I was alone.

As I limped over the molten glass lake, only one set of footsteps cracked the crumbling skin. My heart floundered in my breast, still wracked even with the argument behind me. Salty, sour venom dewed on my fangs, my anger leaking out. My tail uncoiled from my leg, and I drew a shuddering breath, and bit back a cough.

Every motion and habit stood salient in my awareness, with no one else and nothing else to distract me. The vog renewed its constrictions, so much darker now without the figure in bright-white leading me. I took another breath.

I needed to dig up five more stones, prove to Hinte I could help her, and convince her to tell me the secret behind all this.

Five stones. We had collected about seven or eight together. Could I collect so many more before we left the Berwem? I needed time, but how much? I fanned my frills, listening for a sound I hadn’t heard since we left.

In town, we measured time in rings. High up on one of tallest cliffs, in the timekeeper’s belfry, they kept a massive glass carillon. It rang piercing and melodious, and rang fifty-four times a day. Four of those rings, the dawn rings and the dusk rings, sang the loudest. Ten of those rings sang loud too, loud enough to be heard deep in the cliffs by the sifters, the farmmasters, the patrolling guards and anyone else in the cliffs with or without a reason. The remaining rings, softer trills, had no such ambition; and you only heard them in the town.

We called the louder rings ‘long rings,’ and the smaller ones ‘short rings.’ If you needed to talk about something lasting longer than a few heartbeats or tongueflicks, you measured it with rings. Two rings, three rings, half a ring⁠ ⁠—⁠ even a third of a ring. (Digrif used that last one all the time, but I didn’t know why.) However they measured it, the town loathed using anything more descriptive than the plain, obtuse ‘ring.’ Yes, which ring is sometimes clear from context, but for me it never ever hurt to be precise.

Why? Because I had floundered for the first cycle living here. What else could all this talk of rings have been but another example of the Grymri’s frilly obsession with glass-working and metallurgy? So I dismissed it. And I had continued in my ignorance until Sinig-gyfar had lain me down and explained the system one day. I had blown the shop, the Llygaid Crwydro, a whole cowload of wet ash, a cowload that Mawrion-sofran told me to lash and lead back to the shop. But I had flown by the supplier two long rings after the ash had hardened and grown worthless. I almost lost my job that day.

I never lost count of rings, big or little, after that.

Stumbling over a crag brought me back to my senses with a gasp and a lightning strike pulse of my heart. I crouched, made my footing extra, extra secure and looked around, glaring at the vicious crags and spineless dustone skin.

My gaze softened as it lifted and roamed around me, looking for something to anchor my mind in the lake, instead of wandering through my memories. I looked at the shrouded blotches of sunslight, which had already moved from their last position.

Hinte had never told me when she planned for us to return. But we left town in the evening, three long rings before second dusk. The last proper long ring, reverberating through the cliffs around us, came vaguely on our way toward the lake; and on the tail of the first dusk ring, we’d flown down into the smoke and vog. Just one more would sound before the day alighted. I never lost count of rings.

So, came the natural question, when should I find and reunite with Hinte? After the second dusk ring? It sounded good enough and maybe gave me enough time to sift five stones⁠ ⁠—⁠ if I worked fast. The task pressed down upon me like that, knitting itself into a tight knot in my belly.

Starting forward again, I still eased the weight I placed on my injured foreleg. The tedium of marching over the Berwem gave me something to lose myself in, at least. Even if I could do without the dust and dirt in my foreclaws. Or the reeking vog burning my throat raw. Or the soreness settling into all of my limbs, but especially my forelegs, where the constant ripping away of glass felt like I didn’t even have scales there anymore.

I yelped when too much weight fell down on my injured foreleg. Without Hinte here, I could fly now. It would ease the strain on my legs. Should I? Flying took less time, put me in less danger, and I liked to fly. Hinte said it would tire me out, but unlike her, I would take breaks. Yet something she said echoed in my frills.

