2.4 KiB
Eris returned before dusk, breath misting in sharp bursts, her braid half-frozen and cheeks raw from wind. She moved like a shadow slipping between snow-laden boulders, silent until she stood before Telaryn.
“They’re coming,” she said, voice low, urgent. “From the valley below. At least five—maybe more. Moving fast, on foot.”
Telaryn’s expression darkened. She turned toward the narrow ridge path they'd begun ascending. Sari and Halven drifted closer; Weylan stood at a distance, watching with a hand on his spear.
“Who are they?” Telaryn asked.
“Strangers,” Eris said. “Armor not of the mountains. Their cloaks were dyed deep—red, I think. Mismatched plates, but disciplined movement. Not clansfolk. And… something wrong with the air around them. Like the wind didn’t want to touch them.”
Tuaru stirred beside a gnarled pine root, his hand tightening on his staff. “The spirits recoil from those men,” he murmured. “There is blood on their breath.”
Halven looked sharply toward Telaryn. “The Empire.”
Telaryn nodded once. “Scouts. Or worse.”
“They’ll reach the lower slopes by morning,” Eris added. “And if they’re tracking us by scent or sorcery, snow won’t slow them.”
For a moment, the party stood in tense silence. Snow flurried around them in fine crystal threads, the air thin and brittle as cracked bone.
“Then we climb,” Telaryn said.
“To where?” Sari asked quietly. “The higher routes are deadfall and scree. No paths. Not for many winters.”
“Then we find a way,” Telaryn said. Her voice didn’t rise—but something in it steadied them.
Tuaru closed his eyes, and the wooden fetishes on his staff rattled softly. “There are ways not carved by hands. If the stone permits, I will shape them.”
A wind gusted over the ridge, sudden and sharp. The trees creaked in protest.
“We don’t have long,” said Eris. “Whatever they are, they’re not climbing blind.”
Telaryn looked toward the peaks. Already, twilight bled into violet shadows along the spines of the mountains. Far below, darkness pooled like a rising tide.
“Then we climb until the mountain says no.”
With that, she turned and began up the pass, boot crunching ice, cloak snapping in the wind.
The others followed—princess, scribe, storm-caller, mountainbinder, warrior, and boy-soldier—ascending into unknown white.
Behind them, the Mourning Peaks whispered.
And below, the shadows kept coming.