The road beneath Ren Vale’s boots didn’t crumble. It melted into contradictory decades.
To his right, the curb was dressed in granite cobbles hand-chiseled during the Grand Ducal Restoration, their edges sharp with modern chisel-marks and damp with yesterday’s rain. To his left, the stone dissolved into the black, ancient peat of a marsh that had been drained two hundred years before his grandfather was born. Every few paces, the soles of his cobbler boots sank into a lukewarm slurry that smelled alternately of sulfur-tar, rotting marsh reeds, and crushed marble.
Reality was running like animal fat left too close to an iron stove.
“Ren,” Mira said softly.
She stood three paces behind him at the crown of the sunken embankment. Her left hand grabbed the folds of her charcoal wool shawl. That kept it pinned with her carved boxwood brooch.
Her right arm hung motionless. From the delicate curve of her collarbone down through her bicep, forearm, and slender fingers, the flesh was not flesh. It was many-sided, smoky quartz, dark and semi-clear as river ice beneath winter twilight. When she drew breath, the internal turning to glass around her ribs produced a faint, ringing chime—a pure shaking like a fingernail drawn across the rim of an empty crystal goblet.
