The City of Ashkael was a wound made of light.

  It didn't sit upon the earth so much as it pierced it. The towers were needles of translucent crystal, miles high, angled with a mathematical cruelty that ensured no shadow could ever truly form. To walk its streets was to be flayed by your own sight; every surface was a mirror, every corner was a trap of light.

  The ground beneath their boots had shifted from the volcanic shale to a fine, white powder—ground glass that billowed up in small, shimmering clouds with every step. It was silent, save for the rhythmic, crystalline crunch of their passage.

  "My eyes," Morrigan growled. She was hunched over, her massive hands shielding her face. The iron chains around her chest were rattling with a frantic, uneven beat. "Ashaf, I can’t... there are too many of us. I see a thousand versions of you. Half of them are screaming. The other half are laughing."

  "Don't look at the walls," Ashaf said. His voice was a thin, dry rasp.

  He couldn't follow his own advice. He had to lead. But leading was becoming an act of madness. Every time he glanced at a building, he saw Kai. Not the dead Kai they had burned, but the roomy Kai—the one who had stood in the sunlit mirror and smiled. That version of Kai was in every window, every polished door, standing just behind Ashaf’s shoulder, waiting for him to turn around.

  But the worst part wasn't the city. It was the weight in his right arm.

  The green root that had burrowed into Guideau back in the cave hadn't just retracted; it had established a permanent line. It felt like a cold, copper wire had been threaded through his ulnar nerve, stretching from his palm, up his bicep, and anchoring itself directly into the base of his skull.

  He could feel Guideau.

  Not just her presence, but the static of her mind. It was a low-frequency hum that vibrated in his teeth. Whenever she stumbled, his own leg twitched. When she gasped, his lungs felt like they were being squeezed by invisible fingers.

  "Ashaf," Guideau whispered. She was drifting to his left, her movements loose and disjointed. Her red hair-stitches were no longer just on her thigh; they had begun to migrate, crawling up her torso like tiny, blood-red centipedes. "He’s talking. He says the light is a comb. He says he’s going to brush all the tangles out of my head."

  "Ignore the voice, Guideau. It's just the resonance of the glass."

  "No," she said, a small, wet giggle escaping her lips. "It’s not the glass. It’s the comb. Can’t you feel it? It’s pulling so hard."

  Suddenly, Guideau collapsed.

  She didn't fall like a person; she dropped like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Ashaf didn't even have time to reach for her before the "Bond" snapped taut.

  The world vanished.

  Ashaf wasn't in the street anymore. He was inside Guideau’s head, and it was a slaughterhouse of memories. He felt the cold, clinical pressure of Ashkael’s "Attention" as if it were a physical scalpel.

  Slicing.

  He felt the memory of his own face being peeled away from her mind. He felt her first kill—the spray of blood, the thrill of the hunt—being trimmed like a dead leaf. Ashkael was "perfecting" her, removing the messy, human parts that made her Guideau.

  "Stop!" Ashaf roared, but his voice didn't come from his mouth. It erupted from Guideau’s throat as she lay in the glass dust.

  Morrigan and Reina scrambled toward her, but they were halted by the air itself. The light in the street intensified, turning from a blinding white to a deep, bruised violet.

  "Look," Reina breathed, her voice filled with a scholarly, suicidal awe. "The Reflective."

  From the mirrored doorways of the surrounding towers, the inhabitants of Ashkael began to emerge. They didn't walk; they glided, their feet making no sound on the glass powder. They were beautiful and horrific. A woman whose skin had been replaced by thousands of tiny, hexagonal mirrors, reflecting the sky in a distorted mosaic. A man whose jaw had been removed and replaced with a silver bell that rang with every step.

  They gathered in a circle around the fallen Guideau and the standing, shaking Ashaf.

  "The Weaver is messy," the man with the bell-jaw chimed. The sound didn't come from his mouth; it vibrated out of the air. "Too many threads. Too many knots of love and hate. The Master must simplify."

  "Leave her alone," Ashaf gasped, his right arm erupting in a sudden, blinding heat. The bud in his palm opened fully, and a spray of black ichor hit the ground, sizzling as it touched the glass.

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  Through the Bond, Ashaf felt the "Comb" again.

  This time, it wasn't just pulling on Guideau. It was pulling on him.

  He saw a vision of Guideau being held down on a table of solid light. Ashkael—a figure made of shifting mercury—was leaning over her. He wasn't using a knife. He was using his fingers, reaching into her chest and pulling out long, shimmering strands of her soul.

  Each strand represented a piece of her. Her love for the taste of winter pears. The way she felt when Ashaf looked at her too long. The secret fear that she was nothing more than a weapon.

  Ashkael took the strand of her fear and snapped it.

  In the real world, Guideau’s body arched off the ground, her back cracking with a sound like a dry branch. Her eyes flew open, but they were no longer black or wine-colored. They were mirrors.

