![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
It stretched out before him, pristine, primordial, the splinter-spires of frozen glass rising and diving and twisting like rutilated serpents across the surface. A land of glass and dust and white skies, set beneath his feet, wrapped around his chest, poured into his eyes. The Vivid Sphere, where his people came to fight and die in the howling silence. Now his.
Tor smiled a little, creases in a dark block of face, seamed leather parting. His nose twitched, scenting the sterile air, tasting the taint beneath the white sharpness of the glass. Bone, blood. Dust. Death. Just a taste, faint. Old. Years old, maybe, in this place where life and death were one, and fossilised in their turn. But there was more. The tang of metal, the whiff of ozone. Fear-stink, too. A living thing, armed and fearful, silent in the glass. Tor grinned, lips pulling back to bare teeth, black eyes glittering. Hunter hunting. Time to go.
There was an art to glass-hunting, to the haunted trails of the Vivid Sphere, that could be found nowhere else. An instinct that could not be replicated in any other environment, skills that no-one could master without first that instinct, that need. The glass called those who could live inside it, and only those. Tor was one of the few.
His prey was another.
The splinter-spires were his first destination, the glass leviathans that arced high over the Sphere in gleaming bridges and fractured shards. High hunting was rare, but his prey was a glass-man, and the surface with its dust and its hollows was where the scents pooled and drifted. Any hunter who knew the eddy-winds would be able to track down there, and his prey knew it. On the splinter-spires, there was only the sky and the spires, and the scents were hurled to the howling silence above. On the heights, it was sight and sound that found the prey, and in the glass those could be more easily fooled. That was where his prey would go. Tor knew it in his bones. It was what he would do.
He moved smoothly, no rapid movements, no spurts of motion to attract attention. His clothing clung to him, shifting grey and white, light and shadow in the place where both played at will, and moved without warning. He was a piece of the glass, an eddy of dust gliding over the surface, part of the Sphere. He had to be. If his prey had gained the heights first, then the surface was an open field. Only the fractured light could hide him, the shadows refracted into living things by the glass. His weapon snug beneath the curve of his torso, his dark face disguised beneath his grey mane, he moved like a liquid panther towards the spires.
This part of the Sphere was not his, a strange new hunting ground. A challenge. His prey knew this place better, though neither had hunted here before. That meant he was at a disadvantage, one only compounded by the head start his prey had gotten. He would have to be on his guard.
The base of his chosen spire was buckled, broken twice by falls before the new glass had grown again from the remains, supported on the broken backs of its predecessors. The approach was first over the mound of scree and splinters around the base, a maze of reflected light that would hide his form from anyone who might be watching. He would need both hands to climb, unfortunately, but he sensed it would not matter. It was far too early in the hunt for his prey to strike, or too late by some minutes. The landing site was best for preemptive strikes, and his prey was too much the hunter for that. There was no joy, no skill in such tactics, although the ruthless efficiency could hardly be denied. But they were glass-hunters. Efficiency was not the point.
He reached the top of the mound with no incident, his gauntlets glittering with glass dust and his boots little better. He'd need a moment on the heights to fix that, to cleanse them with Slick before moving on. The focused glitter attracted eyes. But first he needed to climb.
The splinter-spires were difficult at best to scale, another reason amateurs stuck to the surface to be run down. It took experience to know where to start, and how to balance, and how to stay hidden during the ascent. The spires were fibrous, formed of thick strands of glass woven and flowing over each other to rise into the bridges, the serpentine forms that made them so distinct. That made them prone to shattering, made the surfaces fluid and rippled and hard to predict. But there were advantages too. The fibrous strands were roughened, not slick-smooth like some of the plate formations on the surface, so they were easy enough to grip. The surface fibers also had a tendency to be plaited or braided, the over-under junctions making perfect handholds. And the organic nature of their growth led to the formation of hollows and curls as they rose, meaning resting places for climbers. Those, though, held their own dangers in the hunt. Ambushes waited there. Tor's blood thrilled at the thought.
His spire formed a relatively gentle upward arc, with a sunwards curl two thirds of the way up the initial pillar. It was broad and strong, too, and its back crested into a wide bridge wending it's way horizonward before dipping suddenly into a graceless slump back to the surface, some six kilometers distant. It also curved within meters of other spires at least twice over its length, making it the perfect ladder up into the spire maze, hundreds of meters above the surface. The perfect choice, and therefore very likely the one his prey had made. There would be traps in the heights, and maybe an ambush. But not too soon, he hoped. Not too soon.
