Race For The Morn

Race For The Morn

The Morn is not a moment in time, but a place the heart can reach.
Some will crawl toward it; some will race.
Most will never see its light,
For it asks not for swiftness,
But for the courage to shed one’s shadow.

The air always carried the scent of rain here, though no clouds had passed in living memory. It was a strange, brittle scent, like water remembered by the stones. For as long as anyone could recall, the sky had been a bruised canvas—dim twilight that neither brightened into morning nor surrendered into night. The people called it the Shattered Dusk, as though the day had once tried to break free but was caught and frozen in its final tremor.

I had grown beneath that bruised light, my eyes attuned to the subtle shades between shadow and deeper shadow. Time here was measured not by the turning of the sun, but by the slow wilting of lanterns and the soft toll of the hour-gongs. My village, Iskal, crouched beside the edge of the Whispering Plain—a place where the wind carried voices from nowhere and everywhere at once.

The elders told us stories of a time before the Shattered Dusk. They spoke of dawn—a white-gold fire spilling across the world, turning rivers into ribbons of flame and hills into towers of gold. They told it with the same hushed certainty one might reserve for speaking of gods. But to me, it was always a story meant for children, no different than tales of silver cities at the sea’s floor or wolves that wore the faces of kings.

Yet, that year, something changed.

It began with the arrival of the Runner.

They came from the Plain at the end of winter’s breath—if such a word could still be used when all seasons here were the same gray veil. I had been gathering shards of frostleaf from the meadow when I saw them crest the low ridge. Their steps were uneven, not from weakness but from a rhythm that felt almost like a heartbeat. They were tall, wrapped in a coat made of sewn-together birdwings, their hood drawn deep so that their face was nothing but a shadow.

The Runner carried no weapon, no food, no water—only a long strip of cloth, trailing behind them like a half-forgotten banner. On it was painted a single circle of gold. Not yellow. Not ochre. Gold.

They collapsed at the well in the center of Iskal, gasping words that none of us understood at first. I was close enough to hear when their voice steadied.

“The Morn rises,” they whispered, “but only for those who run to meet it.”

The elders drew them inside, closed the shutters, and barred the door.

For days, nothing was said. But I had seen the way the Runner’s hands trembled—not with fear, but with urgency. And something in me shifted, as though a long-buried seed had felt the first touch of rain.

On the seventh day, the Runner emerged. Their hood was gone now, revealing a face carved by exhaustion and wind. Eyes sharp as winter stars. They looked at me—just me—as though I had already taken a step I had yet to know I’d made.

“You have the legs for it,” they said. “And the heart.”

I asked them what it meant.

They told me the Morn was real. A single dawn, yet to come, but close enough that those willing to leave everything might find it. There would be others, they said—scattered across the dying lands, each hearing the call in their own way. But not all would run for light. Some would run to claim it, to keep it, to hoard it.

I asked where this Morn would rise.

They only smiled—the kind of smile that knows more than it will ever give away.

“East,” they said. “Always east.”

The leaving was not grand. I owned little, and less still that would be of use on such a road. A strip of dried root, a skin of riverwater, the old knife that had belonged to my mother. I left in the hours when the lamps burned low and the wind spoke softly in the plain’s tongue. No one followed me to the edge of the village—perhaps no one noticed.

The Whispering Plain spread before me like an unrolled scroll of silver grass. The voices in the wind rose and fell, sometimes clear enough to sound like a friend calling from far away, sometimes like the distant mutter of a crowd. I learned quickly not to listen too closely. Some words invited you to walk in circles until you forgot your name.

The first day’s run was easy. My feet knew the rhythm. My breath came smooth. I told myself I would reach the first ridge before rest.

But by the second day, the world began to change.

The grasses gave way to a field of glass—a hundred leagues of broken mirrors catching what little light there was, throwing it back in splintered shards. I stepped carefully, but even so, the sound of cracking glass followed me, each break echoing like the snap of thin ice. In those reflections, I sometimes saw myself as I was. Other times, I saw something else—versions of me with eyes like molten gold, with scars I did not yet bear.

And once, just once, I saw no reflection at all.

By the fourth night, the sky had deepened. Not into night, but into something heavier, as though the Shattered Dusk was gathering itself into a single held breath. I dreamed—though I do not remember closing my eyes—of running alongside shadows shaped like people I might have known in another life. Some were ahead of me, some far behind. One ran exactly at my side, but when I turned my head, there was only the sound of their breathing.

I woke with frost on my hair and the taste of iron in my mouth.

It was on the fifth day that I first saw the others.