“Oh, really?” I said aloud. Hinte had fanned her frills to feel that annoying hum. It tasted so obvious! How else had she found all of those half-buried crysts?

I fanned my frills, an imitation of that dark-green wiver. Five crysts. I could do this.

Even after a while, my frills hadn’t felt anything interesting. Only my amplified footfalls and the low, slow groan of the Berwem as the currents below distorted the skin.

Time had passed with nothing to show for it. Did Hinte have some secret trick for finding out these stones?

Sighing, coughing, I lifted my canteen to soothe my throat with another draught of alien coolness, and kissed the glass bottle. I should have brought a dozen more like it. Dressed in patriotic red and yellow cloth, the glass canteen stood tall and just wide enough I couldn’t wrap my foot around it. I could empty two of them between one long ring and the next, or just one if I rationed, and you had to ration in the lake.

I shook the thing. By now this second canteen had only a sixth left, maybe dozen or half again swallows. I did have one more of them, but it’s been ten swallows since I left Hinte, and I’d never gone this long without anything happening before.

What if I lowered my head really low as I walked? I had never seen Hinte do it, but it didn’t sound so silly to me. Though when my fourth, or maybe my fifth attempt at it revealed a faint rumbling below me, my eyes cleared and I had to choke down a sigh for fear of coughing again.

Doing it this way would only reveal stones sunken deep in the lake, out of reach. But… this was given me my only result since trying this gambit.

After some shuffling around to find the start of the hum, and some extra pacing I stood close enough above it, so I made to grab it. Maybe it did lay too deep in the lake to grab, but I needed to find five crysts. I needed to try.

I punched the ground. It broke with a sizzling crack. Three more punches opened a glowing hole in the skin. Prickling numbness once again enveloped my foreleg as I offered it to the lake. The molten maw swallowed me, first my claw, then my knee, then my upper leg⁠ ⁠—⁠ as far as I dared to reach. Toetips grazed the surface of the stone.

Staring into that glowing maw, there was an echo of the sound of dustone slamming against my stomach. My eyes paled, and for just a moment, I again teetered on the edge of that maw, with a fiery line of pain running up my leg, breaths away from joining my lunch in the burning lake.

Breathe, Kinri.

My fist had clenched in the lake. I relaxed it. Just a little bit farther, just a few more lines of scales swallowed, and I still couldn’t grasp the stone. But I wouldn’t⁠ ⁠—⁠ couldn’t⁠ ⁠—⁠ feed more of myself to the lake.

I pulled my foreleg out, wiping the glaze from my leg without thinking. But I stopped and sighed: no point.

I needed a plan to retrieve the stone. Could I reach in with both legs and wiggle it up? No, that could push it further down. If I had a stick or something, I could nudge or even pull it up. Hinte might have something like that. Anyone could think of it. Even if she didn’t sift submerged stones.

So, what angle was I not considering? All those ideas relied on bringing the stone closer to me. Could I bring myself closer to the stone? No, that sounded frilly. But no, they didn’t only bring the stone closer to me, they also brought the stone closer to the surface. Could I bring the surface closer to the stone?

My forefoot pressed down. The skin flexed. If I put more weight on, it would flex even more.

“And if I fell onto it…”

My wings spread. A leap, and several wing-beats had me in the air. When the vog blurred the ground below me, I stopped threshing. I plummeted. But I panicked, instinct animating my wings. My fall stopped a wing-beat above the ground.

Rising to that height again, I steeled myself. I needed to stop wasting time! So I dropped myself mid-flap, as if to trick myself into falling. And it worked; I crashed against the dustone. The crash beat the breath out of me, and the ground hit my legs like a lightning bolt. I bent and gave, falling onto my belly, but too late to save my legs from the pain.

I groaned. “This was a bad idea.”

The ground gave in its own way. The crash turned to a crater in the skin and then a wave rippling away from me. A massive crack filled my frills. It reverberated and echoed, the lake’s own pained groan. Hinte had said something earlier about sound attracting monsters, hadn’t she?

