Chapter 15 · free to read
The ice on that pool was two hundred years old. Nothing in that valley had thawed since the day its owner walked out of my sect.
Four days on that ice. She taught me one sentence and made me say it ten thousand times: this hand is mine, this breath is mine, this name is mine, and she is a guest.
For a hundred years she had been a voice under my ribs. She stepped out onto the ice and stood beside me at her own height, and for the first time I could look at her instead of out of her.
Four hundred li away, on a terrace above the Hall of Ten Thousand Mirrors, the mirror-keeper felt a frame close around something she had spent a century pouring out of — and turned her blind face north.
Artwork and narration generated with AI.