Rain had collected near the southern rim. It lay still in a shallow hollow in the black glass. Pei Jing knelt over the water and saw his face.
For eighteen years he had watched the changes inside his bones and core. He had barely looked at himself in that time. The face in the pool could have belonged to a quarry worker in his late thirties. His jaw had grown square. The skin over his cheekbones was the color of weathered bronze. Two gray bands ran back from his temples where the years of cold and work at the Void Eye had left them. The trial had made their edges a little sharper. He turned his head. The bands stayed gray in the morning light.
He dipped two fingers in the water. The cold reached him at once, but he felt no tightness in the hand. Warmth kept moving through it at the same rate. He took his fingers out and watched the small ripples cross his face.
The Ledger had put six hundred years on his life when he forged his Golden Core. He could still remember reading the number over the Iron Rift Basin and wondering how many names a country could go through in that time. Now he looked at the new work in his marrow.
