The day’s hiking had been brutal. The road had taken us up a steep incline and led us along a ridge with a sheer drop on both sides. More than twice we had to hold hands; not that the road was narrow, but we were exhausted and vertigo had begun to set in. Yet even at that immense elevation, towers of pointy rock shot up into the sky for several more thousands of feet, raw and unbroken. So many beautiful peaks no one had ever climbed.

It was to be our last night in the wilderness. We’d found a deep bowl of a cavity in a near-perfect circle some sixty feet in diameter at the rim with steep walls and a spiral pathway cut along the interior leading us at least sixty feet down towards the bottom where a lush green garden was warm and moist. Someone had planted tomatoes, basil, and garlic among other things, and we had with us some salt blocks leftover from before and dried bread crisps.

At last, something besides strips of smoked meat and crushed maple-almond trail rolls.

Ales kept holding out his hand and moving it through the air while Faren glanced around at the interior walls, in some places carved out from rock with chisel markings still on the wall, and in other places giant unhewn stones were mortared together. The floor was leveled with black dirt, warm and moist, amid trails of gray, irregular sheets of slate. “How is this place possible?”

Geraln sat on his mat and leaned his back against the stone wall, trying to rub the exhaustion out of his temples. He yawned and got into the physics of it. “The stone walls collect heat from the sun and shield it from the wind.” He grabbed the orca being handed to him and took a deep drag. I could hear the crackling flowers of the happy cabbage. Then he resumed his explanation with smoke pouring from his mouth. “Moisture comes from snow melting higher up, which further traps heat.”

Davod took the pipe and added, “high up in Osenia, they got places like this all over. Some of them ancient clans still don’t believe in the Empire, so… you know.”

It occurred to me that he’d blabbed about me and Sarina, so it was only fair. “One of those clans is a few hours east from Gath; Davod had a huuuuge crush on this girl…”

“Shut up!” he blushed, almost laughing.

“Oh, yeah!” Geraln continued. “Naleen? Nali?”

“Na-la-nya,” Davod corrected him, still laughing.

I continued. “Her brother told him he couldn’t court his sister unless Davod beat him in a fair fight.”

Davod shook his head with a smile. “Scrappy five-foot runt; gods, he was tough!”

Faren smiled. “Got your arse kicked, didn’t you?”

“Damn right, I did!”

We all laughed.

Davod continued. “Chief’s the one gave the old friar that bow Caleb’s got with him.”

“Oh yeah?” Ales glanced at me and passed the pipe along.

I confirmed, “his wife fell ill during childbirth so they sent someone down to get Mother Searnie. The bow was their idea of payment.”

Geraln bit into our unexpected delicacy and groaned. “Some olive oil would make this!”

Faren answered, “you got any?”

“You think I’d hold out on you, man?”

Conversation that evening didn’t last long. Mostly, we were all tired and went to sleep. We were awakened by the warmth of the sun on our faces; we’d slept so long. After a quick meal of dried berries and more rolls, we packed up and climbed the spiral trail out of the warm bowl and back onto the frigid road.

The road was smooth rock interspersed with small pockets of gravel and pebbles, some of which had frozen together in sheets of ice. With the sheer drop on the right leading down into a steep wall of snow and rock, we had to be very careful where we stepped.

And we continued to climb.

We passed by a small footpath leading around a ridge on the right, then went up a steep embankment. The road led us through a tunnel carved from a giant block of ice with chisel markings all up and down throughout. At length that opened up, and we saw it.

Beside another footpath, the road continued up as it curved around the side of a mountain on the left and led to a small landing where awaited a wall of stone and mortar with a gaping archway in the center. Nestled between peaks that towered upward on the right and left, the stone wall hosted a small bronze plate beside the archway that held some writing.

Terbulin Pass, 17,889 feet. Beyond this gate, the Empire cannot protect you.

