“I'm here,” I whispered. “Stay. I just want to have another look at the water.”
He was quiet for a moment. I felt him watching me in the dark. He nodded. “Be careful.”
I walked to the pool’s edge.
The falls looked different before sunrise.
At the edge of the basin, the mist was thicker, drifting low over the water’s surface in slow, unhurried currents. The sky above the ridge was the first gray of morning, not yet light, but no longer night. It was that suspended moment where everything held still before the day began.
The falls were the same as they had been yesterday. Same roar, same curtain of water, same stone basin, and yet, something had changed in my chest in the night, some quiet rearrangement. Now, standing here, I felt a pull I didn't have a name for.
Something that felt, improbably, like recognition.
I stared at the rock face behind the falls.
The amethyst light shone there.
Not a shimmer this time, nor the subtle edge-glow I’d half-noticed the evening before and filed under mineral refraction. No, this was a glow. Soft and steady, the color of the inside of a geode, coming from somewhere behind the curtain of falling water where the stone face curved inward and the direct view was obscured.
I stood still, barely breathing.
One of yours is sleeping behind running water.
My hand closed into a loose fist.
Neither lost nor found.
I took off my boots.
The water at the pool’s edge was cold against my feet, the same biting cold as yesterday, my nerves announcing themselves immediately. I waded in to the ankle, then the knee, moving slowly toward the falls, keeping my eyes on the glow. The mist thickened as I got closer. The sound grew until it pressed against my ears and filled my chest.
Behind me, I heard Guruk’s footsteps at the water’s edge.
I didn’t turn around. “You see it?”
“Yes,” he said, already wading in behind me.
“It’s behind the water.” I kept moving.
Guruk
The roar of the falls shifted, gaining an echo it had not had before. A change in the light stirred the water. The amethyst glow strengthened as we pushed through the slowest portion of the fall’s curtain, soaking us both in an instant. The cold was enough that Sammy gasped and kept moving.
With the rock face standing in front of us, and the falls behind us, we pushed through and stood in the mouth of a cave. It was not large. Ten feet deep, perhaps fifteen wide, the walls smooth and dark with moisture, the ceiling low enough that I had to angle my head. The floor was flat stone, worn in the same patient way as the basin outside.
In the center of it stood a crystal.
I had known, since the market, since the scorched grass at the meadow’s edge, since the cloak scrap on the bridge, that something was waiting here. Having assembled it in my mind and examined it from every angle, I believed I had prepared myself for what we might find.
I stared at the crystal and understood I had not been prepared.
It was taller than I expected, a handspan above Sammy’s head. A column of clear stone with a faint internal light the color of an amethyst, steady and soft, neither flickering nor pulsing. Its surface was smooth on the outside and faceted in the state of something grown rather than cut, though I could see, at its base, the seam where it had been set. Deliberate. Placed.
Sammy had gone still beside me.
Inside the crystal, suspended and captured, was a young woman. Blonde hair floated around her face, as if the crystal had caught her mid-motion and preserved her there. Blue eyes closed. Expression— and this was the detail that hit me in the chest like a physical blow—entirely peaceful. Not frightened. Not in pain. Simply still.
Not dead. I knew this with a certainty I could not have named but did not doubt. The crystal was warm; I could feel its heat from where I stood, and warmth did not come from dead things.
