They call it the Grey Shakes.
“I know,” I said.
She is not hunting you.
— A fragment recovered from the sea wall, written in charcoal and salt water. The author was not found.
I saw the —the thing for which the city is named, though no one speaks its name aloud. It was not a monster in the common sense. No claws, no fangs. It was a woman made entirely of broken mirrors, walking backward down the main canal. Where her feet touched the water, the water turned to cold fire. She was singing a lullaby about the birth of the moon.
When a mirror looks at you, you do not see yourself. You see every self you have ever failed to become.
On the second night, I woke to find my left hand writing in a language I did not know. The letters were spirals. Snail-shell sentences. It wrote: “The spine is a ladder. The blood is a staircase. Climb down.” I burned the page. My hand wrote it again on the wall in ash.
Wave.
You cannot fight the Grey Shakes. You must let them shake you apart. The locals call it “spilling your hourglass.” You lie down in a salt bath, and you let the memories drain out of your ears. All of them. The first kiss. The funeral. The name of your mother’s dog. Gone.