The deep ring in the room didn’t fade. It settled into the stone.
Whenever Mira drew breath, her chest produced a faint, pure sound sustain. A low, musical hum in five-hundred-and-twenty-eight cycles per second that shook through the pine bench and into the flat stone slabs. It wasn’t the painful screech of grinding glass that had tortured her for three days. It sounded like an amber singing bowl tapped gently with felt in an empty cloister.
Ren Vale sat on the edge of a crushed timber beam, his forearms resting on his knees. He watched her face in the pale rushlight.
His marrow still thrummed with the cold, hardening ache of the Brittle Bone axiom. Every minute that passed seemed to solidify the stone thickness of his skeleton. When he bent his fingers, the joints made dry, tiny clicks like baked-clay beads rolling in an ivory cup. But looking at Mira’s throat. There, the purple veins were now soft and elastic beneath the skin, the agony in his bones felt like an insignificant price.
Mira shifted on the burlap bed, propping herself up on her left elbow.
Her right arm, lying across her lap, caught the flickering animal fat flame. The smoky quartz was no longer a crude, chaotic crust of stone-hard tissue. Artificer Ren had cut thirty-two tiny facets into the stone sheath along her forearm, following the natural basal pinacoids of the crystal lattice. Each facet was polished to sight clarity. It showed the dark, shimmering violet shape…
