Dawn did not break over the salt flats so much as seep into them.
The world beyond the Echo Vault was a pale, endless basin, miles of cracked salt catching the first hint of light and turning it into a muted, colorless glow. No clear horizon. No trees. Only the suggestion of sky and ground taking turns pretending to be each other.
Sol tightened the ties of her cloak and stepped out after Kang Ya Zhen, the Vault's stone doors grinding shut behind them with a final, echoing sigh.
For an instant, the faint shimmer of her own silhouette tried to form in the salt under her feet.
Then the sigils branded along the Vault's threshold flared dull red, and the shimmer vanished like breath on glass.
"Do not look for yourselves out here," the Vault Mistress had warned, voice like old parchment cracking. "Exist like smoke. Not even your own hearts should find your faces."
Ji Ming took position at Sol's right, shadow falling carefully where the ground was most broken, where no reflection could fully gather. He had left his Sky Wolf armor behind in the Vault, trading lacquered plates for worn leather and a long dark cloth robe to muffle his outline. Only his twin blades remained, their hilts wrapped in fresh strips of dull cloth to hide any gleam of metal.
His hand hovered a fraction closer to Sol's back than propriety demanded, but never quite touching.
"I'll set the pace," Ya Zhen said, adjusting the strap of her slim travel pack. She wore no red today, only layered grays and a thin veil the color of smoke, leaving her mouth and eyes bare. The only hint of color was the vermilion ink staining the sigils along her wrist, now hidden beneath fingerless gloves. "We reach the first way-station before the sun stands overhead. If we fall behind schedule, the salt starts speaking."
Sol glanced sideways. "Speaking?"
Ya Zhen's smile was quick, crooked. "Not with words. With light. The Mirror remembers how to use light."
The air between them thickened for a heartbeat. The Mirror Forge. The Chief Envoy's broken body, the gleam in his eyes that wasn't his own. The way its hunger had slid along their bond like a finger tracing a vein.
Sol's pulse stuttered, and… inevitably… Ji Ming's did too.
Their shared resonance tightened, a faint pull beneath the sternum, as if an invisible thread between their cores had contracted in warning.
Ji Ming cleared his throat. "Move now," he said quietly. "Talk later."
They descended the last lip of stone and stepped fully onto the flats.
The salt crunched under their boots, deceptively thin in some places, revealing a layer of gray-packed earth below. In others it lay thick and uneven, like frozen waves that had shattered but couldn't remember how to melt.
The Echo Vault shrank behind them into the cliff face until it was indistinguishable from rock. Only the faint red of the hidden sigils pulsed once more, then dimmed.
The world went very, very quiet.
Sol had thought the Vault silent, but this was different. This silence was not the absence of sound. It was the absence of presence. There were no walls to carry echoes, no trees for wind to bend through, no water to remember voices.
Her heartbeat felt too loud.
Ji Ming must have felt it too. His qi brushed against hers… steady, contained, an invisible hand placed gently over her racing pulse.
Breathe with me, it seemed to say, without words. In. Out. We are still here.
She listened. Aligned her breath with the rhythm of his steps. The faint frost of dread along the edge of her awareness began to thaw, just enough.
"Tell me about The Salt Fell," Sol said after a while, if only to fill the emptiness with something that wasn't the Mirror's memory. "What waits for us there?"
Ya Zhen didn't look back, but her shoulders tipped in a lazy shrug.
"Once, it was a city built on a lake," she answered. "Traders came from half the empire to bargain on its waters. Then the water left."
"That's not how lakes work," Ji Ming said dryly.
"In this empire, it is," Ya Zhen replied. "The Emperor's divine architects carved new rivers to feed the capital, to feed their perfect gardens and reflecting ponds. They took the lake's heart and redirected it. The Salt Fell was left as bones."
"Salt," Sol murmured.
"Salt," Ya Zhen agreed. "And memory. Those who stayed learned to drink mist and brine. Those who left took a taste of the old city in their blood… the way they say 'water,' the way they listen for storms. The Salt Fell forgot what water is, but it never stopped mourning it."
Sol let the image settle: a city built on absence, surviving on ghosts of rivers.
A place that forgot what water was. A world learning to move without reflections.
It felt… appropriate.
Ji Ming walked in silence beside her, gaze sliding over the flats with a soldier's wariness. Every pale ripple in the salt was an ambush, every glittering patch a possible mirror. He adjusted the cloth around one blade's hilt, fingers sure, movements economical.
"Your injury," Sol said quietly, catching the stiffness in his shoulders as he straightened. "Your ribs. How bad is it?"
"It held through training," Ji Ming replied. "It will hold through a walk."
"That isn't an answer," she said.
"That is my answer," he countered, but there was no heat in it.
Their eyes met for an instant. His eyes held the hue of storms… that breath before thunder takes its cue. However, a flicker of something softer beneath, the same softness that had flared when he'd thrown himself between her and the Envoy, taking the Mirror's first strike.
The resonance hummed between them, faint but insistent.
Sol opened her mouth to press the matter, but Ya Zhen raised a hand, halting them.
"Stop," she said. "Do not move."