To the right of the archway was a totem reaching some fifteen feet with Goat at the apex, atop Serpent, Falcon, Cougar, and Wolf. At the foundation, and I hadn’t recognized him before but bore an uncanny resemblance to a pipe we’d been smoking from, was Orca.

We entered through the archway and into a courtyard scarcely twenty by twenty feet as an oblong square built more out of respect to the adjacent mountains with only a cursory nod to geometry. On the far end was another wall with another archway, only this one was barricaded with a heavy oaken door set with iron braces and rivets, held fast with three, heavy iron bars behind not one, but two closed, iron portcullises. Portculli. Portcullix. Whatever. On each side were narrow, vertical slits that let through slivers of blue sky beyond, angled on the interior for archers to have any attack they desired, and adjacent each were baskets and baskets of arrows, spears, bows, and other weapons.

The rampart was set with stone crenellations that came up shoulder height, and there were two men up there. Each was adorned in a heavy black fur coat, with metal armored plates peeking out from beneath. They turned to look at us as we came up; the bottom halves of their faces were covered in woolen cloth. One of them called out, “Zaken! Fresh meat!”

Davod turned and looked at me with his brow furrowed and his eyes wide. From the side, we heard the creak of iron hinges as an oaken door swung open and smacked against the stone, and another man emerged. He, too, had a heavy fur coat, but his face placed him well into his middling years. His long, dark-green hair hosted a few strands of white and was pulled to rest behind his shoulders, and his lips were held fast in the freezing cold and gave off a gruff mixture of apathy and sternness. Yet the collar where his coat and armor ended hinted at muscles enough for a man not to be trifled with.

“Y’all eat any o my tomatoes?” His voice was a deep baritone with the thick accent of the Beaver Clan, and his shifty eyes passed among the five of us each in turn.

We glanced at one another and almost spoke in chorus.

“What?”

“No!”

“Of course not!”

“What tomatoes?”

“Why would we?”

“You have tomatoes?”

“We had a few.” It was Ales who confessed. While Geraln slapped his arm, Zaken stepped up close to him, passing his eyes up and down over his body, taking note of his clothes and physique. “Honesty. Good quality.” Then he turned to the rest of us. “What o the rest o y’all?”

We glanced around at one another. Geraln went next, lowering his eyes as he spoke. “We also took some garlic and basil.”

Zaken turned and stepped up to him, then snarled. “Ye got olive oil?”

Geraln shook his head. “No, sir.”

Zaken nodded. “We got plenty.” Then he stepped around among us and turned to face me. “And ye? What o ye?”

I hesitated. Geraln spoke for me, “he’s a Daenma.”

Zaken faced him, then turned back to me and looked me up and down. “That’s it?”

I shrugged. “I don’t know… I suppose.”

Davod spoke up next. “We been called to arms. We’re to go to a place called Carthia.”

Zaken grunted and smiled. “Obviously. Y’all wash up and spend the night here.”

Ales spoke up to that. “We got plenty of daylight left…”

Geraln slapped his arm again while Davod and I smirked. Zaken didn’t react so much as answer him directly, “y’all won’t make the Lake o Doom before nightfall…”

“Uh…”

“... Do NOT be out after dark. Y’all hear?”

Even with the ramparts surrounding the small courtyard, the wind coming off the high mountains bit hard and nearly froze me in place, but those words sent an unnatural shiver all over my skin. I looked around, and it was clear we all felt the same.

“Sir,” Ales tried to speak. “What’s wrong with…”

Zaken turned towards the door and interrupted him. “Come. We got a fawn been marinating in ale for days. Got warm beds, but first wash up…”

We began to step with him when Faren spoke up excitedly, “I have happy cabbage.”

We all giggled, but the older man stopped and turned to him directly. “Don’t be that man.”

Faren looked at him confused and bewildered.

“Keep yer mind sharp. At all times.” He then turned to each of us as he spoke, “that man’ll get ye killed. And no drinking, neither. Survive down there, and ye get to stay up here.”

