The light hit her like a blade.
It was not that the canyon had been dark—shadow there was a kind of intimacy, a knowing—but what waited beyond the narrow mouth was something else entirely. The sky had widened without her permission. It stretched raw and exposed, a vast, unblinking blue that felt less like a ceiling and more like a question.
The wind followed her out.
It came in fits and rushes at first, tripping over the lip of the stone world it had learned, then spilling, awkward and eager, into the open. Out here it did not circle quite so cleanly. It unfurled and broke against itself, pulling dust into brief, confused spirals before losing its grip and scattering them again.
She stopped just beyond the shadow line, where the canyon's cool breath gave way to the day's growing heat. The ground changed; rock fractured into rubble, rubble into packed, pale soil marked by the faint tracks of whatever had been braver—or more indifferent—than she.
The world had not been waiting.
Nothing leapt to attention. The distant hills did not bow. The dry bushes along the slope did not burst into flame or blossom in recognition. Somewhere, something insectile clicked and then stopped. The sun climbed, indifferent to who stepped into its field.
She felt herself thinning under it. The canyon had been a place that pressed around her, made her edges clear by contrasting them. Out here, she was just another moving point in a vast, flat spread of light and distance. The smallness of that should have comforted her, but it didn't. It felt instead like standing on the tongue of a word that had not yet decided how to end.
"All right," she said again, more to test the sound than to affirm anything. Her voice went out in front of her and did not return. It dissolved into the open. The wind—or what she had begun to call the wind—caught a few threads and tugged them sideways, as if reluctant to let even that much leave.
She started walking.
The ground sloped gently, then more sharply, broken by boulders half-submerged in the earth like memories no one had finished forgetting. Between them, dry grasses rattled, their seed heads ticking like tiny, unpersuaded clocks.
The wind moved with her, uneasy in this new expanse. In the canyon it had learned to speak in corridors, to travel narrow and concentrated. Here it sprawled, tasting too many surfaces at once. It went ahead of her and came back, bringing with it the smells of dust, stone warmed to the point of losing patience, a faint iron tang that might have been distant water or old blood.
She felt it gather at her back whenever she hesitated, an insistent pressure between her shoulder blades. When she walked too quickly, it dragged at her ankles, tangling around her calves like a child's hands. It did not want to be left behind. Or perhaps it did not yet know how to be anywhere she was not.
"We are not bound," she said, not sure who she was arguing with.
The wind answered without words. It rose around her, then narrowed, ghosting over the tender skin behind her ears, the hollow at the base of her throat. It found the pulse there and lingered, as if listening to the knock of her blood.
A promise she had not fully made and could not fully escape. This is what walked beside her now. Not a pact, not yet, but a tension threaded between body and air, tight enough that she could feel when it quivered.
She crested a rise and the land opened further, folding downward into a low basin where shadows pooled. At its center lay a smear of darker green: a stand of trees or shrubs hugging what might once have been the course of a stream. The remnant of a path led that way, its compacted earth interrupted here and there by stones, by the pale bones of something that had misjudged distance or thirst.
The world had not been waiting. But there were signs it had been traversed.
She squinted, shading her eyes. No movement. No smoke. No glint of metal or glass. No voices. Yet the path felt recent. The edges of the footprints—too scuffed to read, overlapping into illegibility—had not yet been softened entirely by wind or time. She could feel the echo of passage in the way the ground bent under her feet: a faint, habitual yielding.
The wind slipped ahead and then doubled back, circling the basin's edge. It touched each depression, each scuff, tasting them with a concentration that tugged at her own attention. She found herself reading what it read, sensing weight and direction in the way the air thickened over certain marks, thinned over others.
"They went that way," she said, surprised by her certainty.
There was no answer, but a curl of air brushed across her palm, urging her hand forward along the path.
"Are you searching," she asked quietly, "or hunting?"
The wind shivered, then steadied. It did not push harder; it did not let go. In that hesitation, she thought she heard it consider itself.
"I won't be your blade," she said. The words tasted like dust and defiance.
You are not only mine, something seemed to say—not yet shaped enough to be language, but carrying the outline of meaning.
She thought of the cracked column behind her, the fissure her touch had followed like a sentence beginning to contradict itself. In the canyon, everything had been carved to the measure of stone and time. Out here, the measures were looser, more easily missed. Promises, too, might scatter.
She knelt by the path, pressing her fingers into the earth. It was warm at the surface, cooler just beneath. The impression of other footsteps lingered there, trapped in the compacted layers. She did not try to match her hand to their size; knowing would make the invisible more real, and she was not ready for that yet.
The wind coiled close, then ran itself in a thin ribbon along the ground, tracing the route ahead, lifting little puffs of dust where the path dipped and rose. It was learning edges again, using the human mark as a new kind of canyon.
"You want to know everything that ever touched you," she realized. "Everything you ever touched."
There was a sharp, fleeting gust—almost embarrassment—that ruffled her hair and then dissipated into a more careful, measured breeze.
"So do I," she admitted. "But we're not the same thing."
The horizon answered with silence. The sky remained enormous and undecided. The basin waited without expectant pause, simply being what it was: a shallow, temporary holding of shadow and green in a country of exposed stone.
She rose and took a step forward. The wind adjusted, not quite in tandem, a half-beat off. Another step, and it matched her. A third, and it ranged a little farther, then returned, as if negotiating space in real time.
We, it said again, not as a demand this time, but as an experiment.
"All right," she said, because the refusal would have to be specific, not general, and she did not yet know its shape.
She walked down into the basin, following the path of others, not because the world had been waiting, but because it had, despite itself, already made a kind of room. The wind moved with her and around her, sometimes testing the boundaries of its inclusion, sometimes content to be merely presence.
Above them both, the sky listened, patient and unpromising.
***