By morning, the snow had softened into a light dusting—a brittle crust over the old drifts. The shrine village of the Veyari stirred slowly, as if reluctant to wake from the long memory of the night. Smoke rose in thin lines from stone vents, curling skyward like spirit-threads.

The fire pit had been cleared, the ashes gathered and scattered according to the rites. No one spoke of the stories that had been told, but they hung in the air still—half-remembered verses and flickers of awe pressed between silence and snow.

Telaryn stood near the cracked altar-stone, her hand freshly wrapped in cloth. The fragment of etched stone—sigils faded and flaking—was tucked into her satchel. She wore her traveling cloak again, shoulders squared. Changed, somehow, though she hadn’t said so.

Tuaru emerged last from the shrinehouse, leaning on a staff of bone-pale rootwood. His eyes were rimmed with shadows, and his breath misted in slow, even strands.

“I dreamed,” he said without greeting, voice quieter than frost. “The deep roots shifted. The mountain murmured your name—not in speech, but in pressure. Something old is waking.”

Telaryn turned to him. “You’re coming.”

He nodded once. “I am the last of the binders here. But I was not meant to die among stones that have already spoken. The spirits of the bedrock move now. And I must walk where they point.”

She didn’t thank him. She only placed a hand over his and said, “Then let’s go.”

From the other side of the courtyard, Eris joined them. She wore a short-hafted spear on her back, its head chipped but sharpened again, and thin bands of red clay painted across her cheeks. She looked barely older than Weylan—yet her gaze was older than the peaks.

Sari followed next, taller than both, with storm-gray eyes and a carved talisman hanging from her neck. She nodded to Alisha with a quiet grace and passed her a waterskin made of woven hide and stonecap leather. “For the heights,” she said. “Wind cuts deeper up there.”

Weylan arrived already ready, jaw tight and eyes hollow from too many sleepless nights. He wore the battered armor he had carried from Winter’s Edge, the antler crest on his shoulder repainted but still smeared from the storm. His hand never left the hilt of his borrowed blade.

He didn’t speak. He just took his place at Telaryn’s side, where he had always meant to be.

Halven came last, bundled in layered robes and clutching his ever-growing pouch of notes. He looked exhausted. Determined.

The rest of the Veyari watched from doorways and thresholds, silent and unmoving. A few of the elders had set small stone markers in a line along the exit path—offerings for safe passage. A warning, perhaps, or a prayer.

Tuaru placed a hand on Telaryn’s shoulder.

“You walk toward the Keep of Ash,” he said. “Whatever waits in its shadow remembers you. You must decide whether you will remember it.”

Telaryn looked back at the shrine village—at the lives half-buried in stone, the legacy that had survived not through kings, but through silence, through survival.

She said only, “I will not forget.”

And then they left.

Seven figures moved through the frostbitten woods—princess, steward, lover, storm-caller, mountain warrior, mountainbinder, and last guard—toward a place lost even to legend.