As if the blow to my legs wasn’t enough.

The crash to the dustone ripped wide my hole. Around it, the skin was shattering into several smaller plates. My crater dipped below the molten sand, and now glass trickled in at the fringes. I reached into the widened mouth again, looking away. My knee had sunk in before I touched the stone. I grasped it then, while sliding the leg’s pair in.

As it emerged from the lake, the vibration doubled. I sat the stone on one of the floating plates, near its middle, before wiping my forelegs hard, and only removing the largest hunks of glass.

My frills bristled at a distant crunch, but nothing emerged from the vog. The lake still groaned after my crash had upset the flow underneath, some of the plates still grinding together. They didn’t sound like that, though, so maybe the crash had done something unseen?

Grabbing the stone, I slinked away from the crater in a high walk. Moving with the stone in my feet, I stumbled and dropped it twice. I shifted it to my already injured leg. That helped, but not enough to not make me feel like a tortoise.

The crater faded behind me. I slowed down, and lifted the stone, my eyes clearing to see it. It looked a chalky white-green, in a saucer-like shape thickening at the center. Any lingering glass glazed and cracked on the vibrating surface.

The vibration, weaker than the others, took long moments to slough off the glass, longer than the other stones had taken. And the stone didn’t glow. And even its slow rumble of a hum sounded lazy and sluggish.

Despite this⁠ ⁠—⁠ or really because of it⁠ ⁠—⁠ I liked this stone, finding it so much less annoying than the others. And the little guy had become the first of my stones. He deserved a name. I should give him a cliff-dweller name, since he had hatched in the cliffs, in a way.

“Hrm. Maybe I can call you… Sterk?”

The stone rumbled his assent. It sounded the same as his usual rumbles, but he didn’t really mind⁠ ⁠—⁠ couldn’t, rather.

“Good! You’ll be Sterk, the deepest cryst.”

I dug my claws into the stone⁠ ⁠—⁠ for his own good, I swear! His hum sputtered for a beat before recovering. Fewer fragments scurried to life. I picked off two of them to eat. They tasted sour, with a misleading hint of sweetness. I popped my tongue at the stone.

“You’re an odd one, Sterk.” He fell into my other bag, opposite the glasscrabs, where once my trout had sat.

I had done it! I got a cryst on my own. One down, four more to go.

In my bag, Sterk rumbled and rumbled, and never waned or faltered. It almost grated, really. When I had passed the stones off to Hinte, I hadn’t heard a single click or keen afterward. It just showed, again, how little I knew about sifting. Sterk sat in my bag, yet when my feet pressed against the glassier, more resonant plates of dustone, I could close my eyes and hold him in my feet again, feel his sonorous rumbles against my scutes.

I looked around, then at the old boring lake skin. Here, it had grown a little thicker. Had I walked into some cold spot? Did I near some shore of the Berwem?

I kept slinking the way I’d come from the crater, no point in changing tracks. But as the ground became thicker and gnarlier, I should have; I had been walking to one of the shores.

The cooler air here washed over my scales, and the vog almost cleared, and that clearness inspired my breath to dance in and out of my lungs. My throat still itched raw, so I still coughed and coughed. I choked them down and looked about.

I’d found no hint of any crysts on my journey away from the crater. The knot in my stomach knit itself tighter. Coupling this with how still and quiet my frills felt, and how Hinte didn’t sift at the edges anyway, it meant crysts had to form closer toward the center of the lake.

It raised another question, though. Just how did crysts form? Maybe the Berwem heat had something to do with it⁠ ⁠—⁠ it was cooler at the marge.

Someone had to have wondered about this before, right? I’d look it up at the library tomorrow, or ask Chwithach-sofran about it. I might even find something on what point these wretched stones had. A backup plan, if Hinte chose not to tell me, or I failed to collect five crysts.

No, only if she chose not to tell. I would find five crysts.

