Bilara Toro -

Liyana kept walking. "To mend what is broken."

"Go," Bilara whispered. "The spring is ten steps ahead. And Liyana—when you return, do not walk the path. The path will walk you. Let it." The spring of K'isi was exactly as Mama Illari had said: a round pool no bigger than a cooking pot, sealed with a gray stone carved with the Unwoven Knot—a spiral that unraveled into nothing. Liyana smashed the seal with her flint knife. Sweet, cold water bubbled up, spilling over the rim. She filled her gourd, drank deeply herself, then turned back.

The path laughed—a dry, rattling sound like gourds full of seeds. You think water is lighter than sky? Water remembers every drowning. bilara toro

For the next hour, the path grew cruel. The thorns reached for her eyes. The salt flats shimmered with false pools of water. Once, she saw her brother standing at the edge of the trail, pale and whole, holding out a cup. "Liyana, I'm thirsty," he said. She knew it was not him—her brother could not walk, not anymore—but her heart cracked anyway. She walked past him without stopping, and the mirage dissolved into a pile of salt-crusted bones. Dawn came, but it was not gold. It was the color of a bruise. Liyana had climbed into the foothills now, and Bilara Toro had narrowed to a ledge no wider than her shoulders. Below, a dry riverbed full of white stones that looked like teeth. Above, a sky that pressed down like a lid.

She was old and young at once, with hair like unraveling wool and eyes that changed color as Liyana watched—first brown, then gray, then the deep blue of a storm lake. She wore a torn aksu dress, and her feet were bare, the soles split open like overripe fruit. Around her neck hung a key made of obsidian. Liyana kept walking

"You've walked my spine all night," the woman said. Her voice was the same as the path's. "Most fall by now. They try to run. Or they bargain. Or they weep. You only tied a thread."

"Are you Bilara?" Liyana asked.

The woman on the ledge gasped. Her shoulders straightened. The cracks in her feet began to close.