The city moved like an animal in sleep, towering limbs dragging across the dunes, its spine an arc of coiled bridges and scaffolded spires. Buildings spiraled upward in loops that defied gravity, etched with thousands of red symbols that glowed faintly, like blood through gauze.
Elias kept walking.
The glyph in his hand still pulsed, irregular now, as if responding to some magnetic current emanating from the city ahead. He'd passed through three mirages already, each one a perfect facsimile of places from his past: his university office, the crater where he met Rae, and once, even the room where he first died.
They vanished the moment he spoke.
The real city or what passed for real here, loomed closer. At its border stood walls of broken mirrorglass, angled precisely to reflect the dunes back on themselves. Reflections of Elias shimmered across them, dozens of him, all wrong. Some older. Some scarred. One bled from the eyes. One wept. One grinned like a devil.
None were comforting.
As he approached the gate, the sand shifted. Not from wind, but from voices beneath it. A murmur, a language spoken not in words, but in remembering. Something brushed his foot, and he looked down to see a skeletal hand, fingers tattooed with cipher glyphs, reaching out from beneath the sand before collapsing into dust.
A voice, loud now. Real.
"Stay where the wind doesn't carry your thoughts."
Elias turned. A woman stood atop a ledge above the gate, shaved head, half her face covered by a ceramic mask that glinted in the copper light. Tattoos spiraled from her neck down to her fingers, inked ciphers that shimmered slightly with movement.
She looked like she could kill him in three heartbeats.
"You're new," she said. "But not unmarked. Who wrote on your blood?"
"I—I don't know," Elias replied. "I didn't choose this."
She jumped down.
Her boots struck the ground with finality. She moved close, too close and grabbed his hand, turning it palm up. Her expression didn't change, but her breath hitched for a fraction of a second when she saw the glyph.
"Not local," she said. "Old protocol. Pre-Watcherfall."
"You know the Watchers?" Elias asked, almost desperate.
"Everyone does. We just pretend not to." She released his hand. "Come. You'll burn out here."
They passed through the gate.
Inside, the city pulsed with slow, deliberate life. Streets were carved from obsidian and copper, reflecting the sky in pools of molten light. People moved like they had purpose but no urgency. Most bore tattoos, some on skin, some beneath it. Elias caught glimpses of cipher symbols he'd only seen in texts written by Rae herself. Some were unfinished. Some shifted while he watched.
"They encode maps," the woman said, noticing his gaze. "Not of land. Of time."
"Where are we?" Elias asked.
She hesitated.
"The city is named Téphra, but most call it the Red-Spiral. We're built around a relic too old to categorize. It bleeds instructions into us. We obey."
"Rebels?" Elias asked.
She chuckled. "Only if you ask the Order of Glass. Here, we're just tired people with good memory."
They stopped before a massive obelisk of rusted metal and bone. It rose from the ground like a buried blade, runes etched deep into its surface, deeper than tools could cut.
The woman nodded toward it.
"This is the heart," she said. "It's where you'll need to decide what kind of Walker you are."
Elias blinked. "You know what I am?"
She tilted her head.
"We've met others. Not many. One called herself Rae. Another wore your face but never spoke. And one man, limping, older, burned, he left a message in the stone."
She turned to a slab of black crystal and pressed her hand against it.
A voice emerged, cracked and faint.
"If you find this, Elias, don't go to the Spire. Don't trust Rae. And whatever you do, don't look at your reflection during the leap. It's not just a mirror anymore."
The woman looked at him.
"We called him the Broken One. He died trying to leap from inside the Spire of Teeth."
A silence passed between them.
Elias felt the weight of every leap pressing against his ribs.
The city wasn't just a refuge. It was a graveyard of Walkers. And something was collecting them.
He looked at the obelisk again.
Symbols he couldn't read pulsed to life across it. One looked like an eye with a spiral pupil. Another looked like Rae's glyph, but twisted, corrupted, infected.
The relic was speaking to him now.
And in the deepest part of his mind, something answered.