The crater steamed into the night sky, like a wound that could not close.
Stone curled inward, edges slick with a frost that wasn't cold, and mist rose in slow ribbons that smelled faintly of iron and rain. The shattered fortress had fallen outward in rings; walls, gates, and towers, yet the center held a bowl for the sky to drink from. Shards of living crystal drifted in the air, catching moonlight and throwing it back as if it were droplets water.
I felt the resonance before I realized I was breathing too fast.
Ji Ming's hand found my shoulder, steady and wordless. We stood at the rim together, listening to the crater hum, a sound like music if the instruments were made of teeth.
"Don't go closer," he said quietly.
"We need to know if it's reforming."
"We also need to be alive when it does."
His voice wasn't sharp, but the firmness in it pulled me from the edge. The bond pulsed between us, three slow beats, then one quick one that wasn't mine. I looked up. He didn't meet my eyes, only squeezed my shoulder once and let go.
Below, soldiers staggered through the ruins. Some called names. Others didn't bother. The Mirror's light had erased faces into pale blurs; it was hard to tell who you were searching for when every survivor looked like a portrait half-washed by rain.
Kang Ya Zhen arrived with a lantern and a band of silent attendants who hadn't existed until this moment. They wore travel gray and moved like shadows that hadn't yet learned how to be human. She knelt beside a broken column and set the lantern on the ground. The flame trembled but didn't die.
"Report," she said.
A woman with a scarred lip bowed. "Thirty-seven soldiers accounted for. Twelve missing. Three… unrecognizable." Her glance flicked to the crater's inner rim, where the mist was thickest.
"Wen's men?"
"None here."
"That means they ran," Ji Ming said.
Ya Zhen didn't answer. She took a folded slip of paper from her sleeve and slid it along the lantern's base. Ink glowed where the heat touched it, a hidden script formed across the parchment. She read, and for a moment, the careful line of her mouth broke.
"What is it?" I asked.
She refolded the slip. "A message from the northern watch. The Chief Envoy split his escort after dusk. Half for the road. Half for us."
"Which arrives first?" Ji Ming asked.
"The road." She looked at the crater. "Unless something slows them."
The lantern flame leaned sideways, a ribbon in the wind. The floating shards drifted with it, drawn toward the western lip where the slope fell into broken scaffolds and the remains of a drying yard. The humming deepened.
I realized then that the Mirror wasn't merely reforming. It was searching.
"What does it want?" I whispered.
"A reflection," Ya Zhen said, as if naming an old superstition. "What all mirrors want."
The crater answered by blooming light, unfurling like a thousand glass flowers opening at once. For a heartbeat I saw faces inside the shards: a child's laughter, a monk's widened gaze, an old woman's prayer. Then they were gone, replaced by our own strained visages cut apart and set back wrong.
Ji Ming stepped in front of me, blade half-drawn. "If it moves, we run."
"We can't outrun a thing that doesn't walk," Ya Zhen said. The lantern flame steadied as if agreeing. "We need to distract it instead."
"How?" I asked.
Ya Zhen tilted her head. "By giving it a prettier reflection."
Her attendants dropped their packs. From each came a rectangle of polished steel, not quite mirrors, but not quite shields. They planted them along the ridge at odd angles, a scattered crescent pointing the light away from us toward the broken yard. The glow bled across the panels, brightening, dividing.
The humming changed. Softer. Curious.
"Now," Ya Zhen said, "we wait while the beast gazes at itself."
"You brought these for this?" Ji Ming asked.
"I bring many things for futures I dislike," she replied.
A soldier stumbled toward us, his brow bloodied where the light had grazed him. I knelt, checked his pulse, and pressed two fingers above his heart. His qi was ragged, stitched wrong by fear, not the Mirror. I breathed with him until the rhythm smoothed, then bound his temple with cloth.
"Thank you, healer," he whispered, and in that single word I remembered what my hands were for.
