Chapter 1: The Mirror in the Creek

He dreamed a long dream.

In it he planted grain in a field that went on past where the far edge should have been. There was blade-light in the dream too, and a sect of immortals up on a hillside, and a woman, and a great lake.

Then a woman’s voice at his ear, pleasant and cold.

“Hand over The Greater Yin Breath-Work and The Secret Register of Moonlight, and we will take only your cultivation.”

There was a face near him. It was dim, no farther off than an arm, and he could not make out one thing about it — not the eyes, not the mouth, not whether it was young. He wanted to ask what a breath-work was. He wanted to ask what cultivation was, and what would be left of him once they took it. He had no mouth. He had no voice. He was only there, in the dream, with the field and the lake and the voice, which simply waited on him, the way a person waits for a dog to learn a command.

He noticed, in the moment before everything broke, that she had said only, as though it were a small thing.

Everything shook at once.

Colors he had no names for went through him, none of them belonging to anything, and he tried to open his eyes, and tried to sit up, and not one part of him obeyed. He knew this feeling. He had known it in a bed, in another life, lying awake with his mind already running and his body still asleep, counting to twenty to see if his hand would move. It did, back then, if he waited long enough.

Darkness came in like a tide and kept coming, and the white light stood in the middle of it and did not dim. Golden script broke out of the light, hundreds of marks of it, unfolding in the dark and spreading across the sky like stars.

Beautiful, he thought. It was not a clever thought. It was not even his best word, and he knew it as he had it.

More came, and faster, until something in the light had taken all it could hold, and he heard the sound glass makes when it gives — a thin crack first, and then the whole of it — and the world went bright.

Sky like a sea. Forest running out to the edge of everything, old and dark and enormous. Not far off, a small lake shaped like a crescent moon. As he looked at it, a white streak came down out of the air, slid into the shine of the water, and was gone.

Lower down there was a scatter of cabins with thatch on their roofs and fields of grain worked up along the slope, and past them a creek running clear.

His view rolled, spun, and did not stop for him. He passed over the little brown village the way a swallow passes over a barn — low, and fast, over the smoke standing straight out of the chimneys in the still air, over the creek. And in the creek, for the length of one second, he had his own reflection in view.

Round. Glowing.

I don’t think I’m a person anymore, he thought.

Then the water had him — cold on every side, nothing to hold, the fall still carrying him down — and he came up against the bottom. The creek was shallow, not deep enough to take the shock out of the fall, so the stone came up through him like a fist under the chest. The current shoved, something rolled, and he tipped over and came up facing the sun through the moving water.

I was at my desk, he thought. The apartment. Reworking the proposal. He could get the pieces if he did not push at them. The screen, white and hard on his eyes at three in the morning. The bottle he had opened and set down and forgotten. The light off the signs outside coming in sideways through the blinds. And the rest of it: his heart going faster than a heart should go, and his breath getting shorter each time, until it was less a breath than a wish for one.

I think I died.

The strange part was the relief. It came over him and he lay in it without arguing, and did not bother to tell himself to feel worse. No more proposals. Nobody expecting anything from him by morning. He had died, and there was a kind of ease in it he had not expected, and he let it be true.

He looked at what there was to look at. Roots let down from the trees overhead, dark green, trailing in the water, moving a little. Small bright fish going past his face and gone. The tap and tick of water on stones.

He would have sighed, if he had had anything to sigh with.

Like this, he was going to go quietly out of his mind with boredom.

So he watched the sun come down. The light went orange across the top of the water, climbed the bank, and let go, and the water under the branches went from gold to gray to nothing. Two fish came and looked him over, one down each side. A crab came sideways up the stones, took him for a rock, got its legs under his edge, and tried to turn him over.

There was nothing he could do about it. The crab worked at him, got nowhere, rested, came at him from a better angle, got nowhere again. In the end it went back to its hole in the bank and left him the way it had found him.

When the day was gone, the moon came up over the treetops. He could not see it; it was above the branches and out of his range. He could see what it did. Cool light came down through the water and lay on the stones, and where it touched him it was clean — cool and clean, the first thing since he fell that had felt like anything at all.

Above him, the light gathered. It came together slowly into a pale ring, hung there, moved like something alive, and dropped.

He was frightened, and he was delighted, and he could not have said which came first.

Drinking moonlight, he thought. Something like that. Words he had picked up somewhere and never expected to need. Immortals. Powers. Monsters. Ghosts. And if any of it was real, then what was he? A spirit in a mirror? A mind in a vessel?

He stopped looking for the word and took it in.

That was the first thing he had done on purpose since he fell, and he knew what it could cost him: if the light went into him the way light goes into a lamp, then it would show, and something out there in the dark would see it. He took it anyway, and sank down into something that was not sleeping and not waking.

He came back to himself with the thread running thin.

The moon was gone out of the sky. The sun had cleared the treetops and warm light lay on the water over him.

That was fast.

The thread was still there when he felt for it: faint, thin, going around the rim of him, one turn after another. It stayed when he let it alone. It was his.

He held still and gathered himself and tried — in whatever way there was left to try — to see. And he could. Dim, and soft at the edges, but he could. A gray-green mirror lying flat on the bed of the creek with needles and colored stones under it. Fish working along the bottom, feeding. Off to the side, the crab out at its hole, digging, throwing dirt behind it in little fans. He got about a meter around himself, no more, and not sharply, like the old bulky television from his childhood, the kind with a picture you had to stand next to and hope for.

So this is me now.

The thread went to the center of himself when he pushed it there — he held it, willed it there, if will was what he had — and the gray-green glass gave off a thin glow. When he let the thread go, the glow went with it. He did it again, and it came back.

Light. That was the whole of it. Nothing else he could find to do with it.

So he would take the moon in, night after night, and see whether anything changed. He had no idea what could change, or how a thing like him would know it if it did, but a change was possible, and he had nothing else to do with his time.

He did not know what the mirror was made of, either. He did not know what a thing that could think looked like to a man with power in him. He could hear, and see a little, and he could not move and could not speak. If one of them noticed him — picked him up, turned him over, worked out what he was holding — the mind in the glass would be wiped out of it without a thought, and the glass would lie wherever it was put.

Sunlight came down through the water and moved over the stones. The fish came back to the shallows. He set the thread going around his rim again, one turn, and then another, and kept himself still there on the bottom of the creek, and waited for the night.