Wirrin had been eighteen the first time she’d been so close to death. It had been the first time someone was eaten by the mountains before her eyes. She had been eighteen and full of energy and wonder for the world. She’d spent most of the last two years working in different caravans carting supplies around the West, and she’d decided it was time to go and explore the Dividing Range.

It was early summer and the lower slopes of the mountains were bare and bristling with grasses and brush. The ground had seemed to crack under Wirrin’s feet in such a different way to exploring in the Snow.

Wirrin had found herself a group of adventurers headed out of Teslauk. It was her first time travelling with the sorts of people who called themselves adventurers. She was not enjoying it.

Being from the far south, Wirrin was bigger and broader than all of her travelling companions, but she’d had nowhere near the strength displayed by the adventurers’ porters and servants, who had been hauling huge packs full of useless luxuries up and down the slopes through the early summer mud.

The adventurers themselves carried only small packs of food and navigation equipment that they barely seemed to know how to use. Not that Wirrin would have been any better at it.

What the adventurers were actually looking for with all their map-making tools and navigation equipment as their servants trekked them broadly north along the Dividing Range was unclear. They seemed to be enjoying themselves, at least.

The three adventurers, old to Wirrin’s eyes but barely into their mid-twenties, had dubbed a particularly tall and picturesque mountain Tolakessen in a fit of creativity. And they were quite determined to climb all the way to the top to plant a little flag and leave a little plaque so that everyone would know of their discovery.

Wirrin had told them not to climb that high. The servants and porters had absolutely refused to attempt scaling the peak. The adventurers had offered to triple everyone’s pay if they climbed and only Wirrin had been foolish enough to accept.

Almost since her mother had moved her to Tellen, Wirrin had been exploring Ogesivanen. She knew about mountains, even if these were warmer and muddier than what she was used to. But she was young and energetic and the prospect of getting three flowers for the trip was too enticing.

She imagined all the pretty girls from here to Boltask fawning over her amazing wealth and good taste. Wirrin wasn’t certain what had caused the landslide. She knew it had started near the peak and it had washed down over the adventurers ahead of her before they could make a noise.

The roiling, black earth had dragged her down, dragged her through. It had battered and crushed and choked. It had screamed and shouted into her bones and, in the end, it had left her sprawled and choking and bloody several kilometres from the base of the mountain.

The broken, unmoving bodies of the adventurers had been deposited nearby.

Wirrin’s journey from the mountains to the Tertic river was a haze of pain, mud and bleeding wounds. She walked some and crawled more. She was never sure how long it had taken her, but it must have been days.

First a hook and then a number of hands had pulled her out of the Tertic river and a booming voice had sliced through the haze. ‘Oh, Wirrin, adventure will be the death of you I’m sure.’

Back then, Dartol had had more of his leg. It seemed to shrink every time Wirrin met him for nearly a decade of oozing, stinking pain. He had given her something hard to chew that stuck in her teeth and buried the haze of pain in a fog of loose wonder.

She’d only really woken again in Estauk, covered in splints and stitches with Dartol sitting near her bed in the hospital. He’d been smiling, his own teeth stained with the same opium resin he must have given her.

‘Looks like it won’t be the death of you yet,’ Dartol had said.

Was her mind trying to tell her something? Was she making more foolish decisions? Was all this like climbing the Dividing Range in early summer?

She hadn’t known, then, how dangerous a job it was. Neither had anyone around her. Wirrin had always thought that you only learn by doing. Reading books and listening to preachers might work for some people, but if she couldn’t feel it in her hands then what was the use?

She couldn’t bring the image to mind like the old memory, but she’d climbed the Dividing Range several more times in early summer since then. Nothing anywhere as bad had happened.

Wirrin had been twenty-two years old, she had been exploring the Yasagolk Mountains and decided to have a look through the wetlands. It ought to be quicker getting to Louyava this way, not that Wirrin had been worried about being quick.

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She had seen the big mass of cobwebs, and even figured that she should keep her distance. But she’d been interested. She wasn’t very used to spiders, yet, being from the cold south where they weren’t very active. And the odd, cone formation of the webs had been intriguing.

The big, black spider that had burst out of the webs when she leaned too close had been a good fright. Wirrin had jumped back and the spider had jumped after her. So she’d run. She knew enough about spiders and the wetland to know that she didn’t want to get bitten.

Very unlike any spiders Wirrin had encountered up to that point, the big black spider chased her. It even crossed two, shallow streams in its pursuit. When eventually Wirrin thought she had lost it, she paused for a breath against a tree.

The experience was very like being stabbed in the back of the leg by a two-pronged fork. It hurt a great deal more than any other spider bite that Wirrin had gotten up to that point in her life. It hurt enough that she grabbed the spider in her hand and smashed it against the tree.

