There were walls within the glass mountain, just as clear as its sheer cliffsides. There were floors within the glass mountain—and ceilings, too—but they left just as little to the imagination. A shining citadel of rooms; a pyramid stripped of secrets.

Even the palace, fit snugly at the mountain’s heart, sat bare to the rest of us. The princess shed light like dandruff from the glinting gemstones of her dress. Four rooms below, my back aching and my hands cracked from the washing water, I would clutch my broom’s handle and watch her petticoats trail.

When I first arrived, the mountain folk—for all our human filth and decay—seemed a relief to look upon. My eye caught on them through a hundred glass floors, a reprieve from transparency and light. But after years of watching—watching the royal huntsman slaughter deer in the crystal forest, watching the stableboy shit in the huntsman’s stew, watching the blacksmith and the butcher breed—I grew restless.

My thoughts turned, again, to escape.

I was plucking peas for Old Rinkrank’s supper when I first saw the youth outside the mountain.

He was a stocky thing, bred on corn and beef from the village. His broad shoulders made his pack look small. He ambled toward the mountain’s base, eyes raised toward the distant princess as his hands floated to his lips—as his nails pinched the fragile skin to tug strips of it away.

I was gathering green vegetables in a ground-level harvest room, where the glass magnified the sunlight into a heat that dabbed sweat onto my papered skin.

When he saw me watching, he approached the cliffside between us. “Good afternoon, old mother,” he said, voice sapped by the glass.

“I’m not your mother,” I told him, “though they call me Mother Mansrot.”

“Who does?”

“My master and his like.” My knees protested as I gathered up my bucket and scissors. I turned to leave—if Rinkrank looked down from his rooms to see me dawdling, I’d sleep in the stables again.

“I’m here to save the princess,” the youth said.

“Of course you are. Of course.”

“But I’m smarter than the others were.”

My breath caught. I whirled on him. “And why is that?” I stalked to the glass; pressed my fist to its surface. “You can climb sheer glass? Outsmart the great eagle and see past the trick mirrors? What do you have that a hundred men and… and all the others did not have?”

The youth’s eyes widened. Then his abused lips edged into a smirk like we shared a secret.

“I’m a good listener,” he said.

The mountain was no older than the princess. That’s all anyone knew for sure.

When I was a young woman in the village, shy and strange in ways that rubbed up under my skin like a rash on backwards, I’d heard it said that a foreign king had protected his daughter by growing a wall of glass around her heart. He gave her dresses and soldiers and servants and commanded her not to age. He bid her to only wed whatever brave soul could pull her out of the mountain.

No matter what. No matter who.

I believed that once. Why else would I have come?

I’d cross the woods, again and again, to visit her: I’d picnic at the mountain’s base, watching her pace her raised and inset quarters like a fox in a trap. Watching her freckles wax and wane with the seasons like the moon’s reflection in water, just as my freckles did in the sun.

She never watched me back.

That night, because I knew him, I asked Rinkrank for whiskey.

His yellow teeth filled up my vision as he laughed in my face. “What does a hag need whiskey for? You’ll stop your own heart.”

“You’re older than I am,” I said, making my voice needy and plain. “You’re frailer—”

His ring, when it hit my jaw, left a bruise shaped like a family seal. Rinkrank used to be someone, outside the mountain—I never learned who. Just that when he arrived, young and hearty, to save the princess, he’d thought they would be a good match by blood.

He grabbed a bottle from his cabinet, uncorking it with his teeth. He took a swig in front of me, swallowed, and belched.

I slunk to the kitchen, eyes watering with pain—the eyes of the world on my back. The cook five rooms over leered; the children two above stared through their nursery floor until the nanny swept them away.

Getting Rinkrank to open the bottle was all that mattered. Because I knew him, I waited until he’d drunk himself to sleep, his knobby knees sharp under the moldering blanket on his rocking chair.

Then I slipped from his rooms, and—ignoring the gaze of the patrolwoman—went back to see the youth outside the mountain.

He was waiting for me beside the harvest room, hidden beyond off-season cornstalks. The mountain widened at the base, allowing for corners of privacy at its very edges. I sank to the ground slowly, letting dirt coat the knees of my dress.

“Tonight, you will go into the forest,” I told him, “and hunt two predators: one beautiful, one strong.”

The youth twisted a piece of skin on his lip, watching me. Blood pearled up beneath his nail.

“You will capture a mimic firefly, who pretends a mating dance until its victims are in reach. Find the one that flashes brightest—so bright your eyes water.” I paused for breath, blunt anticipation pressing on my spine. “And you will kill a lynx. You will cut off its claws and fasten them to your own hands and feet.”