A figure, slight and swift, darting across the horizon—too far to know their face, but close enough that I felt the pull to match their pace. Another moved in the far south, burdened with something large across their shoulders, perhaps a weapon or a relic.

The Runner’s warning echoed in me: Not all will run for light.

I began to understand the truth of those words.

By the seventh day, my legs were aching stone, but I had reached the edge of the Whispering Plain. Before me lay the River of Glass—wide, still, and silent, its surface catching the sky like a wound that refused to close. Somewhere beyond it, the land rose toward the east, and I could feel—not see, but feel—the faintest brush of warmth.

It was the first time I had felt such warmth in my life.

And it was enough to keep me running.

The River of Glass lay before me like a dream that had forgotten it was water. I crouched at its edge and touched the surface. It was colder than I imagined, and my fingers came away dry. Beneath its translucent skin lay shapes—long shadows, frozen in the act of reaching upward. Some were human in outline. Others were not.

I tested the weight of my steps upon it. The glass gave a deep, low groan, as if it disliked the idea of being crossed. With each step, my reflection fractured into a dozen selves: one that ran eagerly toward the east, one that crawled on hands and knees, one that stood still with eyes closed as if listening for something far away.

Halfway across, I felt it—eyes on me. I looked up and saw, on the opposite shore, a runner. Not the one I had glimpsed on the horizon days ago, but someone else entirely. They stood utterly still, a pale mask concealing their face, hands hanging loose at their sides. They did not move as I approached.

Only when I was close enough to see my reflection in their mask did they speak.

“You will not see the Morn,” they said. “Not before I do.”

I had no words in return. Only breath and the steady pound of my heart. The masked runner stepped aside, gesturing for me to pass. The motion was not kindness—it was a dare.

Beyond the River, the land tilted upward into a forest whose trees had no leaves, only wind-chimes of bone hanging from their branches. They clicked and whispered as I passed, making a music too delicate to be called song.

The climb was harder than I’d expected. My legs ached from days of running, and my throat burned. The air here was sharp, each breath a cut. Yet I pressed on, for every step east seemed to thicken that strange warmth in my chest. It was not the warmth of a fire—it felt instead like the promise of light.

By the time I reached the crest, night had fallen—or what passed for night in this world. The Shattered Dusk deepened until the sky was the color of iron, but there were no stars. In their place, pale lines of light moved slowly, like veins beneath a skin.

I found a hollow in the roots of a dead tree and curled within it. Sleep did not come easily; when it did, I dreamed again of running with shadows. This time, the one beside me whispered: Not all will run for light.

I woke before dawn—which was to say, before the next dim shift in the sky’s bruised light. And ahead, the road climbed higher still.

The forest sloped upward into hills where the wind had teeth. My clothes, worn thin by the plain’s long miles, caught and tore on the brittle undergrowth. At times I thought I heard footsteps behind me, faint and careful, but whenever I turned, there was only the whispering of the bone chimes.

By midday, my hunger began to gnaw in earnest. The dried root I’d carried from Iskal was gone, and the river-skin was nearly empty. I paused beside a shallow hollow where rain might have once gathered, though now it held only a thin film of frost. I scraped it into my palm, let it melt on my tongue. It tasted faintly of ash.

In the distance, I saw smoke.

I moved toward it, my pace quickening despite the ache in my calves. The smoke rose from a small campfire in a clearing, and beside it sat an old man. His face was a map of lines and scars, his beard a tangle of silver threads. He wore no shoes, though the ground was cold enough to bite.

“You’re late,” he said without looking at me.

“I wasn’t aware I was expected,” I answered.

He gestured to the fire. “All who run this way arrive, sooner or later. Sit. Eat, if you have the teeth for it.”

A small pot simmered at the fire’s edge. Its contents were a dark broth with pieces of something I could not name. Hunger dulled my caution, and I accepted the tin cup he offered. The broth was bitter, but it settled warm in my belly.

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“To see who passes. Some, I warn away. Others, I… observe.” His eyes, pale as river ice, finally met mine. “You are still deciding which kind you are.”

I thought of the Runner’s words, of the masked figure on the riverbank. “I am running for the Morn,” I said.

The old man’s mouth twitched in what might have been a smile. “Then you are already different from many. But hear this: the closer you come, the more you will see your own shadow. Some cannot bear what it shows.”

When I looked again, his fire had gone out, though I could not recall him moving. The clearing was empty. Only the frost on the ground proved I had not imagined it.

I pressed on, the hills steepening, until the land ended in a cliff. From its edge, I could see the River of Glass stretching far behind me, the Whispering Plain beyond that, and farther still, a smear of darkness that must have been Iskal. Ahead, the east lay hidden beyond jagged peaks whose shapes were like the ribs of a colossal beast.

