5.2 KiB
Snow had swallowed the world.
Each step was a reckoning—the crunch of ice underfoot, the sting of wind against raw skin. The trail behind them was shallow, ragged, and already vanishing. A storm had passed through the night before, masking their tracks from the scouts below, but the cold it left behind bit deeper than any blade.
Telaryn moved ahead of the others now, her eyes fixed on the pale blue gleam of the morning sky between jagged ridgelines. Her cloak, torn at the hem, snapped behind her like a dying banner. The wind whistled through the broken pines, howling like a voice almost remembered. She did not speak. She could not spare the breath.
Behind her, the party pressed forward—Halven with his quiet strength and tired eyes; Alisha, cloaked and watchful; Weylan, still too young for the weight on his shoulders. There were others, too, loyalists who had survived Winter’s Edge but not unchanged. The mountains stole warmth and gave no mercy.
Far below, in the pine-shadowed valleys, the Temerian scouts would still be searching. Marcas would not give up the chase—not after what he had seen. Not after the way she had left the city.
At a narrow bend in the path, Telaryn paused. A natural overlook opened beyond a splintered granite shelf, offering a sweeping view of the land they had fled.
From here, she could almost see the smoke still rising from Winter’s Edge—thin, ashen threads twisting into the morning. Not yet taken. But soon.
She breathed in, letting the thin air burn in her lungs. The peaks ahead loomed higher still, cruel and cold and without pity. Somewhere among them, if Halven’s map and the whispers of fireless flame were right, the path to the Keep of Ash waited.
Alisha stepped beside her, her voice low, hoarse from the cold.
“They’ll follow us until we vanish, or die.”
Telaryn nodded. “Then we vanish.”
Her hand dropped to her hip—not to the sword she carried, still dulled and notched, but to the pouch that held the old map fragment. It was warm to the touch, as if something within it knew they were drawing closer.
From behind, a voice called—Weylan’s, breathless. “Something ahead!”
Telaryn turned. Across the next rise, the snow shifted strangely. A stone marker jutted from the frost, its surface carved with sigils half-buried by time. Not Talpian. Not even High Tul. Older.
The mountain was watching.
As the party regathers around the marker and the wind begins to pick up again, Telaryn leads them off the visible path. Toward what? She doesn’t say. But her grip tightens on the map. And the mountains begin to whisper.
The peaks narrowed into a gorge, jagged stone pressing in like teeth. Snow fell in fine needles, hissing where it touched the few living pines that clung to the ledges above. The wind here no longer howled—it breathed, low and slow and watchful, like something too old for hunger but still unwilling to forget.
Telaryn trudged forward, half-guided by instinct, half by memory not her own. The map Halven had unearthed led only to a carved symbol etched in stone, barely visible through frost: a spiral wound with thorns. She had seen it once before—on the faded mural beneath the palace. A remnant of the Nameless Queen.
Beyond the crest of the ridge, the snow thinned. What lay ahead was no village in any living memory, yet it bore the bones of one. Low walls rose from beneath drifts, warped with time and ice. Stone arches ringed a hollow plaza where a shrine sat collapsed, the statue at its heart broken at the waist. The head was gone. Moss clung to the shattered feet like prayer.
Smoke twisted faintly from a few half-dug hearths. Eyes glittered in the dark beneath overhangs and caves—silent figures wrapped in slate-gray furs, faces marked by years and soot. Not savages. Not Talpians. Not quite strangers.
Weylan stepped protectively beside Telaryn, hand on the hilt of his worn blade. Alisha slowed her pace, fingers brushing the base of her throat.
Then they emerged—dozens of them. The Veyari.
They wore bone trinkets and cloaks stitched with ancient glyphs. Their hair was braided with ash and cord. None spoke. Some fell to one knee—not reverent, but wary. Others spat in the snow.
An old woman with eyes like granite stepped forward. Her face bore no paint, no jewelry—only creased skin like folded parchment. She did not bow. She looked Telaryn over as one might study a knife left in the open. Beautiful. Dangerous. Better left untouched.
“You wear her face,” the woman said.
Telaryn said nothing.
Another voice rose from the shrine ruins—a man’s, low and echoing. Stones beneath their feet seemed to groan in answer.
“Then let the mountain speak.”
From the shadow of the broken altar, he emerged. Tuaru, the Mountainbinder. His skin was ochre-stained, his beard laced with rings of blackened iron, his arms bare despite the cold—tattooed with fault-lines and spirals. A staff of petrified root and basalt tapped once on the frozen ground.
“If your blood is hers,” he said, “the mountain will know.”
He turned toward the shrine and raised his staff. The wind stopped. Silence rippled outward like a drumbeat swallowed by stone.
“You will take the trial,” Tuaru said. “Or you will turn back and die.”