She came over the ridge at a low sun and saw the city laid out below her like an open palm, and she knew before she had taken three steps down that she was not going in.
Neferset was beautiful, was the first wrong thing. Sandstone columns the colour of bread crust, raised above the dunes the way Ramkahen had been raised, the same long lines, the same hand. The same Titan-cut foundations under her boots, humming faintly the way old work hums when you stand on it long enough to listen.
The hum was off-key.
Mei Lin stopped and put her palm flat on a wedge of fallen stone at the verge. The stone answered. It always did. But the answer came back through something else first, something laid over the original note like a wet cloth over a singing bowl. Grandmother would have called it a smother. She had felt this texture before, in the gut of Iso'rath, where the water in her had held its hands over its mouth. There it had been thick and immediate, a wound packed with rot. Here it was thinned out, spread across an entire city like oil over a pond. Same substance, different dose.
She set a small earth totem at the edge of the path to test the ground. It hummed, planted, then went searching, like it was looking for the floor and the floor kept moving. She lifted it after one breath and tucked it back into her belt warm.
The water in her had nothing to say. She did not push them. She had learned in Iso'rath that the elements knowing when to be silent was its own kind of speech.
Two Tol'vir came up the dune road below her, going home. Lion-bodied, sand-coloured at the shoulders, tails low. They walked the way the Ramkahen walked, but their hands were ashy at the knuckles, and the line of veins along the older one's forearm had gone the colour of a bruise, twilight blue under the stone. Their eyes, when the foremost looked up the slope at her, were polished blank from being passed.
They went on past her without a word. The younger one's tail brushed the sandstone of the gate, and a flake of his shoulder came away as dust.
Mei Lin stayed on the ridge a while after they were gone. The grief in the stone had been waiting a long time and was prepared to wait longer. The makers had built this place to be guarded by the people who lived in it. The people who lived in it were still here. They had agreed to a thing, somewhere along the line, that the stone had not.
She turned back toward Ramkahen at the second sun-shift and walked the long way around so she would not have to cross the gate. Her hand stayed open at her side the whole walk back, palm down, in case the ground had anything else it wanted to say.
It did not answer. It was tired.
She bedded down at the Ramkahen wall that night and did not light a fire.
— Mist