  Ashaf felt the snap in his own spine. He fell to his knees, his vision blurring. "He’s... he’s unmaking her... Reina, do something!"

  Reina was frozen. She was staring at the man with the bell-jaw. Her hand was reaching for her own eyes, her fingers twitching with the same manic rhythm as the villagers in Oakhaven. "The logic," she whispered. "It’s so clean here, Ashaf. There are no secrets in a mirror. Don't you want to be seen? Truly seen?"

  "Reina, no!"

  Ashaf lunged for her, but the Bond surged again.

  A wave of pure, unadulterated agony washed over him. It was sexual, it was violent, and it was utterly divine. He felt Ashkael’s mercury fingers moving through Guideau’s mind, and the sensation was piped directly into Ashaf’s nervous system. It felt like being flayed and caressed at the same time. It was the violation of the Harem, but refined—concentrated into a single, psychic needle.

  "He likes you, Untouched," the God’s voice whispered through the Bond, echoing in the hollow of Ashaf’s skull. "You have so much... structure. So many walls. I wonder how loud you’ll scream when I turn your heart into a window."

  Inside the vision, Ashkael reached for the strand of Guideau’s devotion to Ashaf.

  "This one is the heaviest," the God mused. "It’s so thick. So ugly. It’s dragging her down. Let’s see what she looks like without the weight of you."

  "No!" Ashaf screamed.

  He did the only thing he could think of. He didn't pull away; he pushed.

  He flooded the Bond with his own rot. He channeled every ounce of his burgeoning corruption—the green root, the black ichor, the cold logic of the bird-dissector—and shoved it down the copper wire into Guideau’s mind.

  He didn't do it to save her. He did it to poison the "Comb."

  The reaction was a psychic backfire.

  The light in the street shattered. Literally. The air cracked like a windshield, jagged lines of darkness spreading across the sky. The Reflective villagers shrieked, their mirror-skin cracking, their silver bells falling silent.

  Guideau let out a sound that wasn't human. It was a roar of static. She sat up, her mirror-eyes bleeding black ink, her red hair-stitches glowing with a violent, neon intensity. She looked at Ashaf, and for a second, he didn't see Guideau. He saw a doorway into a void.

  The vision of Ashkael recoiled, the mercury figure flickering as Ashaf’s "rot" touched its hands.

  "Impure," the God hissed, the voice now sounding like grinding glass. "You would ruin the art to save the canvas? How very... mortal."

  The pressure vanished.

  Ashaf slammed back into his own body. The street was dark now, the violet light replaced by a murky, suffocating gray. The towers were no longer pristine; they were jagged and broken, their reflections distorted into monstrous shapes.

  Reina was on the ground, her hands over her eyes, sobbing. Morrigan was standing over her, her beast-form half-manifested—her fur matted with glass dust, her claws dripping with a clear, salty fluid.

  "Is it over?" Morrigan rasped.

  "No," Ashaf said. He looked at his right hand. The root had grown. It now reached all the way to his elbow, the skin over it turning a translucent, bruised green. He looked at Guideau.

  She was standing now. She looked whole, but the way she stood was wrong. Her head was tilted too far back, her limbs moving with a strange, liquid grace that didn't belong to her. She didn't look at Ashaf. She looked at her own reflection in a jagged piece of a fallen tower.

  "I feel so light," she whispered. Her voice was beautiful. It was the most beautiful thing Ashaf had ever heard, and it made him want to vomit. "The weight is gone, Ashaf. I don't remember why I was crying."

  "Guideau?"

  She turned to him. Her mirror-eyes were gone, replaced by her normal blue ones. But when he looked into them, he didn't see himself. He didn't see anything.

  "Who are you?" she asked pleasantly.

  The Bond was still there, pulsing in Ashaf’s arm. But it was empty. The static was gone. The hum was gone. There was only a cold, hollow vacuum.

  "We need to find the Spire," Ashaf said, his voice dead. "We need to kill him."

  "Kill who?" Guideau asked, tilting her head. "Everything is so pretty now. Why would you want to kill anything?"

  Ashaf didn't answer. He turned and began to walk toward the obsidian tower in the distance.

  As they moved through the shattered street, Ashaf caught his reflection in a standing pane of glass. He stopped for a fraction of a second.

  In the mirror, he was walking forward. But his reflection hadn't started yet. The Ashaf in the glass was still standing there, staring at the real Ashaf’s back. And just before the real Ashaf turned the corner, the reflection raised a hand—the right hand, the one with the root—and blew him a kiss.

  The reflection’s palm was perfectly clean.

  "He's already inside," Ashaf whispered to the empty street.

  The crunch of the glass powder followed them, a rhythmic, grinding sound that sounded like a million voices trying to scream through a closed door.