The temperature did not just drop; it died.
As Kiron and Nel-Eak stepped past the first row of smooth obsidian pillars, the air in the Wailing-Galleries became a freezing, sterile substance that burned the lungs. The violet light of Lament became a ragged, desperate flare against a darkness that seemed to possess mass.
Kiron's stone leg clicked rhythmically against the floor. Clink... clink... clink...
The sound was too loud. It echoed and multiplied, turning the vast chamber into a cacophony of his own disability. He felt a sudden, sickening swirl of vertigo. The basalt on his neck tightened, a vice-grip on his windpipe. His right, human eye blurred, and he squeezed it shut against a sudden, piercing headache.
Clink... Clink...
The sound of his stone leg stopped.
Kiron opened his eyes. The violet light was gone. The freezing cold was gone.
He was sitting at a rough-hewn wooden table. The air smelled of woodsmoke and dried chamomile. Through a small, greasy window, a warm, golden sunlight—the true, impossible sunlight of the surface—poured onto his hands.
Both hands.
Kiron stared at his left arm. It was flesh. No cracks, no stone, no black veins. He was wearing the simple, stained tunic of a scrapper.
"You were dreaming again, little wolf," a voice said. It was soft, a vibration of pure, remembered safety.
Across the table, a woman sat, mending a pair of canvas trousers. She had dark, curly hair tied back with a red ribbon, and her eyes were the exact shade of the autumn leaves back in the Sunken Cathedral.
"Mother?" Kiron whispered. His voice sounded different—higher, younger, devoid of the gravel of the grave.
She smiled, a genuine, warm expression that made his heart ache with a physical pain. "Who else would it be? Come, the soup is getting cold. Your father will be back from the forge soon."
It was perfect. It was everything he had ever wanted since the night the sky burned. Kiron reached for a spoon, his hand trembling. He felt a tear leak from his eye—a warm, human tear.
This is real, he thought, his chest swelling with relief so profound it made him dizzy. The Pit, the Sword, the Dead City... it was all just a nightmare brought on by the fever.
He looked at his mother again. She was watching him, her smile still in place.
"The soup is good," Kiron said, taking a sip. It tasted... flat. Like water that had been sitting too long. "Is... is there enough salt?"
"Of course, Kiron," she said.
She leaned forward to wipe a smudge of soot from his cheek. Her touch was warm.
Glitches.
Kiron saw it as her hand moved. For a fraction of a second, the skin on her forearm didn't look like skin. It looked like the textured, porous surface of the fossilized ivory from the Marrow-Mines. He blinked, and it was gone.
"Mother," Kiron said, his voice dropping an octave. The relief was being replaced by a cold, crawling dread. "Why is there no shadow on your face?"
He was right. Even with the sunlight pouring through the window, her face was perfectly, uniformly illuminated, as if she were lit from within by a sterile, cold light.
"Shadows are only for those who are afraid, Kiron," she replied.
Her smile didn't move, but her eyes... they were shifting. The warm, autumn brown was receding, turning into a pair of rotating, multifaceted prisms that caught the nonexistent sunlight and split it into a blinding, painful spectrum.
The scratching sound. It was back, loud and rhythmic. It was coming from inside her chest.
"You're not real," Kiron whispered, pushing back from the table. "You're not her."
"I am whatever you need me to be, Grave-Son," she replied, her voice losing its softness, gaining the frequency of grinding glass.
Her jaw opened, unhinging like a snake's. But there was no mouth inside. The skin on her face split open down the center, peeling back like a rotten fruit. Beneath the flesh was a void of jagged, rotating shards of mirror-glass.
She didn't scream; she just broadcast the collective grief of the entire Gallery. Thousands of voices shrieked in unison as her body unfolded, the skin of his "mother" tearing away to reveal a spindly horror made of glass and pale, stretched tendon.
"Give me the memory of her warmth," the Mother of Shards whispered, her prismatic eyes locking onto his. "Give me the dream, and I will give you the cure."
Kiron felt the vertigo slam into him again. The wooden table turned to ash, the sunlight to violet shadow. He was back in the cold vault. His left side was stone, and Lament was in his right hand.
Nel-Eak was already moving, his daggers drawn, his hollow silver eyes fixed on the unfolding glass entity.
Kiron raised the sword. He was shaking, not from the "Decline," but from the violation of the sanctity of his own mind. He had just seen the thing he loved most turned into a nightmare.
"If you ever touch that memory again," Kiron roared, his stone jaw cracking, "I'll shatter every mirror in this kingdom."