33 lines
No EOL
2.5 KiB
Markdown
33 lines
No EOL
2.5 KiB
Markdown
They traveled in silence.
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The high paths north of the avalanche scar were narrow and bitter, the stone sharp as broken glass beneath thin snow. Breathing came hard—thin air and colder wind—so there were fewer words, fewer moments not wrapped in breath or frostbite or aching bone.
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Each day, the wind changed.
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Once it carried laughter—Sari’s soft voice, coaxing favor from the wild spirits overhead as she scattered salt and ashes into the gale. Once, it carried memory—Alisha humming an old Talpian lullaby beneath her breath as she walked beside Telaryn, their hands nearly brushing. Once, it carried nothing at all.
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Those were the worst days.
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They followed no trail, not in any true sense. But they had signs. A jagged cairn toppled long ago, its stones marked with pre-Shattering glyphs. A vision that Telaryn could no longer tell from memory—stone halls pulsing with chained hunger. A weather-beaten map unearthed in Winter’s Edge, now creased and ink-faded, clutched in Halven’s frozen fingers as he led from just behind.
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And the stone fragment, still warm on occasion, despite the cold. Veyari script on one side. Something older on the other.
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Above them, the pact spirit followed—a ghost-wind Sari had bound into the shape of a falcon made of frost. It never cried. It only circled.
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By the fourth day, the clouds turned slate-grey and heavy. Halven’s lantern went out at noon and would not relight. Tuaru’s absence was a silent wound in every step, every glance back to make sure someone was still there.
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Then, in the hour between dusk and dark, the mountain changed.
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The ridgeline narrowed—twin cliffs rising like fangs—and the valley below dropped out in a long scar of ice and black basalt. They stood at the precipice, staring down into it. The snow did not reach the valley floor. It melted around the stone in strange patterns, coiling like breath or words once spoken.
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Sari’s spirit falcon circled once, then broke apart into wind and was gone.
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“There,” Telaryn said, voice hushed, but certain.
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The mouth of the mountain. And far below, carved not with chisel but force of will and old power, loomed a structure half-swallowed by the dark: a keep of seamless black stone, its gate marked with a symbol that had been scraped clean long ago.
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The erased sigil. The place the Veyari had sworn to remember.
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The Keep of Ash.
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None of them spoke. But every one of them felt it—how the wind here had teeth. How the stones did not echo. How even the sky seemed to lean away. |