Trito seemed to hover up the side of the wall. He stepped to the place where it met the butte and climbed, and despite a vertical, icy surface, he scaled it easily, snaking across its length as he ascended. He’d taken a lantern so he would always stay illuminated; it was bright enough to see beneath the stars, but there were few plants here, and it was darker than on the forest floor.

The party watched on in silence.

Halfway up, he stopped. For a moment he floated in place. Like a levitation spell of Mother, except without any outward signs.

Corvo and the others stepped forward—and they saw the spell.

There was no spell. The wall wasn’t vertical, and it wasn’t covered in ice. Steps, some small and others large, lined the way up. They were spaced unevenly apart, each hidden beneath the uniform snow. At the press of Trito’s foot a sprinkle of white fell down to the butte. A shape to the staircase slowly took hold. A path up was revealed.

Trito paused and looked down.

“The steps are larger than they look,” he said. “Really.”

Aletheia looked to Mother. “I can’t carry Corvo here,” she said. “He’s too big for me.”

“I can climb!” Corvo said.

Mother took hold of him. “I will take him. If we slip, I will Blink us to safety.”

“And draw a demon our way,” Dorian said.

“Better that than plummet to our deaths.”

They glared at each other in a way they hadn’t before. Even after their fight at the Tower of Keraz, in the library, there had been more kindness between them than there was now.

“We’ll see, I suppose,” he said, and he started up after Trito.

Mother gave her staff to Aletheia. “Take this. And come here, Corvo. Hold on to me tight. Do not look down, and do not let go.”

“I can climb,” Corvo said again, this time with less confidence. But Mother did not listen. She reached down, picked him up, and brought him against her chest.

Then they went together.

The steps were larger than they looked. At each break in the rock Mother had enough room to stop and breathe, and her legs were long enough that she could stretch between each snowy platform.

They brushed against the huge stone wall. It felt frozen through Corvo’s armored jacket. He gazed upward and it seemed to reach forever up into the sky, and they grew no closer as they continued along the path.

He felt Mother’s heart pick up with exertion. He listened to its beating.

He looked down.

Aletheia was tiny beneath him. She went slowly, taking one step and then the next, following the path.

The drop down to her would have been enough to kill. And then, off the sides of the butte….

Vertigo washed through him. His fingers tightened around Mother. He buried his head against her neck. She was warm in the cold air, and her firm grip assured him everything would be all right.

He wished he were back at Castle Erod, or the Boyar’s keep. He wished he were the son of a duke, a real duke, somewhere warm and safe. Adventure seemed like endless fun when reading stories, but after so long on the road with Mother, Corvo’s mind had changed. He preferred safe nights in warm beds to this endless terror. All he wanted was to see the sun again.

Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Mother jolted beneath him. And again. And again. Chest heaving, her breath hot against his neck.

She halted.

A moment.

She put him down.

He opened his eyes.

Ewsos, the City of the Dawn sheathed in eternal darkness, stretched out on the horizon before him. And it was very bright.

Black walls a thousand feet tall surrounded Ewsos like the mountains of a valley. The party stood on the ramparts of the Oldwalls. It was a very long way down. The ground underfoot was slick and snowy. The wall was even taller from this vantage point, raised as it was on the mountain they had spent the last day scaling, and from such a height they saw everything there was to see.

Around the circumference of the walls arose seven tall Spires, identical to the Spire of Veshod and many others Corvo had seen throughout his travels: metallic structures that stretched into the heavens in search of untapped mana.

They found it. The sky writhed with red lights. A maelstrom of magic hung over them, invisible until now behind the City’s Oldwalls. From it flooded columns, like the mana aurora, like waterfalls of rainbows pouring from arcane clouds. Streaking gold and blue darted through them in helical pairs like playing foxes. The stars were impossible to see now, but it was no matter; the sky was so bright that it might have been day, except that instead of a hot sun to give off light, there was a cold blanket glowing across the whole sky.

That blanket illuminated the twisted shape of the ruined city.

It was a metropolis. The City stretched so far into the distance that even from this vantage point the far side’s walls, the side that faced south and lined the coast, seemed no taller than Corvo. Buildings of black brick formed block after block after block; most structures were halfway crumbled, but a few still stood whole, four or five or more stories—bigger than anything the people of Veshod could ever imagine building today.

And everything was grown over with a jungle of mana-hungry plants. Stretches looked no different from the forest near Waterrest; teal trees formed dense woodlands, reclaiming what man took from nature when these blocks were first built. But through most of the City the various buildings of the Old Kingdom remained visible and distinctively urban. Yet they were always grown over with luminescent vines, or given their shape in the dark by the pink branches of an oak or pine tree.

The city’s center looked hardly changed at all. There the largest buildings still stood: skyscrapers and towers, thick and tall as Spires; a colosseum, like the massive arena in the city of Katharos; and directly in the City’s middle, with all of Ewsos radiating out around it, was a mountain of steel.

Five thousand feet tall. A castle of countless pinnacles, turrets and keeps, walls and spires all of its own. It black construction was metal, there was no doubt of that; it glinted in the maelstrom. But it was a mountain. No other word could describe it. It made the Oldwalls look like palisades.

Its highest tier of defense was a pyramid. Its tip was banded in gold, and it rose so high that it pierced the maelstrom.

The maelstrom’s heart. Its center. Its eye, though it did not look calm. Mana poured down on the pyramid’s sides from it, and all the red aethereal clouds seemed to spin around it.

“That is the Regizar’s Palace,” Trito said. “The puncture in the Veil Between Worlds.”

Everyone jumped. They had become so lost in awe at the sight, the most magnificent sight that had ever or would ever exist, and from the best vantage point possible, that they had forgotten they could speak.

“I have seen it before,” Mother whispered. “Yet it is still—unlike anything else in this world.”

“I’ve never felt so much mana,” Aletheia gasped, like every breath winded her. “I knew—Eris told me—but….”

She shook her head.

“They had all this and lost it?” Dorian said.

“In a sense, yes,” Trito said. “We did.”

“Then what hope do we have?” Aletheia said.

“There is more to civilization than black bricks and pyramids,” Trito said. “That is why we are not going there, but there.” He pointed across the city, to the far rightmost side of the walls. “The Mortalists make their compound there.”

“Doesn’t look like anything to me,” Dorian said.

“Nothing except ‘far away’,” Mother said. She sighed. “It is nearly over. We are almost there. The end has never been closer.”

At first Corvo thought she was speaking to him. But she wasn’t. Her eyes were affixed to the point Trito’s fingers led to.

She was speaking to herself.

“Optimism,” Aletheia said. “That’s good. So—how do we get down there without magic?”

“We stick to the walls until we can go along them no farther,” Trito said. “Then we take the stairs.”

They all laughed, except Corvo, and started onward again. They walked along the ramparts toward the City’s main gate, trudging through snow and descending off from the butte. The going was steep and slick, but the pushed-up bricks made an uneven surface that could be scaled downward with time.

The walls leveled again when they reached the gate. The snow disappeared. And from there, they needed to do nothing except walk—and hope they went unnoticed by demons.