More survivors emerged, broken and stunned, the ones who had been thrown by the blast and only now remembered their names. We established a ring around the rim: wounded behind, watchers ahead, Ya Zhen's makeshift mirrors glinting like teeth around a mouth.
Ji Ming moved among them, quiet as a night blade, offering a word here, a steadying hand there. He checked every knot on every bandage I tied. Not because he doubted me. Because touching the wounded kept his own hands from shaking.
When the worst were laid down beneath the broken scaffolds, he returned. The crater light painted frost along his jaw; he looked like the winter river we'd once crossed as children in different lives. A thought I did not mean to have lodged in my throat.
"You're cold," he said.
"And you're pretending you aren't." I half laughed.
The corner of his mouth twitched. He unclasped his cloak and threw it around my shoulders before I could protest. The fabric held the heat of his body and smelled faintly of ash and cedar oil. My fingers hesitated on the clasp. He pretended not to notice.
"Sol," Ya Zhen called, not unkindly. "A word."
I went. She did not move from the lantern. Up close, the tremor in her hands had become a line of stillness so absolute it looked like poise.
"When the envoy's road men arrive, we will be too valuable to kill," she said in a voice too low for anyone else to hear. " But that will not protect us. It will only slow them."
"What do you need?" I asked.
"Proof that the Mirror can't be controlled. Something the Envoy cannot explain to the throne."
"You want us to provoke it."
"I want you to survive." Her gaze cut sideways to Ji Ming, then back. "But yes. If it must see something, let it see the thing that breaks its hunger."
"What breaks hunger?" I asked, throat tight.
"Enough of the wrong food," she said. "Or a mouth burned too badly to bite."
She pressed something into my palm—a dull coin with a lotus etched so faintly it could have been a trick of light. It was warm from her skin. On the other side, cut shallow, a crescent moon.
"A courier's token," I breathed.
"Not all messages kill," she said. "Some keep the right people alive."
She closed my fingers around it like a mother with a child's hand, then released me as if nothing had passed between us at all.
When I returned to Ji Ming, he studied my face. "What did she give you?"
"Instructions disguised as mercy."
"Which is?"
"Don't let the Mirror choose its reflection."
His eyes lowered to the coin I couldn't quite hide. He didn't ask more. The bond thrummed low, steady, trusting, or refusing to doubt me because doubt would break us.
The humming swelled. The mirrors shivered on their posts. The floating shards gathered along the western descent, cohering into a shape that wasn't a body but made the air behave as if it were. It leaned… curious, half-sated, but hungry for itself.
"Now!" Ya Zhen said.
The attendants yanked cords tied to the mirror stands. The panels toppled, flashing the crater's glow into the yard in a sudden blinding arc. Light slid over the broken scaffolds and flooded a shallow basin where rain had pooled. For one breath the whole yard became a dark, perfect mirror.
The Mirror saw the mirror break. It howled without sound.
The shockwave lifted the outer ring of soldiers and dropped them again. Ji Ming's arm hooked my waist, pulling me down behind the rim of a fallen pillar, a heartbeat before the air turned into a blade. I felt the force shear a lock of hair at my temple; the world rang like a bell struck too hard. When it faded, we were face to face in a pocket of dust, his breath warm against my cheek.
"Are you hurt?" he asked.
"Only where you grabbed me," I said, meant it to be wry, but it came out too soft.
His hand loosened his grip, but did not leave. We stared at each other for a measure longer than was safe. Something in the bond tightened like a knot pulled right, the kind that holds a sail through bad weather.
"Up," he said at last, roughened. He rose first, then offered his hand as if the decision to take it belonged entirely to me.
I did.
The crater edge smoked. The mirrors lay shattered, their trick complete. The light within the pit fractured in on itself, chaotic, no longer seeking us. Ya Zhen's attendants moved quickly, hauling the wounded farther from the rim before the next swallow of light.
A horn sounded from the road, thin and distant. The envoy's men.
