His heartbeat was still there, pressed against my back. Still fast, though slowing now. I focused on it because it gave me something to count, something to hold onto in the darkness.
“Tavrin.”
“Yes.”
“Your heart is racing.”
Silence. A long silence.
“Yes,” he said finally. Quieter now.
“Were you afraid too?”
Another silence. I felt his chest expand with a breath. Felt him decide something.
“The harness has not been used for many years. I was... not certain I would remember how.”
I tried to imagine it. And tonight he’d strapped a stranger to his chest and stepped off a cliff and his heart had been pounding the whole time.
“You remembered,” I said.
“Yes.” I felt something release in him. Some tension I hadn’t known was there. “Yes. I remembered.”
We flew in silence after that. I couldn’t tell how much time passed. Minutes. Hours. The darkness inside the cloak was absolute, warm and close, and his heartbeat was slowing against my spine, steadying into something deep and ancient.
I should have been planning. Calculating. Figuring out what he wanted, how to be useful, how to survive whatever came next.
Instead I listened to his heart and felt the warmth seeping into my cold bones and didn’t think about anything at all.
It was the first time in eight years that my mind had gone quiet.
Part of me wanted to fill the silence, to start counting something, anything, to pull myself back into the safety of numbers and plans. But a larger part of me was so tired. Bonetired. Eight years of never stopping, never resting, never being allowed to just exist without being useful.
The cloak was warm. His heartbeat was steady. And no one was asking me for anything.
“Wren.”
I stirred. I’d been drifting, not quite asleep, floating somewhere in the darkness.
“We are close. I thought you might want to see.”
Yes. I did want to see. I wanted it more than I wanted to stay in this warm dark cocoon where nothing could touch me. Which was its own kind of warning, if I’d been smart enough to hear it.
The cloak parted, wings spreading wide, and the world spread below us like a map I’d never seen. Mountains rose from the darkness, their peaks catching moonlight, snow gleaming like spilled salt. A river cut through the valleys far below, and from this height I could see how it branched and rejoined, how it had carved its path over thousands of years.
But that wasn’t what caught my eye.
There was a lake. Small, tucked between two peaks, and the moon was reflected in it so perfectly that it looked like a hole in the world. Like if you fell into that water you’d fall right through into the sky on the other side.
I’d spent eight years copying maps. Trade routes and territories and the careful lies that cartographers told to make the world seem known. I’d drawn rivers I’d never seen, mountains I’d never touched, lakes that were just shapes on parchment.
This was real. All of it. Real and vast and so beautiful it hurt somewhere behind my ribs.
“The lake,” I heard myself say. “The one with the moon in it. Does it have a name?”
“I do not know if humans named it. I call it the Mirror.”
“The Mirror.” I watched it slide beneath us, that perfect reflection, that hole in the world. “I want to see it. From the ground. Someday.”