The sky above them seemed lighter—just barely, a shade less bruised. I felt the warmth again in my chest, stronger now, as though the Morn itself had noticed me.

But I also felt something else: the weight of eyes.

From the corner of my sight, down among the rocks, a figure kept pace with me. Their movements were fluid, deliberate, never hurried. When I stopped, they stopped. When I moved, they moved. The distance between us never changed.

At last, I faced them fully. The space where they should have stood was empty.

Yet the sense of being watched did not leave me.

Night came again—iron sky, vein-light shifting slowly overhead. I made camp in the lee of a boulder, but sleep would not hold me. In its place came a half-dream, where the shadows I ran beside no longer followed—they chased.

When I woke, frost rimed my lashes, and far off in the mountains, I saw the faintest shimmer. Not light exactly—more the ghost of light, a promise the air had yet to keep.

I rose, tightened the straps of my pack, and began the climb. The mountains waited, and beyond them, the unknown road east.

Part I closed in my mind with the taste of iron on my tongue and the echo of the old man’s warning: the closer you come, the more you will see your own shadow.

And I was beginning to fear what mine might reveal.

The first pass into the mountains was not a path at all, but a scattering of ledges, gullies, and knife-edge ridges that cut at the soles of my feet through the worn leather of my boots. Every step was a choice: forward into the thin air and shadowed stone, or back toward the safer monotony of the plains. The Morn lay east, so I climbed.

The rocks here held a strange light of their own, a sheen like old silver, as if they had once been polished by a river now long dry. My breath came in clouds that clung to me, then drifted upward, curling toward peaks I could not yet see the tops of. Somewhere above, a single, high cry echoed—a bird, perhaps, or something shaped like one.

I came to a narrow gap between two cliffs where the air whistled like a flute. In its center stood a cairn of stacked stones, each etched with the same symbol: a circle surrounded by lines like rays. I traced one with my finger. It was worn almost smooth, but I could still feel the grooves.

The Runner’s banner had carried that same circle.

It was here I met the first of those who wished to turn me from the race.

They stepped from behind the cairn—a woman, tall and spare, her hair bound in a braid so long it brushed the ground. Her clothes were patched from a dozen fabrics, and her eyes were pale gray, almost colorless. She carried no weapon, but the set of her shoulders told me she did not need one.

“You run for the Morn,” she said, as though tasting the truth of it.

“Yes.”

“You will not reach it. None ever do. Turn back now, and you may yet live to grow old in your village.”

The thought of Iskal—the bruised sky, the hour-gongs, the endless sameness—flashed in my mind. “If no one ever reaches it, how do you know it exists?”

Her expression did not change. “Because I ran for it once. And I saw what waits on that road.”

I asked her what that was.

She stepped aside from the cairn and pointed east. “Yourself. And if you are not careful, you will not survive the meeting.”

I passed her without another word. The whistle of the gap’s wind followed me until the rocks closed behind.

The trail, if it could be called that, wound upward until the stone gave way to a wide plateau. And there, stretching from one edge to the other, was the River of Glass—not the frozen lake I had crossed before, but a true river, flowing yet solid, as if the water had been turned to crystal mid-motion. The current was visible beneath the surface, slow and majestic, carrying shapes that glimmered and then were gone.

Crossing it would not be like crossing the lake. Here, the surface shifted subtly, as though the glass itself was alive. I tested it with a single footstep and felt it ripple under me, though it did not break.

Halfway across, I stopped. In the depths below, the shapes became clearer—faces, hands, whole bodies, drifting as if asleep. One face looked up at me, and I nearly stumbled. It was mine. Not as I was now, but older, eyes hollow, mouth slack with despair. The current took it before I could decide whether to look away.

When I reached the far bank, the ground was not earth but shards—smooth on one side, jagged on the other. They tinkled softly underfoot, like distant bells.

And it was there that I saw her: the masked runner.

She stood with her back to me, looking east. When she turned, the mask caught what little light the Shattered Dusk offered, and for an instant it seemed to shine gold.

“You’re still behind,” she said.

I said nothing.

“You think this is a race for the sun,” she went on. “But it is not. It is a race to see who you are when there is nothing left to run from.”

She walked past me, and though I turned to watch her, after three steps she was gone—no sound, no trace.

The River’s far bank sloped into a hollow where the air felt unnaturally still, as though the wind had been forbidden to enter. Shards of glass lay everywhere, some small as fingernails, others the height of a man. Each shard reflected something different, and not always the world around it. One caught the sky, but instead of the bruised, vein-lit heavens I knew, it showed a pale blue expanse with white clouds like sleeping beasts. Another showed me—not standing here, but kneeling, my hands pressed to the ground, my mouth moving in a soundless prayer.