“How?” he asked calmly.

“You’d better not be asking me how to kill, boy, or you’ll never make it up the mountain—never mind down through its rooms after.”

“How do I fasten the claws to my hands? Is that why you asked for rope?”

“Idiot.” I pressed my fingertips to the glass between us.

Horror dawned alongside understanding as he saw the scars.

“She’s been trapped here a long time,” I told him. “Longer than you or I’ve been alive. Are you worthless or are you ruthless?” I crooked my fingers into claws. “The rope will get us out of here. Now shut up while I tell you what comes next.”

There were mirrors in the mountain.

Sometimes suitors found ways to climb the sleek mountainside—clever ways or careful ways or bloody ways. But once they reached the crest, they found challenges they could not see from below: a deep gorge, and an eagle furious with hunger. Mirrors, indistinguishable from clear glass, disguised the danger until it was too late.

We’d learned this bitterly, those of us who survived. But I began to believe something else, too: there were secret mirrors at the mountain’s heart.

The princess never left her chambers, where the glass was angled to bounce light from her skin and set her teeth to gleaming. Where all the world outside could see her dark hair and her rosy skin, her freckles thick as spots on a seashell.

Where she never ate or shit or bled.

How could she never leave? How could she never leave? How could she sit in an icy room with nothing in it but a four-poster bed and pace, and pace, and let the filth of the world watch her, and not want to smash through the glass with her own two hands? How could she not want to set her fists to bleeding?

How could she send her guard to reject us unfortunate survivors at the palace door?

Perhaps all the mountain had was her reflection, bouncing her beauty off every surface. Perhaps the mountain had an alluring hunger. Perhaps the mountain gently fed on us. There were more fireflies than lynxes in this world.

The youth didn’t need to know that.

The following night, Rinkrank played cards with the neighbors. The stakes were high: he’d bet a room on the south side of his mean estate that adjoined both the knight’s property and the priest’s. Both wanted the space; Rinkrank wanted their coin.

My pulse sharp in my throat, I scrubbed the bedroom of his filth, watching through the walls. If they played late into the night, I’d miss the youth’s ascent up the cliffside. I would not be there to remind him that the entrance “stairway” was just a trick of mirrors—that he must fasten his rope above the landing if either of us were to leave this place again. Young people were always stupid. I could leave nothing to chance.

Once, in my early mountain years, I’d thought to win myself a room in a card game. Property was the only kind of prestige recognized by the mountain folk. But Rinkrank would rather drown me in my own washing water than give me the satisfaction of any meager freedom, so I never did get to play.

When I was young, he used to stake me, playing against men who I’d seen watching me from their bedrooms. It was cold comfort that he’d never lost.

I waited while the men drank, while they gossiped, while they talked about who they’d last seen fucking. I waited until the moon had risen clear over the forest’s canopy, and then I saw the youth climbing the mountain.

He pulled himself, claw over claw, up the cliff face. Rust-red blood trailed behind him, and I remembered how that same slickness had felt under my own palms. My breath caught when I realized how quickly he moved, how smoothly. Hope, an unfamiliar vintage, twisted through me.

Others watched him, too: I saw the nanny place a bet with the butcher’s boy. They did not warn him away.

The priest had a bad hand, and he left first, claiming an early service—a polite but useless lie, when everyone could see that his flock met after midday. The knight played to win: he and Rinkrank raised, and drank, and raised.

Finally, as the youth dwindled into a speck of darkness far above, the knight threw down his cards. Rinkrank howled with laughter as his neighbor stormed out the door. Then he called me in to clean their mess, stumbled to his rocking chair, and pulled his blanket tight around him.

As soon as his eyelids fell, I bolted for the door.

My first mistake.

“Where the hell are you going?” he murmured. I froze.

Then, louder: “Where the hell are you going?” He pulled himself to his feet, blanket catching between his shins and the footstool. “Answer me.”

“To fetch the lantern lighter,” I said, mouth dry. “The—the lights burn too bright for sleeping. I thought—”

He shoved me. My ankle twisted. I fell to the floor and caught myself by the palms. Pain cracked up my arms; settled into my shoulders. He planted his boot on my back and pushed me the rest of the way down.

“I hear you’ve been walking out on me, Mother Mansrot.” The words wandered drunk on his tongue.

My saliva smeared on the floor. Through it, the patrolwoman watched me from the room below. She tipped her hat to Rinkrank.

“You,” I mouthed. “I’ll kill you.”

The woman shook her head and walked on. Maybe it wasn’t her that exposed me—it might have been the priest, or the nanny, or her children. It didn’t matter.