Whatever the reason, those stones had to lie closer to the center. So I turned at a sharp angle against my old course. Just enough to send me toward new ground, but angled to ensure I would walk back into the Berwem itself. Unless I had bungled it entirely and now walked along the shore instead of away. But for that, I would have to have stumbled some kind of corner, right? I wasn’t that starless. Right?

The knot in my stomach lurched, waxing to a dribble of tart anticipation on my fangs. As if my gut spoke to me. You have a time limit, it might say. I shook my canteen. My sixth of water had halved.

When I coughed again, the flecks were bigger, with globs of red in the mucus that didn’t look good at all. I had more than one time limit. It would be an empty victory to offer a bag full of crysts to Hinte only to fall over fainted or worse in the next breath cycle.

I looked at the sky. After I stopped moving; because I would not trip again! In the almost clear air, the hazy outline of a sun hung above, rendered purple by the vog. Try as I might, I couldn’t find the sun’s partner. Taken with the color dying fading on the west horizon, you guessed it: first dusk had fallen.

Enyswm, the lonely sun hanging above, seemed to linger. With the vog distorting the sun’s disk, you could stare at the wiggly lines at the fringe until you saw a frown there, a glimpse of the solar sadness of a sun bereft, for today, of his eternal partner.

When the morning came, he would chase Oleuni across the sky for five more days until the crestday of the cycle, when he would catch her at last. Enyswm and Oleuni would embrace for a single, teeth-chattering day, before falling into the next phase of the dance, where Oleuni would chase Enyswm until she finally caught him. Again and again.

We were near the middle of the cycle, so Enyswm would hang in sky for half a long ring after Oleuni fell. Both suns had hung in the sky when we left town, and Oleuni’s final rays reached out as I watched. Altogether, time chipped away with every breath and tongueflick. Time I needed to gather four stones.

I slipped my tail into my bag, wrapping around Sterk. Any pride I had in finding him lighted, then. He was just one stone. I need five.

But Sterk rumbled his encouragement from my bag, his vibrations intensifying at my touch. Maybe his lifeless vibration had fluctuated or maybe Sterk, aware and appreciative, had just wished me well. The first sounded about right, but I liked the ring of the second.

Emboldened, my steps became a determined stride, a copy of Hinte. But, limping on my injured foreleg, I didn’t look half as graceful. Yet I settled into a rhythm, and strode forward like that.

Then Sterk hiccuped. I jerked to a stop. Sure, he acted weird for a cryst, but I had never heard a stone’s vibrations change so⁠ ⁠—⁠ abruptly. Granted, I hadn’t heard much of the stones anyway, owing to that mysterious silence whenever Hinte took a cryst. Maybe stones had acted this way all along? There had to be a sense to this. The endless stars bid the world lawful.

Shuffling around, my frills angling about in every way, I felt the hiccup come again from one side. I walked along a path of the hiccups. Soon after, Sterk’s new stutters overtook his rumbles. The vibrations became a quick, rolling rhythm, and grew uneven as we tended close to the source.

I followed Sterk’s rumbling like that, giggling at the oddity of following a rock’s lead. A brainless rock.

Something skittering in the distance crunched. I crouched, flattening on the ground, and peered toward the source. And a shadow emerged from the shadows.

It came into focus, a little glassy rock scurrying forth. A glasscrab! Horned eyestalks gyrated, scrutinizing the world. It moved toward me, its steps settling into rhythm with Sterk’s new hum. The glowing eyes of the crab stared at my bag. Did crysts attract glasscrabs?

“Oh,thank you, Sterk. You are such a good rock,” I said before I leapt, some instinct taking over. I landed with a crash. The crab bolted! I growled. How could something so resembling a rock scurry around like an oversized insect?

But my foreleg was already in motion, expecting my prey’s fright. I clawed at an eyestalk, slashing, then ripping it from the crab. But the little bug wasn’t defenseless! Its other eye jabbed at me, and pierced my foot. I flicked my tongue. Something stunk. The crab’s smell? Urine?