It wasn’t lost on me that this cramped, frigid outpost standing at ungodly heights untold miles from civilization he found preferable to being down there. “Sir,” I said. “May we see what’s on the other side of that wall?”

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The man looked me up and down, then pointed at a heavy, oaken door tucked into a corner that was short enough that it would force most children to duck through it. “Through there.”

Faren looked sullen and withdrawn. He and Geraln went along with the older man, while Davod was just hungry. Ales and I went to have a look.

The door itself was set with iron braces and rivets, and there was a sealed barrel beside, half buried in snow long since iced over. As we pulled at the door, the hinges cried out in protest. Inside was a dark, cold column with a spiral staircase that went up to the left and down on the right. The space was tight, and I nearly tripped several times thinking I could get the rhythm of the steps, but they were horribly uneven. The staircase wrapped around one time and brought us to a small landing where, in a small stone recess in the center column a solitary candle clung to the remnant of what wick it had left amid a pool of solid wax. Opposite that was another heavy wooden door with a thick iron bar at the side, and we pushed that open.

Our eyes were flooded with sunlight, and out before us between the stone crenelations was an endless expanse of clouds.

The Terbulin ridge could be seen extending out to the east and to the west, a sheer cliff face of rock curved inward for hundreds of miles as far as the eye could see, marbled in gray and black and too steep to host any snow caps save for what little that was saddled between peaks that reached heights I couldn’t grasp with my mind. Everything else was beneath a blanket of clouds. The side of the cliff hosted a long outcropping of rock that angled down sharply to suffice for a road that dipped beneath the clouds, but otherwise fell straight down who knew how far.

Ales’s eyes were wide as they scanned the endless sea of clouds before us. He chuckled lightly. “I never seen clouds from this side before.”

That made me smile. “It’s surreal, isn’t it?”

He nodded emphatically. Before us, waves seemed almost frozen in time, as though they swelled and flowed in slow motion, fluffy pillows of cotton that refused to give us so much as a hint of what lay beneath be it hills or valleys, farms or cities. White mixed with shades of gray with touches of amber kissed by the overhead sun, all beneath the pristine blue sky, hemmed in by the endless gray-black wall of rock towering above us.

I mustered some words. “I feel so small.”

Ales smiled. “It looks like you could just take a boat through it. Listen, man, I’m sorry for ratting us out like that.”

“What do you mean?”

Ales lowered his eyes. He had a wide, stocky face that wore a look of shame and introspection. “About the tomatoes.”

I smiled. “Come on! I know you see they’re fine with that.”

Ales shook his head; that wasn’t what worried him. “I know… it’s just… I keep blabbering like that…”

“Nah, man. I’m jealous.”

Ales raised an eyebrow at me and tilted his head a little.

“I wish I had the courage to be honest on that level. You’ll get no complaint from me.”

Ales huffed a little and smiled from one corner of his mouth before turning his attention back out over the expanse of clouds. “I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t this.”

A voice came from the side. One of the men with us on the rampart, draped in a dark fur coat over heavy armor, had his dark-green hair cascading down his back. “On a clear day, you can see Carthia right over there,” he pointed.

He was a sturdy man of average height, Herali without question, with a line of scar trailing down the left side of his otherwise soft face. He wasn’t much older than us, if at all.

Ales and I looked. The place where he pointed was but a crest of pillowy clouds.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Timeu of Raouna.”

“Where’s that?” Ales asked.

“It’s in Ozaria.”

Ales huffed. “You’re from diamond-tree country, too.”

Timeu nodded. “Yeah, there’s a lot of us.”

“Is it like this all the time?” Ales asked.

“This time of year?” he nodded. “All day every day. In winter you can see everything. The River of Unending Torment, all the way to the sea.” His finger traced a wavy pattern in the air and led our eyes off to the right, towards more clouds.

I winced at the name, then shook it off. “You survived down there?”

Timeu lifted his eyebrows for a fleeting moment, then scratched at the scar running down the side of his face. “Barely.”