Rinkrank heaved his weight down on top of me. I felt a crack, and screamed.

His reflection grinned in my saliva. “You know better than this—you know me better. You and me, we’re trapped until the end of us.”

He hooked his arms under mine, dragging me upward—dropped me in his rocking chair. He twisted his ring on his hand. “Everyone will see this,” he said. “They’ll know I don’t take lip from anyone.”

The round shape of an empty bottle pressed between my thigh and the armrest.

Rinkrank closed his hand to a fist. “They already know what you are.” He braced the other hand against the headrest. “They know you’re an unnatural woman who’ll scrape and die and decay down here with the rest of us.” He pulled back to strike.

My hand closed on the bottle’s neck. I smashed it into the side of his head, barely hard enough to break—he staggered sideways. I tackled him to the ground. Shoved the sharp end into his eye.

He screamed, cursed, threw me off—I rolled, grabbed a stray shard, then dragged myself to my knees over him again.

Because I knew him, I sliced his neck from end to end, a grinning gash that slobbered blood on the floor in an even pool. A carpet of red—opaque. A meager protection from eyes below.

I sat back on my haunches, gasping for breath like a woman half-drowned. Every inhale burned. Rinkrank was far from beloved, but eventually someone would send a runner to alert the palace guard—if the patrolwoman, a dark uniform in the distance, did not already see.

My chest screaming, my lip bleeding, I limped for the still-open door.

As a girl in the village, I did not think to climb the mountain for a long time. I was used to watching women who did not look my way.

The princess wore beautiful dresses that flared at her waist, all lace embroidery and silk brocade. Sometimes, if I was very lucky, I would arrive at the mountain’s base in time to see her brush her hair—as thick and dark as mine was.

I believed myself content. After starving for long enough, you can convince yourself that seeing and feasting are the same.

I left Rinkrank’s blood in handprints as I staggered against clear stairwells.

The youth was nearly at the crest. Mountain folk watched me from their bedrooms and their servants’ quarters, their kitchens and their outhouses. Some looked frightened. Some looked sorry. No one stopped me. No guardsman gave chase.

I dragged myself up and up, room to room, staircase to staircase, until I was level with the bottom of the clear gorge. I saw the bodies, flesh sloughed off faces as they decayed in open air. There was the skinny ginger with the limp, pierced through by the gorge’s crystal spikes. Then there was the foreign lad, disemboweled by the eagle’s giant beak. He had listened more closely than most, and his lynx claws were still secure, visible against shriveled hands trapped and eaten away by time.

Some good it had done him. Some good they’d all done me.

I was three rooms below the surface when the great eagle attacked the youth.

It turned imperious circles above him, then let loose a diving cry. The youth remembered my instructions: he grabbed onto the eagle’s claws and held firm. The bird pulled him up—over the gorge. It struggled to throw him, higher with every frantic wingbeat. The youth’s thick legs dangled far above me. He didn’t let go.

The texture of pain in my chest sweetened and sharpened until I couldn’t tell it from hope. Maybe—finally—this one was different.

I reached the highest room. Instead of a ceiling, there was a chute, deeper and sheerer than any stone well. I’d fallen down it myself, years ago—convinced I was seeing stairs.

The youth raised his hand to the eagle—the eagle screamed and released him. He fell down to the mountain’s surface beside the chute, a showering of blood droplets around him.

“Hurry!” I called. “The rope.”

The youth tied the rope’s end to the post at the entryway, then dropped the rest down to me—I touched the hemp with an elation edging on pain.

He slid down the rope to meet me, landing tenderly on one bare foot. “Where is she?” His breath came hard. “Take me to her.”

“I got you this far. I’m going to the surface.”

He grabbed my wrist with a clawed hand. Blood dribbled from the gashed skin at his fingertips, his palm sticky-wet against my skin.

I looked at him. Darker blood rolled down his forehead. It pooled in the rips and crevices of his lips.

“Did you do as I said?” I asked him. “To the eagle?”

“What does it matter?”

“The—the firefly. You used it? You used its flare to daze him?”

He shook his head. “I found a quicker way. I used my claws to rend his.” He curled his fingers against my wrist, sharp points into skin until skin gave beneath them.

It hurt—it all hurt—but I should have seen it coming. The stories we told ourselves in the mountain never survived contact with other people.

“You idiot!” I gasped. “The eagle is the only way across the gorge! You’ve trapped us both here.”

The youth’s mouth went slack. “But—but I brought the rope—”

“The rope doesn’t matter if we can’t cross the gorge!” I beat uselessly at his shoulder. “You’ve doomed us both, and for what? A pretty ghost?”

