2.4 KiB
The wind here had changed.
Where once it screamed with indifference, it now whispered with purpose—dragging snow in listless spirals across the cliffside trail. The soldiers moved slowly, hunched beneath white-washed cloaks, their steps muffled by old frost and new fear.
At the front walked Verrin, his gait half-limping, half-sliding. His skin had not fully healed—stretched too tightly across reknit bone and sinew. His breath steamed like smoke through cracked lips, and he said nothing. But his eyes burned.
They reached the edge of the high ridge as twilight bled into full dark.
From there, the valley opened below—its bottom choked in ice and shadow, the far side a wound of black stone. Half-buried and silent, the Keep of Ash loomed like the carcass of a beast too ancient to name. A thin plume of smoke curled upward from a campfire near its gate—faint and distant. A handful of tents. Shapes that moved. Watching. Waiting.
One of the soldiers crouched and murmured, “Looks like they’ve stopped for the night.”
“They shouldn’t have,” Verrin rasped.
And then it came.
A pulse.
Not of sound—but of something else. The stone beneath their boots vibrated with sudden, aching stillness. Snow slid off ledges without wind. The air grew heavy—pressed down like an unseen hand. A few soldiers stumbled, looking wildly around. One swore he heard singing. Another dropped his weapon.
Verrin fell to one knee, his fingers curling into the frostbitten earth.
He felt it—not just in his skin, but in the marrow of the mountain.
A gate had opened.
A bond unsealed.
The blade had been drawn.
He turned, teeth bared in what might have been awe—or horror.
“Make ready,” he said hoarsely. “We descend at first light.”
One of the sergeants hesitated. “Do we wait for command? The Legate hasn’t—”
“There is no more waiting,” Verrin said. His voice carried now, sharp and iron-laced. “What just woke beneath us will not sleep again.”
He stood slowly. Blood ran from his nostrils. He wiped it with the back of a trembling hand, smiled crookedly, and looked to the black ridge below.
“She’s found it. Whatever it is.”
The soldiers exchanged nervous glances.
Verrin closed his eyes.
“We're already too late. But perhaps not entirely.”
Then the wind rose, howling through the teeth of the peaks, and whatever they would face below had already begun to shape the world in its image.