I had killed the other one so much quicker than this⁠ ⁠—⁠ except it had been smaller, its glassy carapace under-developed. Grounding that one was simple. What to do about this one?

Glasscrab shells grew harder than the thin glass of the lake, and just punching it wouldn’t help. They were there to protect them from predators like me, after all.

I grabbed at the other eyestalk. It swerved out of the way! The crab writhed in my grasp. It ripped its last eyestalk out in its struggle! And, it scurried away like that. How were these things so agile!

Again, I leapt after it. But it expected me, even blind, and threw itself to the side.

“Come on, wretched little crab⁠ ⁠—⁠ I only want to ground you, drain your blood, then eat you.” Honestly, it wasn’t that bad of a deal. Better than living in the Berwem, for sure.

I landed beside the crab, farther away than the flightless little bug expected, and growled. Tired of playing with the crab, I punched the ground between us. Frowning, punching again, harder, the leg plunged into the lake. Little crab dug in, like fear. I grinned and lunged forth. My foreleg still prickled, plunged in the glass. It ripped wincingly through the skin as I leap forward.

I punched the crab with my free leg. It tipped without falling over. I grinned and brought my other leg under it and tore it out of the lake. Beneath the crab burst the skin! The crab flipped over. It landed on its back!

Did the little fiend have an answer to that as well? Before I could find out, I plunged my claw into its underbelly, ending the crafty little crab.

“I win.”

I twisted my claw inside the crab to be sure. After I cleaned off the icky blue blood, the crab slipped into my crab bag. It fit, but tightly. With my other bag only for crysts⁠ ⁠—⁠ five of them⁠ ⁠—⁠ I couldn’t ground another crab without abandoning its body. Three should be enough, though.

Turning to where the crab appeared, I walked over: and under the skin, revealed by the crab’s earlier digging, lay another pink cryst. Yes!

I collected the thing. It matched the Sterk in size, and unlike the drab green stone, it glowed happily. Already, fragments scuttled across the surface, stirred most around some holes on the surface.

So, did the crabs feed on these crysts? It raised another question: What were the scuttling fragments? I’d taken them to be some living part of the stones, but maybe the vibrations just attracted them as well.

Should I name the new stone? It didn’t have the personality of Sterk, so maybe it didn’t deserve a proper name. How about something simple and silly, like ‘the crabstone?’ Yes, that would work. The crabstone joined Sterk in my cryst bag.

“Now you have a friend,” I murmured, more to entertain myself than anything else.

After a while, my second empty canteen slipped in my bag as well. I dared a glance at the sky. But I had ventured far enough for the lake to obscure the sun. I saw only a glowing blotch nearing the horizon. Maybe a fifth or a fourth of my time had passed, I would guess. It added more haze to my already vague sense of starless doom.

As I fretted over time, I missed the skittering approach of too many glasscrabs to my side. Four, I counted. Was that what the pungent smell was? Some kind of signal, an attractant? Their eyestalks glowed, all four pairs. I could barely make out their silhouettes, they looked shadowy blotches in the darkness.

Like ghosts, angry spirits come to exact vengeance after I grounded their conspecific.

I stumbled backward. The crack of movement tore them into motion! They shot forward as a group, each as adroit and overspeedy as their fallen friend. I backpedaled, heart thundering in my breast. Two crabs were here.

Now I was in the air, and threshing my wings in escape.

As I flew away, I felt the weight of the new crab and its crabstone. Could I still fly away at the end of this, with three more crysts? Maybe the reason Hinte refused to fly was the stones weighing her down. She would never admit that, though.

Below me, the angry crabs milled about. Farther away, another, larger shadow moved in the vog. A fifth, but huge glasscrab? I didn’t know how big glasscrabs grew, but that shadow looked dragon-sized. But maybe vog, with its stirred dust clouds, had tricked my eyes. The lake had grown darker this close to second dusk.