I stepped carefully, the glass shifting under my weight with the soft chiming of many tiny bells. The sound was almost pleasant, until I realized it echoed in my skull longer than it should have, as if some part of me had joined the resonance and was still ringing.

A faint movement in one shard drew my gaze. It was my own face again—but not the tired, dirt-smeared version I carried now. This reflection smiled, warm and unguarded, eyes bright with a joy I had never felt. And then, with a slowness that made my stomach tighten, the reflection raised its hand and pressed it flat against the inside of the glass, as if it longed to step through.

The handprint it left behind began to fade, and in its place, frost spidered outward.

I turned away, but the image clung to me like a scent.

The hollow opened into a corridor of glass pillars. They rose higher than I could see, each one filled with a liquid that shifted between colors—deep crimson one moment, molten gold the next, then a black so absolute it seemed to devour even its own outline. Shapes drifted lazily within them, some human, others winged or horned or limbless. Whenever I tried to focus on one, it dissolved into the swirl.

The ground beneath the pillars was smooth glass as well, but faintly warm, as though something lived beneath it. I could feel its slow pulse in the soles of my feet.

Halfway through the corridor, I heard a sound—not footsteps, but the sharp, delicate crack of glass under pressure. I stopped. The sound stopped.

When I took another step, the crack came again, closer this time. It felt less like something breaking and more like something trying to break out.

My pulse quickened. I walked faster. The cracks followed, matching my pace.

When the corridor ended, I stepped onto a platform where the glass gave way to stone again. I looked back. The pillars were still, silent. No sign of what had made the sound.

But I could feel its eyes on me.

The stone beneath my feet felt like relief at first—solid, weighty, certain—but as I stepped away from the corridor of pillars, I realized it was no less treacherous than the glass. Thin hairline fissures ran across its surface, and in those fissures lay light—not reflected light, but something alive, something that shifted when I looked too long.

I followed one fissure to where it widened into a seam. Within it, I saw not stone at all, but a narrow stream flowing underneath, carrying with it shards of… moments. I can’t call them objects, because some were sounds—a laugh, a scream, the hush of distant rain. Others were scents—smoke from burning pine, the sharp green of crushed mint. Others were faces. Many were mine.

I crouched. The current slowed when I leaned over it, as if it wanted me to choose. One face in the stream tilted toward me, eyes wide, lips moving. I couldn’t hear what it said, but the shape of the words was familiar: Turn back.

The fissure snapped shut.

I stumbled backward, and the stone rippled like the surface of a pond. My own shadow bent strangely under me, stretching forward until it met another shadow—taller, broader, wrong. When I moved, it didn’t.

I turned.

The masked runner stood at the far edge of the platform. This time the mask was not white, but mirrored. My own face stared back from its surface, warped by the curve, my eyes too large, my mouth too thin.

“You are slower than I thought,” they said, but their voice was my own. Not an echo—my voice, speaking words I had not thought.

I stepped toward them, and the glass underfoot reappeared without my noticing when it had returned. The masked figure stepped back in perfect rhythm with me, as if we were separated by a wall neither could pass.

“Is this the way to the Morn?” I asked.

They tilted their head, and my reflection did the same, but the mask did not. “You think the Morn is somewhere. You think it is a gate you can reach and pass through. But what if it is a mirror? What if you have been running only to see yourself?”

I thought to answer, but the platform dissolved beneath us.

We fell—not down, but sideways. The River of Glass was all around now, flowing in every direction at once. Currents twisted like serpents, carrying fragments of lives past and lives never lived. In one current, I ran across an endless plain of fire. In another, I sat beneath a tree that had no leaves, only birds that spoke my name. In another, I lay still, eyes closed, as if waiting to be found.

I tried to swim upward—if there was an upward—but every motion drew me deeper into the flow.

The masked runner drifted beside me, their mirrored face cracked now, lines running like rivers through it. Behind the cracks, I saw flashes—not their eyes, not mine, but something burning.

Then they were gone, swept into a current of gold light that vanished into the distance.

I reached for it. My fingers grazed the edge—and I was standing on solid ground again.

The River was behind me. The air here was warmer, the sky a fraction less dark. And yet, as I looked east, I felt no victory. Only the strange, growing sense that I had left part of myself behind in those currents, and that I might need it before the race was done.