Sol followed her gaze.
Ahead, the salt crusted into a wide, unnaturally smooth sheet, as if some invisible hand had taken an enormous blade and shaved the surface flat. Light spilled over it with greedy clarity, forming ghost-reflections of the three of them… distorted, stretched, but there.
The Mirror likes flat surfaces, the Vault Mistress had said. It likes clean answers. Even when there are none.
Ya Zhen slipped a thin paper charm from her sleeve, flicked it with a practiced snap. The vermilion sigil on its surface flared, then crumbled into ash that the non-existent wind didn't bother to take.
For a heartbeat, the reflections on the salt shuddered.
Then they fragmented, dissolving into a scattering of milky, harmless crystals.
"The salt here is thin," Ya Zhen murmured. "Beneath, the old lake still remembers how to show things. The Mirror can ride that memory if it's strong enough."
"And is it?" Ji Ming asked.
Ya Zhen's lips pressed together. "Stronger than yesterday," she admitted. "We will keep to the broken crust from now on. If you see your face, look away."
Sol glanced down, making sure the ground beneath her boots was rough, uneven, scattered with jagged growths of salt like tiny, frozen waves.
She thought—just for an instant—she felt something brush against the inside of her skull. Like a fingertip tapping on glass from the wrong side.
Lotus…
Her breath caught.
Ji Ming's hand found her wrist, steadying. "Sol?"
"It's nothing," she lied, because saying otherwise felt too much like inviting it in. "Just the emptiness."
He didn't look convinced, but he didn't press. His thumb, unthinking, rested over the flutter of her pulse for one heartbeat beyond simple duty, before he let go.
The resonance tightened again, warm and sharp, and she knew he felt her quickened pulse through it just as clearly as he had felt it beneath his thumb.
They continued walking.
The sun climbed, burning white in a colorless sky. Sweat prickled along Sol's spine beneath her cloak, but the air tasted dry, stripped, as if even the heat carried no moisture. The flats blurred in the distance; The Salt Fell may have been a hundred li away or only ten. The world offered no markers to measure by.
By the time Ya Zhen raised her hand again, calling a halt at a scatter of low, broken stone walls jutting up from the salt, Sol's calves ached and Ji Ming's breathing had grown shallow in that way she recognized now; controlled, measured, the sound of someone guarding his ribs.
"This was a way-station," Ya Zhen said, stepping carefully over a collapsed lintel. "For traders, once. Now it's for those who prefer not to be seen at all."
Inside, the ruin offered a shade that was more symbolic than relief. Half a roof remained, propped on leaning beams. The scorched circle of an old fire pit marked the center. Someone quite recently had left a cluster of smooth stones in one corner, each carved with a different sigil… Red Courier marks.
Sol slid her pack from her shoulders and knelt beside Ji Ming almost before he had finished easing himself down against a wall.
"Robe off," she said briskly.
"It's fine," he started. "Really."
"Off." She lifted her chin, refusing to be swayed by the faint crease of discomfort between his brows.
He sighed, resigned, and complied.
The undershirt beneath clung to skin damp with exertion. The bandages wrapped around his chest were starting to yellow from ointment and sweat. Darkening along the left side told her everything she needed to know about how much they had bled through during training.
"You call this fine?" she murmured.
"I have walked on worse," he said. "Sat through sect assemblies on worse, actually."
"Your sect assemblies sound like a medical hazard."
"That's because you have never met our elders."
His attempt at humor was thin, but it drew a faint smile from her nonetheless.
Sol set her hands lightly over the bandages. The familiar warmth of her qi gathered in her palms, a soft glow against skin. She moved carefully, sending healing intent into bruised tissue and cracked bone, guiding the flow around the embedded echo of the Mirror's strike, an absence rather than a presence, a place where the resonance between them went quiet for a breath, then returned, as if stepping around a hollow.
Ji Ming watched her. He always watched her when she healed, gaze clear and unflinching, as if memorizing the way her face softened in concentration, the way light caught in the small strands of hair that had escaped her tie.
"You should rest properly when we reach the city," she murmured, focus split between his ribs and his eyes.
"When we reach the city, we will be surrounded by strangers and couriers with knives in their sleeves," he replied. "Rest will have to wait."
"Then rest now."
His lips quirked. "Are you commanding me, Lotus?"
The way he said it… soft, amused, with that undercurrent of something that made her heart trip on itself, sent a tiny ripple through the resonance.
Sol's cheeks warmed. "I am healing you," she said. "It would be helpful if you did not undo my work with stubbornness."
"Stubbornness is what keeps ribs from collapsing," he argued. "And what kept me standing between you and—"
He broke off.
The Envoy's eyes again. The Mirror's whisper in their blood. The way her resonance had surged to meet it, instinctive and furious.
Sol's fingers curled slightly against the bandages. The glow beneath her palms wavered.
Ji Ming's hand came up, hesitated, then settled very gently over her wrist. "Sol," he said quietly. "It will not have you. Do you hear me?"
She swallowed. "You can't protect me from something that lives in reflections."
"I can stand wherever it tries to appear," he said simply. "Until I break."