"We've bought minutes," Ya Zhen said. "We need hours."
"Then we lie," Ji Ming answered. "And we make the lie look like truth."
"Can you do that, Sky Wolf?"
He looked at me before he answered her. "If Sol says so."
The ridiculousness of being asked to name a falsehood as truth almost broke me into laughter. Instead, I nodded once. "He can."
"Good," Ya Zhen said. "Then both of you… breathe as one."
We turned back to the pit. The Mirror's heart beat in dimmer pulses now, distracted by its own reflection lingering in the yard's black water. I felt the bond steady under my skin, not a flare but a coast, like a river choosing to run around a rock instead of through it.
"Show me your anchor," I said to Ji Ming, low.
"What?"
"Not your sword. The thing that stops you from falling."
He was silent for three breaths. "I thought it was duty," he said finally. "Then honor. Now—" He swallowed. "It's when you say my name."
He said it with his eyes on the crater, as if offering the truth to the dangerous thing instead of to me. Perhaps that was safer. Perhaps it was the only way he could say it and keep living.
"Then anchor there," I said, trying not to tremble.
We let the resonance build, not to strike out, but to be a presence. The first time we had fought with it, it had been a blade. The second, a hammer. Now I tried to make it something else: a hand pressed lightly against a fevered brow, reminding a body to cool.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Match. Hold.
The light below flickered, then eased, its rhythm aligning to ours for a fragile instant. Shards sank like snow into a melt. The humming softened.
For a single heartbeat the world forgot to be dangerous.
A figure appeared at the ridge… black lacquer, crimson sash, and a sigil pin burning like a coal. The envoy's lieutenant. Behind him, two ranks of soldiers, bows wrapped in talisman cloth to protect the strings from heat.
"What happened here?" the lieutenant demanded, gaze combing our faces as if searching for cracks. "Report to the throne's authority."
Ya Zhen did not look at us. She stepped forward alone, her lantern lifted. Her voice, when it came, was made of grief.
"The Emperor's prototype failed," she said. "It reflected its own power. We contained the backlash at great cost."
The lieutenant eyed the crater. The Mirror's glow had gentled to a simmer. He saw only ruin. He did not see the way the light leaned as if listening to our breath. He did not see the coin warm in my palm, or Ji Ming's hand hovering near mine as if protection could be affection if named correctly.
"Your proof?" he asked.
Ya Zhen set the lantern down on the soil. Its flame caught the edge of a fallen mirror shard. The reflection split… one flame into two, then four, then eight. A small echo of what had almost devoured us.
"My proof," she said softly, "is that we are still alive."
The lieutenant stared a heartbeat longer than courtesy allowed. Then he signaled his men to spread and set camp. "The envoy will arrive before moonset," he said. "He will expect a full accounting of what happened here."
"Of course," Ya Zhen replied. "And he will have it."
Only when they retreated to their tasks did she permit herself a breath that trembled. Her eyes met mine over the lantern. Hours, they said. Buy me hours.
"We need more mirrors," I told Ji Ming under my breath.
"We have water," he answered. "And a sky."
He followed my gaze to the yard's black pool, to the buckets stacked by a collapsed cistern, to the slope where a channel could be carved by hands and shovels. We looked back at each other and didn't need to plan further.
"Do you trust me?" he asked.
It was ridiculous, after everything, to need the question.
"Yes," I said. "Even when I shouldn't."
He smiled then… quick, rare, as if he'd stolen it from a better world and smuggled it here. He squeezed my fingers once in thanks, then let go to shout orders that sounded like strategy and mercy at the same time.
The night was not forgiving. The Mirror below did not sleep. But the humming matched our breathing enough to pretend, and sometimes pretending is how you teach a body to heal.
When the envoy's horn sounded again, closer now, I tucked the courier coin into my sash and pressed my palms together until the tremor quieted.
What the Mirror kept, it would learn to lose. What it had seen of us, it would not understand.
Not today.