“She’s more than that.”

“She’s not real! She’s a reflection! You look at her and see yourself! The guard will never let you near her.”

The youth closed his bitten lips. His face turned white.

Then he wrapped a strong arm around my neck and dragged my back to his chest. Pain flared through my ribs.

“I’ll make her see me,” he murmured in my ear. “I don’t care if she’s not real. I’ll make her crown me.”

“Why would she?” I wheezed. “You’re nothing down here. You’re both nothing. You’re a body, she’s a shadow.”

He pushed his claws into the flesh of my neck. They felt like nettle stings. “I was nothing anywhere else, either. I can be worthless, or I can be ruthless.”

I laughed, shaking with it. “You think I’m a hostage. Idiot boy.”

“I’m stronger than you.”

“Do you see the guard? Do you see anyone coming to stop you?”

His body stilled. He listened.

“There’s no one,” I said. “I thought they’d stop me, but—but when everyone can see you, there’s nowhere to run. They can wait you out, understand? Predators that hunt at a goddamn walking pace.”

“They’ll come,” he said, tightening his hold. “They’ll come, and I’ll make them—”

“I’m nobody,” I said. “You could kill me right now.”

The youth’s claws trembled. Warm blood—or sweat, or saline—dripped from his chin and splattered against my neck.

His next breath came gasping, and he pushed me away. I fell against the wall.

“I’ll cross the gorge myself,” he said. “I’ll—I’ll claw myself down the side and weave through the spikes. I’ll fight off the eagle.”

“You’d be alone. You can’t carry her with you.”

He didn’t answer.

I coughed up a glob of blood. Pressing myself to the wall, I made for the door—deeper into the mountain.

At the doorway, I looked back. Tears tangled in the youth’s thick eyelashes. He gazed up through the chute—watched stars flicker like fireflies. I left him that way: one hopeful hand on the rope. The other tearing skin from his lip.

I dragged myself back through rooms and rooms. Twice I fell. Twice I stood up again. I made for the mountain’s heart.

I saw the patrolwoman waiting for me in a room that lay outside the palace wall. Her eyes moved from Rinkrank’s blood on my palms to my silver hair to my desperate limp.

“Killed your master and ran,” she said. “You must have really thought this one would make it. Was he special? Or are you running out of time?”

Her own hair was a dark chestnut, as mine had once been, only graying around the temples. Her father was a patrolman, and his mother before him—maybe stretching back as far in time as the enigma of the mountain did. She served the princess at its heart.

She wore a string of lynx claws around her neck.

Though her empty room was no larger than Rinkrank’s kitchen, I did not attempt to cross. Instead, I sank down at the glimmering wall, where I could watch the princess pace her chambers.

My eyes darted to the patrolwoman, my breath coming in fits and starts. The lines of her brow softened. She inclined her head.

The starlight played like fireflies in the princess’s eyes. Her fingers were long and delicate; her lips like rosebuds waiting for the chance to bloom. She gazed, unfocused, at a point beyond my shoulder.

“What are you?” I asked her—asked the freckles on her collarbone. “What were you?”

She made no answer.

“Damn you!” I lunged for the glass; pounded it with shaking fists. “What do you want from me?”

The patrolwoman’s hand went to her pommel.

“I’ve tried to win you, I’ve tried to escape you, I—I’ve tried helping others.” I blinked tears down my cheeks. “What do you want from us? From any of us?”

A sharp breath escaped the patrolwoman. She took a step forward.

I turned on her, half-rising only to fall again. “What is she? Tell me what she is or I’ll fight you all the way to the guardhouse and every minute after. Even if it’s the last thing I know, I want to know. Was she ever real?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It matters! It matters more than anything!”

The patrolwoman’s grip on her pommel turned protective—uncertain.

Quietly she said, “There are no stories in the mountain—no secrets. I’m offering you this small ignorance. Don’t you want to take it?”

I scrubbed the blood from my lips, my wrinkled hands like sand rubbing skin. Darkness rose and fell like a tide at the edge of my vision.

The patrolwoman said, “You could decide she was a person once. That she escaped. Ran. That the mountain trapped her reflection as its lure.”

The princess looked right through us. Or perhaps she looked through every wall, through every mirror, through every foul and fleshy body to the dark and open sky.

“Then I’ll follow her out,” I said. “This isn’t the end of us.” I spat blood on the crystal wall.

The patrolwoman’s hand landed heavy on my shoulder. She pulled me to my feet. Silent and thoughtful, she led me away, half-carrying my weight.

And all the mountain watched: a sight that left us hungry, and a hunger that saw.

Copyright © 2026 by Sarah Pauling