She almost laughed at the absurd, infuriating earnestness of it. "That is not how reflections work."
He held her gaze. "That is how I work."
The resonance pulsed… once, deep and low, like a drum hit at the bottom of a well.
Heat flared in her chest, a mix of irritation, fear, and something too tender to name. The Mirror, wherever it was, would taste that if she wasn't careful. It would smell it on them like blood.
"Don't say things like that," she whispered. "Not when it listens to us."
His fingers tightened fractionally around her wrist. "Then I will say it quietly," he replied. "Only where it cannot see."
A shadow shifted at the edge of the ruined doorway.
Ya Zhen leaned there, silently, veil pushed back to let her breathe the thin shade. She watched them with an expression Sol could not immediately read, something between resigned fondness and deep unease.
"You two are very bad at 'existing without reflections,'" Ya Zhen said at last, tone light.
Sol jerked her hands back, color rushing to her face. The glow of her qi dimmed.
Ji Ming only exhaled, slow. "You were supposed to be scouting," he said.
"I was," Ya Zhen answered. "Then I realized our biggest danger is in here, not out there."
She tapped two fingers flatly against her own chest, over her heart.
"Feel it, don't you?" she continued, softer now, words meant more for herself than them. "The way it pricks up its ears when you get close. The Mirror Forge is not a sword. It's a listener. And lovers are the loudest storytellers in the world."
Sol's breath caught. "We're not—"
Ya Zhen lifted a brow. "I did not say you are. I said, when you are, it will feast."
The word 'when' hung in the air like a held note.
For a moment, no one spoke.
Then Ya Zhen pushed off the doorway with easy grace and crossed to the far wall, dropping into a crouch beside the cluster of carved stones. Her fingers moved deftly, rearranging them into a new pattern, tracing a fresh sigil in the dust.
Sol wrapped Ji Ming's chest in clean bandages, hands suddenly all practicality. He endured her fussing without complaint this time, gaze occasionally flicking to Ya Zhen's moving hands.
"What are you writing?" he asked.
"A message," she said. "For those who come after, if they're ours."
"What does it say?"
Ya Zhen's mouth twisted. "It says: The Mirror is listening. Speak in lies you wish were true."
Sol frowned. "Lies we wish were true?"
Ya Zhen looked up at her, eyes dark and unreadable. "If it learns from our desires, then we feed it bait instead of bone."
She rose, dusting her hands. "Time's up. The Salt Fell waits."
They resumed their journey as the sun slid past its zenith, light growing harsher, shadows shorter. The ruin shrank behind them, sigil-stones glinting faintly before blending back into the broken landscape.
Hours later, the first hint of the city appeared—not as walls or towers, but as a subtle thickening along the horizon, a band of irregular shapes rising from the flats.
As they drew closer, the shapes resolved into buildings: stacked blocks of pale stone crusted in salt, their edges softened by time. No banners flew. No smoke rose. The air around The Salt Fell seemed as dry and thin as the flats themselves, but there was a weight to it nonetheless… a gravity of absence.
Canals cut through the city in a stark, skeletal grid, all of them empty. Lines where water had once flowed, now filled with drifting salt and dust. Bridges arched over nothing. Stairways led down to docks where boats could no longer tie.
"The veins," Ya Zhen murmured, voice barely audible. "Cut and emptied."
Sol's chest tightened.
As they passed the first bone-white archway, a gust of heat rose from the dead canal, warping the air. For a heartbeat, Sol saw it, not with her eyes, but with some deep, traitorous part of her that remembered oceans only from ink paintings.
Water.
Dark and glass-smooth, filling the canal to its brim. Lanterns reflecting in it like spilled stars. And there, mirrored between those stars—
Her own face.
And behind her, Ji Ming's, closer than he was in reality. His mouth near her ear. His hand resting over her heart.
The image shattered the instant she recognized it. The canal was dry again. The salt stung her throat.
She staggered.
Ji Ming's hand caught her elbow, steadying, the touch sparking through the resonance like flint on stone.
"Sol?"
"I saw—" She swallowed, forcing her voice steady. "Nothing. A mirage."
Ya Zhen's gaze cut sharply to her, expression going very still. "Or a rehearsal," she said under her breath.
Sol didn't ask what that meant.
As the three of them stepped fully into the city that had forgotten what water was, the Mirror Forge, wherever its broken consciousness drifted, tasted the flicker of their joined fear and want and recorded it carefully.
Not as a simple image.
As a possibility.
Somewhere deep beneath the dead canals, in a place where light almost never reached, something like a reflection but not quite tilted its head, listening.
Lotus, it thought, in a voice that was nothing like a voice at all. Wolf.
And then, with a curiosity that bordered on hunger:
What will you do for each other, when I show you what you most wish to see?
The salt did not answer.
But the resonance between Sol and Ji Ming thrummed once, low and undeniable, as if in response to a question they had not yet heard.
The city welcomed them with its silence.
And far above, the fading light cast their shadows long and thin across the empty canal, two lines that almost touched, separated only by the thinnest sliver of white.
A space exactly the width of a blade.