The land after the River rose in a slow incline, at first barely noticeable, then steeper with each hour. The ground was no longer glass or stone but something in between—a mineral that flexed faintly beneath my steps, like hardened resin that still remembered how to bend. It gave the unsettling impression that the earth was breathing under me.

The air here tasted different. It carried a faint sweetness, like bruised fruit left too long in the sun, mingled with the dry, sharp tang of metal. Each breath seemed to travel deeper into me than it should have, brushing against parts of myself I had no name for.

At the horizon, the Mountain of Breath revealed itself—not in a single instant, but in fragments: the curve of a slope glimpsed through a break in the cloud, the shimmer of snow or perhaps ash drifting from its unseen summit, the long ridges that reached out from its base like fingers. And always, the slow movement at its crown, as if the entire mountain inhaled and exhaled.

They said in Iskal that the Mountain could not be climbed directly—that the air near its peak was alive, and would push out anything that sought to trespass. But I could not see any other way forward.

The first signs of its breath were subtle. A sigh that stirred the dust at my feet. A faint warmth on my cheek that could have been sunlight, if sunlight had ever lived in the Shattered Dusk. But the warmth came and went in steady rhythm, too regular to be wind.

Then came the voices. Not loud—barely more than the hiss of sand shifting—but distinct enough to catch my ear. At first they whispered in the language of home: my mother calling me from the threshold, my father’s brief laugh. Then in voices I did not know, some sharp with command, others heavy with grief. I could not understand their words, yet their meaning pressed into me, as if the breath itself carried intention.

By the second day’s climb, the ground had changed again. It was not earth but a carpet of soft fibers that clung to my boots, each one fine as spider silk and faintly luminous. When I bent to touch them, they curled around my fingers, pulsing faintly in time with the mountain’s breath. Some were warm; others chilled my skin to the bone.

The higher I climbed, the louder the breath became. It filled the air like a drumbeat, shaking loose the small stones around me, bending the strange fiber-grass in great waves. Once, when the mountain exhaled sharply, the force nearly knocked me from my path. I crouched low until it passed.

Halfway up, I met the first guardian.

It was not a person, not exactly. At first it seemed a heap of the same fibers that covered the slope. Then it rose, unfolding limbs so long they seemed jointless. Its face was nothing but a smooth mask of pale material, with a single vertical slit that opened and closed in rhythm with the mountain’s breathing.

It blocked my path without a word.

“I must pass,” I said, though my voice felt small in the vast inhalation that followed.

The figure tilted its head. From the slit in its face came a single, low tone—like the note of a flute played in an empty chamber. It was not a question. It was a command: Breathe.

So I did.

When I exhaled, the air left me too quickly, as if the mountain had taken it. My knees buckled. The guardian leaned close, the slit widening. I felt my own breath return, but altered—cooler, carrying with it the scent of pine and rain, things that had never belonged to this place.

It stepped aside.

The last stretch was the most treacherous. The slope turned sheer, and the air was so thick with the mountain’s breath that each inhalation felt like drawing in smoke. The fibers here glowed brighter, their light refracting through the thin mist until the path ahead was a shifting maze of shadows and halos.

I climbed on hands and knees, my fingers finding holds in places that seemed to vanish the moment I pulled upward. More than once, I thought I saw the masked runner ahead of me, a flash of white or mirrored face in the glow. But each time I reached the place, there was only the swaying of the fiber-grass, as if someone had just passed.

Near the summit, the breath turned into a voice—not one voice, but many, layered until they became a single tone that vibrated in my bones. I could not make out words, yet I understood: What will you give?

I thought of my village, my childhood, the slow ringing of the hour-gongs. I thought of the River of Glass and the faces I had left behind in its current. What could I give that had not already been taken?

“Myself,” I said aloud, though I did not know what I meant.

The mountain exhaled so forcefully that I felt my ribs bow inward. My vision blurred. And then, as the air rushed back, I was standing at the summit.

From here, the land beyond lay visible for the first time—a vast plain of shifting color, as if the world itself could not decide what it was made of. Far to the east, just at the line where the horizon trembled, there was a glow—not bright, but steady, and unlike any light in the Shattered Dusk.

The Morn.

It was farther than I had ever imagined. And the path to it led down into the plain, a descent that looked somehow longer than all the distance I had yet crossed.

Behind me, the mountain sighed one last time. I felt it in my chest. As I began my descent, the glow ahead pulsed once, as if it knew I had seen it.

The land after the River rose in a slow incline, at first barely noticeable, then steeper with each hour. The ground was no longer glass or stone but something in between—a mineral that flexed faintly beneath my steps, like hardened resin that still remembered how to bend. It gave the unsettling impression that the earth was breathing under me.

