They crossed the span as night fell. They slunk past the spot where he had nearly slain the father and daughter and he looked at the pavers where they had lain one on top of the other with a dead sow between. He thought of the daughter at the flood and her pick hooked around the greenskin's neck. Serrations opening a stream of blood from his throat. He shook his head and passed on. Last time he had followed the horde down the seaway to the human port. This time he jogged up the dwarfroad to where it ran beside the river. There were hills on the left and the river on the right and more hills beyond it. The road was paved in the dwarven way and it bent to follow the river into dwarfdom.

He wasn't certain where to go next. He knew only what the [brigadier] taught him, only what any human might teach their child about some other people's myths. The black heart of the world, where the world was made and yet being made, birthplace of all life and unlife. Somehow both below and above the dwarven realm she had said. Both within it and without it.

He crossed the river.

At the top of every hill they crouched and studied the country about but they never saw anyone upon the parallel road. Before dawn on the second morning they trotted down to the river and he tried and failed to catch fish. The [bosun] watched a while, then left upstream. By daybreak Orc was soaked and freezing and empty handed. He retreated back into the hills. The [bosun] found him there with a little string of trout hanging from a stick. He held them up to his mouth so they hung like silver teeth below his horrid half smile.

Two mornings later he woke to the [bosun] gesturing madly at him. The man flattened his hands against either side of his skull and then patted his sunken chest and reached a hand for Orc's shoulder.

Orc backed and slapped down the hand.

The [bosun] pointed to the journal. Orc gave it to him.

He wrote: I can feel it.

He looked at Orc expectedly.

The fragment. Can't you feel it?

"No."

The [bosun] handed him the journal and beckoned him to follow. They left the river behind and struck out across a green backcountry of gray firs and peeling birch and roosting crows that likely hadn't seen two legged two armed creatures in centuries. He saw bear scat and heard squirrel laughter and wondered why they weren't hibernating for it was now the deepest part of winter. Rocks as tall as the elven trees seemed to grow out of the earth without accompaniment, and red winged black birds waited on their tops and watched the orc and the dead man walk through their shadows. Frigid streams carried meltwater from higher up though in no place did it appear to him that anywhere higher up might be melting.

Then he saw the mountain. It dominated the sky, the world, taller and wider than anything he'd ever seen. Its brow was white yet its face was as black as the [Skyshard], as if made of something so abhorrent sunlight dared not shine upon it nor would ice cling to it. Stark white snow covered its shoulders and draped down from those ridges like a cloak, and the rest of it lay hidden behind a set of rugged foothills with rocky crowns climbing higher and higher yet never approaching anything close to the mountain's immensity.

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He stopped just to look but the [bosun] waved his hand and wrote in the pine duff with the pommel of [Booky's blade]: Not safe.

He looked back the way they'd come. "No one's following us."

Not us. The fragment.

The [bosun] set off at a run and soon they were crossing broad and shallow patches of snow that first stretched only across the open ground between the trees, then deepens and covered the ground under the lowest limbs, then blanketed the treetops in layers that made each enshrouded fir look like a mountain in miniature.

They ran through the night and the hillsides sparkled first green then teal from the moonslight on the snow as if the land was covered in emeralds. The mountain grew even taller and wider and in that green otherworldliness its snowy flanks looked like the iris of a predator's eye and its black face the constricted pupil.

Orc's feet began to hurt from the cold and the dry air made him thirst. He bent and scooped a handful of snow into his mouth and nearly lost sight of the [bosun] doing it. The snow hurt his teeth as it melted.

"Not sure I can climb that thing," he called.

The [bosun] did not slow. Orc ran after him.

By the time the sun rose on the fourth day his feet were wholly numb and his fingertips hurt. He couldn't catch enough breath to run. He could only walk. Steam rose from his back and scalp and came out his mouth and nose with every breath. Sunlight gilded his breath and the steam rising from his skin as if his soul burned. He hadn't seen the [bosun] in hours but the tracks kept on straight as the pole of a compass indifferent to terrain and he followed them with his head down and his eyes squinting against the sunglare. The tracks wrapped around a long aspect and he followed them with the sun at his back and followed them as they passed into blue shadow. The gentle hillside on his right fell away into a deep gulch with water flowing white over rocks at its bottom. The far slope rose so steeply that it bore no trees or perhaps because it bore no trees, and as he continued to come around the aspect he saw blankets of clouds burning off wherever the sun carved into them. Emerging from behind their curtain was earth so rough and steep none would call it a hill. It was the true base of the mountain.

The [bosun]'s tracks turned slightly down there and traversed toward the gulch's bottom and the stream flowing therein. Orc could smell the water and his throat cracked as he swallowed in anticipation. Down he went and for the first time in a day he felt like he could breathe fully. He came around a rib in the hillside and he saw the yawning hole whence the water came. The dead man waited at its threshold.

Orc dipped his hands in the water to drink. It was warmer than he expected and smelled faintly of sulfur. He drank again then he looked at the hole. No light came out of it. Only a steady stream of water descending a smoothed yet porous black rock of the kind ejected from the world by the great burning rifts at its beginning. He listened and he smelled but the interior was dark and inscrutable. As if he stood before the place where night was nightly birthed, and where it daily gathered like a flight of bats to wait out the sun.

"You brought me somewhere pleasant," he said.

The [bosun] knelt and in a slough of snow beside the stream he wrote: Hurry.

"Molten rock made that."

The [bosun] nodded.

"If it starts flowing again you know what'll happen to us."

The [bosun] waved his hand as if such a thing were of no consequence.

"Yeah. You're already dead."

Orc craned his head and looked into the hole. There was nothing to see and only the faint sulfur smell and the trickle of the water on the rock. He said, "If Ogaz was here he'd tear you to pieces."

The [bosun] nodded and pointed to what he'd written.

They entered the hole and started climbing.