The upright slab flared. Dust rose in thin vertical sheets and resolved into hollow outlines of people who no longer existed in any living record. They had no faces, only the suggestion of eyes and the posture of those who had once stood exactly here. When they moved, the air forgot the sound of their steps.
Kael swung first. His staff passed through the nearest outline and came away clean, yet the outline recoiled as if the refusal itself had weight. “They are not solid. They are the idea of people. I hate fighting ideas.”
“Then refuse the idea,” Ysara said, and drove her own staff through two outlines at once. They frayed into ordinary dust, then began to reform a few paces away.
Lira felt the lattice buckle. This wound did not push excess, repeat moments, store touch, or separate tim
