From the shore a Surface-Walker looks like a person standing on the water a stone’s throw out, small against the dark pool, with no reflection beneath it. Closer, it is plainly of another age: a fisherman in an old style of oilskin, a girl in a dress nobody has worn in a lifetime, a soldier with a helm of a forgotten pattern. Its skin is the colour of wet slate and its clothes cling and drip, though the drops vanish before they reach the surface. Where its feet touch the water, faint rings spread and are gone, the only ripples the Mirror ever shows.

It walks slowly and lightly, as if on ice, and turns towards anyone on the bank. It beckons, or holds out a hand, or simply waits. Some speak; their voices reach the shore a breath late, as all sound does at the Mirror, and they smell of cold lake water and weed.

They are found only on the Mirror that holds them, and never far from its centre. A pool may hold one, the Echo of a single drowning, or many, if it has drowned many. They seem to belong to the time the water reflects, and a pool that shows the distant past shows walkers dressed for it.

Surface-Walkers lure, and they are patient about it. Each seems to know what the watcher wants: a lost child sees a child, a widow sees a figure with her husband’s walk, a scholar sees someone holding out a book. They do not chase or grasp; they invite, and when invitation fails they wait for the next visitor. Whether there is malice in it or only the drowned’s longing for company, no one has learned.

A Surface-Walker stands on the Mirror’s surface as on stone, and what it offers is real in its way: it is a window to another time, and the water behind it is a door. A traveller who steps out goes through and stays in the reflected time until they surface, if they ever do. Such travellers often become the Mirror’s Drifters, visible in the water and unreachable, ageing at the rate of the time they fell into.

The Surface-Walkers give the living nothing; they take. Those who come to the Mirror to recover a lost heirloom or see a lost face are their likeliest victims. The water’s Echo-Divers warn every visitor not to look too long, and not to follow anything that walks where nothing should.

Lakeside folk call them "lake-brides" or "the dry-footed" and tell that they are the drowned seeking someone to take their place, so that they can rest; others hold that they are the Mirror’s own servants. Neither is shown to be true. What is so is that many of them are what the drowned left behind, Echoes of a last moment on the water, and that the water keeps the memories of everyone who has ever looked into it. Some believe a walker will answer one true question before it lures; others say any answer it gives is bait.

Lakeside songs tell of the lover who walked out across the water after a lake-bride and was found floating in the morning with a smile on his face, and of the brother who rowed out to cut him free and was never found.