Book One – Chapter 1

Nightfall had reversed the world.

What had been a field of blinding fire had become a spectral graveyard of cold reflections. The monoliths had lost the sun, but the heat had not vanished. It lingered beneath the glass, rising in slow distortions, while the manyfold formations now caught the pale radiance of ςεψ and βυγς, and returned it in warped cascades. Each giant was a many-sided mirror, and each mirror reflected every other in turn, and each such reflection carried the reflections those others held, and the reflections within those reflections, again and ever again, until each of their surfaces was saturated with so much of the world, they ceased to show any part of it reliably. The mirrors could not be trusted anymore. Their surfaces were so deeply distorted that they became indistinguishable in how unrecognisable they were. Each of them held everything there was, and many more illusions, to no end.

Ashen light spilled everywhere, so violently fractured that it disturbed the very shape of the land. Everything lost coherence. Depth collapsed. Distance contradicted itself. Wherever Yves looked, the world answered with lies. Bottomless pits opened where the ground remained intact. Smooth planes stretched where the earth should have broken into crevasses. Ridges appeared to bend in directions no solid thing could follow. The glass desert had become an infinite array of false geometries.

Across these layered illusions, the monoliths also cast and captured their own flickering shadows. Amidst the ceaseless exchange and fracture of light, those shadows writhed in their own madness. They lengthened, severed, and recombined. They slipped between surfaces and climbed from the ground into the air like phantom presences rehearsing the behaviour of living things. Some pulsed with faint veins of blue and violet, as though infected by minute parasites of light.