The sound of Mira’s boots marching across the silver glass of the Mirror’s Heart was sharp, deliberate, and fiercely mortal. She didn’t glide like a spectral projection, nor did she advance with the heavy, armored tread of an emperor. Her scuffed leather boots—mended with cheap waxed hemp cord that Ren had stitched himself during the winter of the Synod trials—struck the mirror-bright floor with the rhythmic, stubborn rhythm of a girl from Low-Khorat who refused to be told where she wasn’t allowed to walk.
The Man Who Returned turned his mirrored eyes toward her, the shard-blade lowering an inch. For four hundred years, no un-summoned mortal had ever walked upon the floor of the Seventh Void. The surrounding pressure of the Speculum was designed to pulverize human marrow into fine quartz sand within three seconds. Yet Mira Vale moved through the sub-zero gale as if it were nothing more than an autumn breeze blowing off the canal vats. The smoky quartz of her right arm—stretching from shoulder to fingertips—burned with blazing bright, pulsating violet fire, lighting up the dark expanse in a halo of rich amethyst light.
The transformation of Mira’s arm in the Western Rust-Dunes had been a tragedy that nearly broke Ren’s sanity. For months in the aftermath of the Lapidary Breach, he had blamed himself for every facet of smoky quartz that replaced her skin, spending hundreds of hours experimenting with neutralizing acids, animal fat salves, and potion-made compresses to reverse the turning to stone. But Mira…