As she wiped grey-brown ooze off her hands, she’d started sweating. And then she’d started shivering. And then her tongue had gone numb. Her eyes started to water. Her heart had thundered in her ears.

Much too late, Wirrin wrapped her belt around her leg.

Within a few minutes, the muscles in her neck and shoulders were twitching and she was struggling with the insurmountable urge to vomit. As she tried to hurry through the wetland, she had to stop several times to throw up.

Walking had gotten harder and harder as her leg muscles started to twitch uncontrollably, until Wirrin was stumbling from tree to tree to avoid collapsing completely.

She had felt blood oozing down the back of her leg.

It had been hard to breathe.

The sunlight had been blinding.

Through a familiar haze of pain, stumbling and crawling in parts, Wirrin had made it to a pier on the banks of the Louyava river. They had wrapped her up and sent to her Louyava, where she’d been stuck in a bed for nearly three weeks.

What was this memory supposed to teach her? Don’t go to the wetland? She’d been back to Yasagolk plenty of times since then, and killed several funnel-web spiders and never been bitten again.

Where were the fun memories? The dried frog she’d eaten with a big farming family around a campfire just outside the wetland that had sent her into a colourful daze well into the next night?

If she was supposed to see her whole life, where was the fun?

Wirrin had been twenty-four, climbing through Oplalicanen, the Oplalica Mountains. She had been mountaineering on behalf of more adventurers, this time out of Ettovica. These adventurers hadn’t been too bad, they’d carried all their own supplies for one thing.

It had been the middle of spring and the mountains had been blanketed in snow easily as thick as Ogesivanen in winter. They had been headed steadily south for over a month, starting from the origin of the Sovet River. Wirrin had been enjoying herself.

For adventurers, these two, both men about her own age, had made for pleasant enough company. They had been more interested in her than she’d liked, but they’d gotten the message after a week or so of travel.

Like most adventurers, they were educated types who were a bit too confident in their own abilities for Wirrin’s comfort. But she’d learned the lesson more than once that if they didn’t listen to her, she could at least listen to herself.

The avalanche didn’t kill anyone, though one of the explorers, a man by the name of Oulet, had broken a leg and an arm. The other, by the name of Tebav, had badly cut his face and neck being rolled over the stones by the snow.

Wirrin was unharmed, she’d stayed out of the way. She knew what she was doing. And she’d told Oulet and Tebav to stay clear, to come back down the slope, to at the very least be careful.

She had slid down the side of the mountain on the wake of the avalanche, already digging in her pack for some bandages and looking around for something to use as splints, when Tebav had rounded on her with a knife.

Wirrin had dropped her bag and frowned at him, not even bothering to raise her hands. ‘What are you doing?’ she’d asked.

‘You knew that would happen,’ Tebav fairly shouted.

‘Yes, that’s why I told you not to go up there,’ Wirrin had said, sensibly in her opinion.

Tebav had lunged at her with the knife. ‘You were trying to kill us.’

Wirrin had frowned harder. ‘By warning you not to do that?’

Tebav had stepped closer and lunged again. Wirrin had dodged to the side, but she hadn’t bothered learning how to fight up to this point in her life. The knife grazed the side of her winter leathers and didn’t even slice through.

‘What are you doing?’ Wirrin had demanded. ‘I didn’t…’

‘You want to steal our money,’ Tebav shouted, lunging at her again.

He’d lunged at her face, and she was taller than him. Wirrin had leaned back out of the way, completely avoiding the knife, and hit him in the throat. A move she’d accidentally learned as a small child was a great way to incapacitate someone.

Tebav had choked and spluttered.

‘Calm down,’ Wirrin had said. ‘I didn’t do anything. I don’t care about your money.’

Holding his neck and coughing, Tebav had lunged again. Wirrin had stepped in close and swung her whole arm around to punch him in the side of the head. She hadn’t expected it to kill him, but it certainly had.

He’d dropped like a rock and completely failed to ever get up again.

Oulet had been unconscious at the time. Wirrin had hit Tebav in the same side of the head that the stones had cut through his skin. It wasn’t hard to convince Oulet that he’d been killed by the avalanche.

Despite being barely able to walk, Oulet insisted that they carry Tebav’s body back to Sovet to be buried. Wirrin had obliged. Oulet had paid her twice what they agreed on.

Wirrin had left the money in the snow, trekking across Ogesivanen to near Tellan, where she’d barely left the mountains for a year. Eventually, she’d decided for sure that it wasn’t really her fault, and gone to Ettovica to learn how to fight.

And where had that gotten her? Drowning in her own blood in the middle of the desert. She wondered, as much as she could make her mind work at all, if none of this would have happened if she’d not spent so much time with the Sovtlan learning to fight.

Was all this because some rich kid couldn’t handle the knowledge that he had been incredibly stupid?

Did it matter?