Night on the flats came without ceremony. One moment pale, one moment black.
We made a fire that burned without smoke and with too much light. The flames felt watched.
I sat with my back to a salt outcrop and tried not to listen to the way the ground occasionally… adjusted itself.
Shen Yue stared into the fire. "When you asked the monk if you could sever yourself from it," she said, "and he said you might make a choice neither Father nor the bridge accounted for—what did you hear?"
"That I might die," I said.
"That can't be all."
"No," I admitted. "I also heard that I might live and still lose what makes me myself."
"And which scares you more?"
"The second," I said.
The bridge, offended, went quiet. Its silence was worse than its humming.
A sound scraped softly behind us.
We turned as one.
Another body.
Standing at the edge of the firelight. Not there a moment before.
This one wore no armor. Just a traveler's cloak, stiff with old salt. Its face was turned away. Its hair hung in crusted strands. Its hands were empty.
Its shadow was wrong in a new way.
There wasn't one.
Shen Yue rose slowly. "Stay," she said.
"I'm not a dog."
"You're worse," she muttered. "You're curious."
She stepped forward, just enough to be between me and it.
"Who are you?" she asked.
The figure turned.
Where the face should have been, there was only packed salt and two empty hollows where eyes might have been impressed and then forgotten.
Yet—
I felt it looking at me.
My hand went to my chest without thinking. To the bridge. It answered the gaze like a guilty thing caught with its master's seal.
The not-face moved.
Not lips.
Salt.
It cracked as something inside it forced sound through.
"East," it rasped. "He went east."
"Who?" I asked.
"The one who… broke… the line," it said. "He tore the river out of its bed. The tower eats sky. The dead… stand… to listen."
My mouth went dry. "My father."
The salt-man's head tilted, as if comparing what I had said with something it remembered.
"Name… changed," it whispered. "Meaning… same."
"Why are you here?" Shen Yue demanded.
"To… warn," it said. The word cost it. A flake fell from its cheek.
"Warn us of what?" I asked.
It lifted one hand.
Pointed past us.
Not back toward Ling An.
Not toward Hei Fort.
Not toward the familiar world at all.
West.
"Of what comes when…" It gurgled. Cracked. Then, with a last effort: "…when the bell… rings… and nothing… answers."
The fingers crumbled.
The whole figure shuddered.
In a slow collapse, it broke along a dozen seams and fell into a heap of salt that gleamed in our firelight like ground bone.
Shen Yue stared.
"An," she said, voice very soft. "We are walking toward something even he is afraid of."
I didn't answer.
Because the bridge inside me was shaking.
Not with anticipation.
With something that, in any other creature, I would have called fear.