Ales quizzed him, “what’s the secret?”

Timeu glanced his dark-green eyes back and forth between us and leaned in close. “They’re going to tell you a whole bunch of shit, and it’s good shit, but honestly… just… whatever the natives tell you, listen. Learn the language, talk to the natives. They’re… most of them are good people, and they know what’s what…”

“OK,” I nodded.

“... but no matter what, don’t be out after dark.”

Ales and I looked at one another; a cold feeling of concern passed between us. We almost asked together, “what happens after dark?”

Timeu shook his head and took a deep breath. “How’s this: during the day, your enemy is other people.”

“And at night?”

“Hey!” Davod called out to us from the courtyard below. “What do you cocksuckers see up there?”

Ales shook his head. “Nothing but clouds, dunderhead.”

“Uh-huh. Need you to run an errand. He says they got a bowl with some thyme and onions nearby. Need you to go get some.”

Timeu slapped my shoulder and, though his mouth was covered in black wool I could see the sides of his eyes smiling. “Looks like it’s your turn. We’ll talk later.”

The bowl in question was easy to find. Ales and I left the gate and headed back along the road through the rugged terrain, making our way along the narrow footpath leading us down a spiral trail into the belly of another bowl, where we found what they’d asked for along with some blackberries trained on a wooden trellis. I had one.

“Those any good?” Ales asked me.

“I can’t tell. I think I need to try another to be sure.”

Ales nodded and came over. “Sounds like you could use a second opinion.”

Together we managed to pluck blackberries from the vine, incurring more than a few thorns, only to end up painting our olive-green an incriminating purple.

I spent the whole time on the trail back trying to pick those seeds out of my teeth.

Absolutely worth it.

Zaken had said we could wash up. The bath was but a small washbasin scarcely large enough to sit in, tucked into a closet with a drain in the middle of the floor, buried deep within the mountain with naught but an oil lamp for light, and the water had a thin sheet of ice over it. A rag and soap had been provided, and with it I scrubbed as quickly as possible to try and mitigate the cold all over my skin.

It didn’t work.

Faren had been drafted into laundry duty with some other men from the garrison, which was fortunate as I was on my last change of clothes.

That evening, dinner included blackberry marmalade with fresh sour bread, sweet potato mashed up with a torturous amount of nice pepper, some kind of cavernous vegetable I’d never seen before filled up with a slurry of rice, cheese, and other stuff, and that venison he’d promised from before along with a bowl of chopped tomatoes and basil with dots of black pepper and white specks of garlic swimming in olive oil. They also had pitchers of some yellow-orange colored juice that was as sweet as anything I’d ever tasted and tart, and we managed to empty the first one within seconds while the men of the garrison laughed at us.

The room was small, walled with rough-hewn solid stone on one side and mortared blocks on the other that held a window of amber-colored glass in a hashed frame. The dark, wooden table filled the space, and all the meal was set in the center alongside an iron candelabra with numerous fresh candles. It was the five of us along with Timeu, Zaken, and three other men of the garrison. One of them was a burly Herali man with a tattoo over his brow marking him from the Porcupine Clan in Lavega County. He had only a thumb and two fingers remaining on his left hand, with a scar that ran the length of his forearm.

Faren was silent while Davod, seated at the head of the table, grabbed up a generous serving of food.

It was Ales who spoke first. “What’s down there?”

The men of the garrison glanced at one another and smiled. The Porcupine man grimaced and spoke. “Well, there are only three things you need to watch out for.” We watched him closely as he held up his hand and counted them off on the three fingers he had left. “There’s the things that’ll eat you but won’t bother to kill you first, there’s the things that’ll kill you but don’t care to eat you, and then there are the things that’ll kill you and eat you. That’s it. You watch out for those three things.”

The others laughed, but we didn’t. Another man added, “there’s a hundred different kinds of snakes down there. But don’t worry, only ninety-nine of them are poisonous!”

Another man chuckled, “the other one will swallow you whole!”

