief touch the way you would tell a door it had the right to open now.
"You listened," he said.
Lyra tried not to smile and failed, which was fine. She had earned this mistake, and the world could learn to live with the brightness of it for one breath. Behind her Skarn exhaled with insulted dignity and decided that, fine, this child could be allowed to continue existing in the sky. He bumped her hip with his head just hard enough to say do not make me be proud again.
They spent the rest of the morning turning terror into technique. Torian stripped his instructions down until they were more law than language. "Lead with intent." "Hands are suggestions." "If you cannot name the wind, accept its offer." "When the world lies, make it say something useful." Lyra flew short arcs and long and walked patient miles with the glider folded across her shoulders so that her legs could learn the duty the wings would expect from them later. When her wrists started telling her they were tired, he sent her up for one more pass because mercy is indulgence if it comes too soon.
She brought the glider down a final time at noon by her body's count—no sky here would confess to what hour it owed—and sank to the grit with the kind of bone-tiredness that feels like honest pay. She lay back while the dune reflected a narrow stripe of cloud across one eye and laughed without sound because sound would have made the happiness too easy. Torian stood over her like a statue someone had put a heart in.
The world allowed them that long.
Skarn lifted his head halfway through a yawn and stopped in the middle, mouth still open around a warning. The hairs along his spine rose one by one, each a small, private decision. His ears angled not toward Lyra or Torian or the treacherous bowl, but toward the horizon where the dunes dipped and a flat line of ordinary land began.
"Trouble," he said, which in Skarn's language covered anything from hunger to armies. This was closer to armies.
Torian followed his gaze. At the edge of distance something had begun to form that wasn't weather. A smear of black against fractured violet sky thickened into a column. Birds, at first reading—the eye loves patterns it understands. But it was too deliberate, too pointed. The plume rose straight and then bent, making a sign across the air like ink dropped into water with someone's hand controlling the flow. Lyra shaded her face and watched it resolve with the horror of someone learning a new alphabet by having it shouted at her.
"Ashbound," Torian said—no surprise, only the confirmation of a path already bright under his skin. The plume had the shape the Ashbound used when calling anyone who might not be dead to come help them stay that way: a spine with ribs, a black spine with too many ribs. Distress.
He turned his arm and the map answered, threads kindling along the veins, drawing a clean vector out of this lying place toward the ridge where the plume wrote its emergency again and again on a sky that had begun to understand messages didn't have to be metaphors. The pull was not urgent to his body; the Spiral in him did not surge. It aligned. The difference was everything.
Lyra was already folding the glider with hands that shook because she hadn't asked them yet to stop. She tucked it with the efficiency of someone who knew the next putting-together would be in wind that did not care what she thought of it. Skarn stepped to the downwind side of her and let her work in his shade without calling it protection.
"Eat," Torian said, which was another way of saying you will have to be good again soon. He tossed her a strip of dry meat from a pouch and tore one for himself, chewing the way long walkers chew to make the jaw do something while the mind looks ahead.
"What is it this time?" Lyra asked around a mouthful she did not want to call hunger.
"Whatever survived long enough to ask for help and something that doesn't care that it did," Torian said. "We'll find out when we have to."
They left the bowl the way careful people leave a house with a door that sticks—slow, angle, pressure at the right moment. Lyra took one last look at the place where her shadow had been hunted and thought, with the plainness that comes after not dying: I am not the dark shape on the ground anymore. It would not always be true. Today it felt like law.
They moved across the mirrored backs of old dunes, boots biting where wind had left the grit, glider tight against Lyra's spine, Torian's shoulders set in that posture that meant he had decided what not to kill today and would keep deciding it until there was nothing in the world left that required killing. The plume on the horizon wrote distress into a sky that looked ready to learn another truth: that help can come from three figures who carry no banner except the way they move.
The map along Torian's arm settled into a bright, unambiguous line. He increased the pace by a fraction that told both child and beast he expected them to keep up because he wouldn't make them if they couldn't. Skarn lengthened his stride with a sigh he didn't try to hide; Lyra matched them without thinking of what she was matching and only realized she had when her lungs made the small complaint bodies make when they start to trust themselves too quickly and too well.
Behind them the dunes reflected a sky with one fewer lie in it. Ahead, black birds—or a symbol made of them—kept rising and collapsing, a signal thrown by hands who understood that sometimes precision is another word for hope. The Ashbound had learned restraint at the edge of desperation. Torian would meet them there.
They ran for the rib of land that would take them down into whatever the plume marked, and the dunes let them go without trying to teach them anything else.