The air here tasted different. It carried a faint sweetness, like bruised fruit left too long in the sun, mingled with the dry, sharp tang of metal. Each breath seemed to travel deeper into me than it should have, brushing against parts of myself I had no name for.

At the horizon, the Mountain of Breath revealed itself—not in a single instant, but in fragments: the curve of a slope glimpsed through a break in the cloud, the shimmer of snow or perhaps ash drifting from its unseen summit, the long ridges that reached out from its base like fingers. And always, the slow movement at its crown, as if the entire mountain inhaled and exhaled.

They said in Iskal that the Mountain could not be climbed directly—that the air near its peak was alive, and would push out anything that sought to trespass. But I could not see any other way forward.

The first signs of its breath were subtle. A sigh that stirred the dust at my feet. A faint warmth on my cheek that could have been sunlight, if sunlight had ever lived in the Shattered Dusk. But the warmth came and went in steady rhythm, too regular to be wind.

Then came the voices. Not loud—barely more than the hiss of sand shifting—but distinct enough to catch my ear. At first they whispered in the language of home: my mother calling me from the threshold, my father’s brief laugh. Then in voices I did not know, some sharp with command, others heavy with grief. I could not understand their words, yet their meaning pressed into me, as if the breath itself carried intention.

By the second day’s climb, the ground had changed again. It was not earth but a carpet of soft fibers that clung to my boots, each one fine as spider silk and faintly luminous. When I bent to touch them, they curled around my fingers, pulsing faintly in time with the mountain’s breath. Some were warm; others chilled my skin to the bone.

The higher I climbed, the louder the breath became. It filled the air like a drumbeat, shaking loose the small stones around me, bending the strange fiber-grass in great waves. Once, when the mountain exhaled sharply, the force nearly knocked me from my path. I crouched low until it passed.

Halfway up, I met the first guardian.

It was not a person, not exactly. At first it seemed a heap of the same fibers that covered the slope. Then it rose, unfolding limbs so long they seemed jointless. Its face was nothing but a smooth mask of pale material, with a single vertical slit that opened and closed in rhythm with the mountain’s breathing.

It blocked my path without a word.

“I must pass,” I said, though my voice felt small in the vast inhalation that followed.

The figure tilted its head. From the slit in its face came a single, low tone—like the note of a flute played in an empty chamber. It was not a question. It was a command: Breathe.

So I did.

When I exhaled, the air left me too quickly, as if the mountain had taken it. My knees buckled. The guardian leaned close, the slit widening. I felt my own breath return, but altered—cooler, carrying with it the scent of pine and rain, things that had never belonged to this place.

It stepped aside.

The last stretch was the most treacherous. The slope turned sheer, and the air was so thick with the mountain’s breath that each inhalation felt like drawing in smoke. The fibers here glowed brighter, their light refracting through the thin mist until the path ahead was a shifting maze of shadows and halos.

I climbed on hands and knees, my fingers finding holds in places that seemed to vanish the moment I pulled upward. More than once, I thought I saw the masked runner ahead of me, a flash of white or mirrored face in the glow. But each time I reached the place, there was only the swaying of the fiber-grass, as if someone had just passed.

Near the summit, the breath turned into a voice—not one voice, but many, layered until they became a single tone that vibrated in my bones. I could not make out words, yet I understood: What will you give?

I thought of my village, my childhood, the slow ringing of the hour-gongs. I thought of the River of Glass and the faces I had left behind in its current. What could I give that had not already been taken?

“Myself,” I said aloud, though I did not know what I meant.

The mountain exhaled so forcefully that I felt my ribs bow inward. My vision blurred. And then, as the air rushed back, I was standing at the summit.

From here, the land beyond lay visible for the first time—a vast plain of shifting color, as if the world itself could not decide what it was made of. Far to the east, just at the line where the horizon trembled, there was a glow—not bright, but steady, and unlike any light in the Shattered Dusk.

The Morn.

It was farther than I had ever imagined. And the path to it led down into the plain, a descent that looked somehow longer than all the distance I had yet crossed.

Behind me, the mountain sighed one last time. I felt it in my chest. As I began my descent, the glow ahead pulsed once, as if it knew I had seen it.

The descent from the Mountain of Breath felt like falling out of one dream into another. The air thickened, pulling at my chest with each step, and the slope was treacherous—sometimes hard stone, sometimes a strange elastic surface that seemed to give way only after I’d already committed my weight.

By the time I reached the base, the Mountain had withdrawn behind a veil of cloud and exhaled one last sigh that rattled the fibers on its slopes. Ahead of me stretched the Plain of Shifting Hours.