Geraln had a mass of sweet potato on his fork and was about to bite it, only to freeze in that position and look over at me with his eyes wide open and his mouth gaped.

Zaken, seated opposite Davod, chuckled heartily with a satisfied grin while his men tormented us. Timeu continued, “don’t touch the yellow vine.”

The porcupine man continued, laughing, “and don’t let it touch you, either!”

Davod pulled the slab of meat from his face; a patina of fat saturated his cheeks while a tiny glob of meat clung to his lips. “What do you mean ‘don’t let it touch you’?”

Another man turned to Ales and spoke to him directly. “You’re from the coast; you ever seen a twenty-foot alligator?”

My jaw dropped. “How big?”

The others laughed. It was Timeu’s turn again. “The ants will kill you. The mosquitoes will kill you. The bees will kill you. The heat will kill you. Drinking the water will kill you. The mud will kill you…”

Another man interrupted, “packs of wild dogs. Had a guy tried to pet one of them; he’s dead now. You know what a dæguwa is?”

None of us did.

“It’s like a cougar, but bigger and stronger, and yellow with spots.”

Another took the baton. “You could be walking along, thinking you’re on a trail. Bushes and trees are so thick you don’t see the edge until you walk right off it. Then you fall, hurt so bad you can’t move, waiting for your friends to come help, and some random thing comes along and takes a bite out of you.”

“Stay on the main road, but the main road is boobytrapped. Move slowly to avoid traps, but move quickly else the Sewu’oni will find you.”

Ales spoke up to that. “Is that the enemy we’ll be fighting?”

It was Zaken who answered. As he spoke, the whole table fell silent. “Carthia been there over a century. Started as a trading outpost, grew into a refuge for pirates, runaway slaves, and other outcasts. Then, about twenty years ago, the Great Umeazi Plague swept through Uhui. Lots o people died, and the survivors blamed us. The Sewu’oŋi are one tribe, but they built an alliance throughout the whole region hellbent on getting rid o us.”

“What about after dark?” Ales asked.

The men of the garrison exchanged fearful glances. Then the Porcupine Clan guy said it. “vɪta’o.”

Geraln spoke up. “What’s vɪta’o?”

As before, the men took turns layering their words on top of one another. “Picture giant lizards. Tall as a man.”

“With talons like an eagle, several inches long and razor sharp.”

Another took the baton. “And serrated teeth. When they bite you, they shake their heads like this,” he bobbed his head back and forth, “carve right through you like a saw blade.”

“They move through the forest, quieter than the wind, and they blend in with the trees. You could have one right next to you and you won’t see him. Until it’s too late.”

“... and faster than anything you’ve ever seen. You ever seen a cougar barrel down the side of a mountain at full clip? Faster than that. And, they’re smart.”

“Real smart. They hunt in packs, talk to each other through chirps and clicks—sounds just like the rest of the forest. And, they know we can’t see shit after dark.”

“They don’t much care for human politics, neither; we’re meat.”

The mood fell silent. I tried to will myself to take a bite of something, then it occurred to me to ask, “these vɪta’o… do they go after the enemy the, uh…”

“Sewu’oŋi,” they reminded me.

“Will they go after the Seu-oni after dark? Are both sides subject to the same rules?”

The men nodded a strong affirmation.

Then, finally, Davod remembered his priorities. “What about girls?”

The men of the garrison looked at one another as if shocked we still had the nerve to ask such a thing.

Ales’s eyes perked up and he stared at Davod wide-eyed, his eyebrows raised. Faren still stared empty at his plate of untouched food as though lost in thought, but Geraln leaned forward and listened. I doubled down, “what kind of girls do they have down there? What are they like?”

Zaken let out a wry smile while the man from the Porcupine Clan grinned wide and spoke. “Man, they got women down there that’ll absolutely blow your mind.”

Ales spoke, “in a good way or a bad way?”

“Both!”

Another clarified, “at the same time!”