but the night was dark / and love was a burning fence around my house.
Bexley looks down at herself in the mirror-clean surface of the glass streets.
From under her feet, her reflection stares back. Her golden face is clean; the scar that runs through her white blaze is thin and pale, almost invisible from a certain angle; her eyes are blue as moonstones, but clouded by a lack of focus, shifting from side to side so rapidly she has ceased to notice it happening. The thin gold chain around her neck is tight and ice-cold. Where the light glints off it, it turns pure white, and as Bexley raises her head she sees in the reflection that her throat has briefly become a high-beam.
Everything here is so bright, so intense. There isn’t a place to look that doesn’t dazzle. The streets are metallic, or mirrored, or iridescent; in some places it somehow manages to be all those things, while in other places it’s sectioned like a patchwork quilt. Gemstones are buried in the sidewalk: rubies, sapphires, topaz. And trees in this city are not trees at all but strange sculptures, made of iron and glass. The buildings that rise up on either side are long, narrow things that spear into the sky—taller even than Veneror, their spires swathed in clouds that float through the pale blue sky.
There isn’t a place to look that doesn’t dazzle. But it all dazzles so brightly that Bexley thinks there must be something very, very wrong with this place.
There are no birds here, no squirrels or mice either. And no plants—just metal shaved into the shape of bushes, flowers made of paper-thin gems. There is no noise, either: nothing but the sound of her own breath whooshing in and out, the roar of blood in her ears as her pulse rises.
As far as she knows, Bexley is the only living thing in the city. It could be a blessing or a curse.
Finally, she tears her ghost-blue eyes from the glass streets, up toward the city that rises around her like a welt. There is a storm brewing overhead: faint gray like the wing of a wedding dove. A cloud of white hair floats open behind her, coasting in the soundless breeze that emanates from the castle at the middle of the road-spiral.
And Bexley starts to walk toward the sovereign, who she’s heard might be a monster.
