The shrine at the center of the First Well was not built by human hands wielding iron chisels or mortar troughs.
It was a hollow massive stone geode of smoky quartz eighty paces across. He rose from the mirror-smooth surface of the sapphire salt water like the crown of an ancient, underwater skull. Ten thousand years of stone vapor had crusted its outer arches in delicate, frost-like rimes of selenite and pale lithium salt, so semi-clear that the deep blue glow of the water beneath lit up the inside chamber in shifting, cathedral twilight.
Ren Vale stepped across the natural bridge of glass-fused dark rock connecting the shore to the geode entrance.
His boots made no sound on the smooth, glass-like stone. In the warm, stone-dense air of the shrine, his breathing was deep, silent, and easy. The constant, burning irritation in his breathing tract—the lingering shadow of the Ink-Rot and the dry dust of the dunes—had subsided fully. Every breath in tasted of clean salt, sulfur. A sweet, crystal-clear ozone that filled his chest with quiet, healing medicine vigor.
Beside him, Mira walked with her ash walking staff held lightly in her left hand.
Her right arm was bare to the shoulder. In the blue twilight of the shrine, the solid quartz of her forearm and anterior ribs was glowing with a rich, many-sided lavender light, pulsating at eighty cycles a minute—in total, tiny exact timing with her resting heart.