It was unlike anything I had crossed before—not a single, continuous expanse, but a restless country that refused to hold still. Hills rose and flattened between one breath and the next. Ravines opened, swallowed their shadows, and sealed again without sound. The ground did not simply carry the traveler forward; it seemed to be considering them, deciding whether to lead them on or return them to the place they had begun.

I stepped onto it and felt time give under my heel.

At first it was small things—the strange sense that the sun had dipped lower in the sky between two strides, or that my shadow had lengthened without my body moving at all. Then the changes became sharper.

I saw my own footprints ahead of me, already pressed into the shifting soil. The impressions were deeper than any step I’d taken, and the stride was longer, as though they’d been made by a more desperate version of me. I followed them until I saw the one who had left them.

It was myself, but older—shoulders bent, hair tangled, eyes rimmed with exhaustion. They looked over their shoulder, saw me, and stopped as if struck. Their lips moved, forming words I could not hear, and then they stepped sideways out of the path and vanished into a fold of the plain as though they had never existed.

The prints ahead of me disappeared with them.

I continued, and soon the plain began to speak. It did not speak in words at first—only in rhythms. A slow knocking under the earth. A long inhalation that seemed to come from the horizon. Then a sound I knew well: the hour-gongs of my village. Their toll carried across the plain, steady and exact, each strike a note of cold certainty.

At the third gong, the light dimmed; at the fourth, the plain split.

The fracture was not in the ground but in the air. Beyond it, the world bent wrong—colors like bruises, sky inverted and trembling, the soil moving in ripples. And far in that warped landscape, the glow of the Morn pulsed faintly, as if it were a heartbeat.

I stepped through.

Here, the plain was not made of land but of hours. They lay in loose drifts, some pale and dry as parchment, others rich and heavy with scent and heat. I stepped into one and found myself in the depth of a summer afternoon—the air warm, my body light, the skin of my arms bronzed and unscarred. Another step carried me into a brittle winter dawn where frost clung to my breath and my bones felt older.

Some hours were my own. Some belonged to others.

In one, I stood at a market I had never seen, the air thick with spice and smoke, the shouts of merchants in a tongue I did not know. In another, I walked through rain so fine it felt like dust, past buildings of green stone. No one in these hours noticed me. I was only a shadow crossing their time.

Sometimes, I saw the masked runner ahead—always just beyond reach. But here, their mask was fractured into three jagged plates, each reflecting me differently: a child with river-mud on their knees, the traveler I was now, and a hollow-eyed figure I did not want to become.

The plain tested me. Hours would repeat without warning—a single moment played over until it frayed. I would find myself standing at the lip of a ravine I had crossed already, or tasting the same mouthful of stale bread again and again. The only way forward was to run.

When I ran, the hours blurred. Days folded into seconds. I saw my hands stretched into years, my shadow broken into pieces that raced ahead of me. I felt time tear at my ankles like a current too swift to wade against.

Once, I stumbled into an hour where the masked runner was waiting. We faced each other without speaking. The air here was thick and violet; even the ground seemed to pulse. They reached up and touched the crack in their mask, and the sound it made was like ice breaking on a river. Before I could move, the hour dissolved, and I was elsewhere.

The farther I went, the more the hours thinned. I felt them falling away from me—every moment I had carried, every weight of memory, slipping back into the plain. I was becoming light enough to drift, and yet heavier with something I could not name.

At last, the hours ran out.

The masked runner stood at the very edge, no mask now, just a face that almost matched mine. There was recognition in their gaze, but also a warning.

“Almost there,” they said. Their voice was my own, as it would sound years from now.

I took their hand. Behind us, the plain folded in upon itself like a closing book. Ahead, the glow of the Morn swelled until it erased all shadow.

The light was no longer a far-off beacon — it had unstitched the horizon entirely.
It spilled not outward but inward, drawing the plain, the sky, and my own shadow into its center. Even the breath in my chest seemed pulled toward it, as if the air itself longed to arrive.

The runner beside me — no longer masked, wearing the weathered version of my own face — slowed until they were a step behind.
“You have to arrive alone,” they said. Their voice did not ripple the air; it traveled through the ground, up the bones of my legs, and lodged behind my sternum like a second heartbeat.

I stepped forward. The plain, though still beneath me, felt as thin as paper stretched over a void. My feet sank slightly into it, as if it were remembering my weight for the last time.

The air thickened, but not in resistance. It was the thickness of honey catching sunlight, of the deep ocean pressing in from every side. It moved through me, curling under my skin, into the hollows of my ribs, until I no longer knew where I ended and it began.

