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“I see it.”

Weapons lay scattered where they’d fallen, some still gripped by hands that were no longer entirely hands. The glass had come for the men here the way it was coming for the stone, creeping up from the boots first, she thought, though she made herself stop looking before she could be sure, threading through cloth and skin until where a soldier ended and the Fracture began was no longer a question with an answer. A few had made it halfway to standing before whatever took them decided they were finished. Most hadn’t moved at all.

This was the contingent. She had known it since the hall, since the word significant, and had not let herself finish the thought until now, laid out along forty feet of broken road.

She did not look at faces. She’d decided that at the first body and kept to it.

She noticed one man’s chainmail instead,- worn down by salt and rain rather than by anything that had happened here. She had ridden behind that chainmail just weeks ago.

She took a deep breath in, and breathed out through pursed lips.

Julen made a small, strangled sound. “They never even reached the Fracture.”

“No,” Maia said, her voice steadier than she felt. “I don’t think they were meant to.”

Neither of them suggested stopping. There was no time, and there was no clean way left to separate a man from the glass that held him now. She kept the horse moving, kept her eyes on the violet light ahead instead of the shapes at its edges, and did not let herself wonder which of the boys who’d drilled in the courtyard below her window were lying back there, or whether this was the whole of what “significant losses” had cost, said so cleanly across a banquet hall.

As they got further up, the air turned cold and snow began to fall. And rather than swallowing the eerie beauty of the landscape, the snow sharpened it. When it hit the glass, it made a soft, chiming sound.

“My father will be on the road,” Julen said after a while. The words came out more quietly than he seemed to mean them to. “He’ll be on it when it happens.”

Maia kept her eyes on the path ahead. She did not tell him it would be all right. He already knew the answer. “I know,” was all she could offer instead.

The snow chimed softly against the glass below them. Julen exhaled.

“Do you think Selinne’s mother got out?”

“Selinne will have made sure of it,” Maia said. “That’s why she stayed.”

“She should have come with us.”

“She made her choice. The same as we made ours.”

A pause.

“Are we making the right one?” Julen asked.

Maia didn’t answer immediately. The path wound upward, the glass catching their reflections in pieces.

“I don’t know,” she said finally. “But I know what the wrong one looks like. And I’m not doing that.”

Julen was quiet for a moment. Then: “My father always said I’d do something reckless eventually.”

“He wasn’t wrong.”

“No.” A pause. “For once, he wasn’t.”

Maia and Julen carried on up the mountain in silence, in awe of what lay ahead of them. The silence settled too easily, like something pulling them forward, mesmerising them both into stillness.

“This can’t be right,” Julen eventually said. “This doesn’t feel like the end of the world. It feels… nice.”

“It’s… too calm,” Maia added.

A low rumble drifted up from below shortly after she spoke. It sounded like waves pulling out from the sea, and calmly falling back - but the sea below them was still, dark and undisturbed, exactly as it had been the whole climb. Whatever she’d heard, it hadn’t come from the water.

Maia stilled.

“Did you hear that?”