Shapes emerged in the light — not solid, yet not entirely imagined.
A bird, but not one made of feathers and bone — it was composed of the ringing sound of a bell at dusk, each wingbeat another chime.
A river of pure scent: green shoots after rain, salt wind from an unseen coast, the dry sweetness of sun on wheat.
Figures passed without touching me — some bore faces I recognized from my past, some were strangers I felt I had loved for centuries.

Each time I turned to face them, they unraveled into filaments, which drifted upward and were absorbed into the Morn’s glow.

As I walked, the years I had carried began to fall away.
First the easy things: the pull in my knees from endless travel, the slight twist in my spine, the taste of dust that had lived at the back of my throat for days.
Then heavier things: the weight of my name, the knowledge of which places had once been home, the need to ask why I had come here at all.

I thought, for a moment, that if I shed too much I would vanish before reaching the Morn. But what vanished was not me — it was the crust of myself, the callus grown from walking in the same skin too long.

The light changed as I drew closer.
It began to ripple, like water stirred by wind, and with each ripple the world folded in odd ways.
I saw the river I had once crossed, but it was flowing backward and upward into the sky.
I saw the Mountain of Breath, but it was inhaling and exhaling the plain as though the ground itself were just another breath to hold and release.
I saw the River of Glass, curling in midair like a silver ribbon, each droplet turning into an eye that opened as I passed.

Between the folds of light, I caught glimpses of the masked runner — sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, sometimes standing still in a place I could not reach.

When I finally reached the threshold, I saw it was not a sun at all. It was a door without frame or hinge — an oval of trembling gold suspended in nothing. Its surface swelled and contracted, breathing.

Through it, I did not see a single destination. I saw all of them:
One world where I was already old, telling children stories of journeys I had not yet taken.
One where I had never left the village, content in the smallness of the known.
One where I was still racing across the plain, endlessly caught in the chase.
And one — the most luminous — where I was already stepping through the Morn.

The runner’s voice came from behind me, though I felt it in the marrow:
“You’ve already chosen. The step is the choice.”

I reached for the door, but it did not yield to hands. It asked for the last piece of me I still carried: the sense that I was separate from it.

When I gave that up — not by force, but by letting my edges dissolve — the Morn broke open.
Not with the brittle shatter of glass, but with the wet, slow split of fruit overripe in the sun. Light flooded me, thick and sweet, filled with the hours I had lost: the first time I had laughed without knowing why, the voice of a friend who had vanished from my life without goodbye, the face of a stranger I had once passed on a narrow road and never seen again.

I was every version of myself — the child, the traveler, the future stranger — all woven into one endless step.

The Morn was not the end. It was the race itself. The first breath and the last. The runner and the pursued. The shadow and the light that cast it.

When the light steadied, there was no plain, no sky, no me.
Only the pulse.

And I understood, without a mind to hold the thought, that I had been here before. That I would be here again. That no one ever truly reached the Morn — they simply remembered it:

In some uncounted place — a place both before and after — a traveler wakes in the thin blue breath before dawn.

The world is so quiet it seems uninhabited, yet the stillness carries a sound, a low vibration at the edge of hearing, as though the ground beneath the traveler’s bare feet is murmuring to itself.

They rise, not from bed, but from a dream that feels more like an old memory rediscovered.
Its fragments cling to them: the smell of rain on distant dust, the faint taste of metal on the tongue, the silhouette of something vast and shining at the farthest reach of sight.

They cannot name it, but they know they are already walking toward it.

Frost paints the low grasses, though the air is neither winter nor spring. Shadows are long, but they do not belong to anything visible. The traveler watches them sway to a wind that never touches their skin.

Somewhere ahead, the faintest light blooms — no larger than a pearl at arm’s length. It pulses once, then waits, as if testing whether the traveler will notice.

They notice.

With each step, the frost melts, not into water, but into tiny, translucent creatures that crawl away into the soil. The plain seems to hum in response, a note deep enough to shake loose the threads of time.

The light ahead remains small, as though distance has no intention of obeying its usual laws here.
But the traveler feels no frustration. They know — though they cannot explain how — that the journey will take as long as it has to take, and that every step is already part of some older, wider race.

A shadow moves far behind them, another far ahead, both wearing the same gait. For a moment, the traveler suspects they are chasing themselves, or being chased by themselves, or both.

The first blush of the Morn, too faint to truly see, brushes the edges of the horizon.
It does not rise like a sun — it reveals itself, like a face emerging from the water’s surface.

The traveler inhales, and in that breath feels the plain shift, softening underfoot as though recognizing its own weight in them.

And in that breath, the race begins again.