Chapter 1204: The Ridge of the Continent
The mountain range shed its heat the moment the sun dropped behind the peaks.
Time to find shelter, Lightning thought. The temperature swings here were punishing — scorching during the day, the kind of dry blaze that burned exposed skin in minutes; then after dark, a wind that scoured every trace of warmth from the air. Sleeping in trees was fine in the Misty Forest. Here, it would kill her.
She had to be inside something before darkness closed in.
“Calling it for the day,” she said into the Sigil of Listening. “I’ll find us a shelter. You go find food.”
Maggie couldn’t answer in flight, but Lightning knew she’d heard.
She dropped altitude, skimming low above the rock-strewn ground. Before leaving Neverwinter, Agatha had drilled the same warning into her three separate times: when searching for demons, fly either very high or very low, and avoid changing your route without reason. God’s Stone mines could not be seen from above, but they didn’t have to be seen to be deadly. Entering one meant no one could come for you. There was no rescue from that distance.
Lightning followed the instruction without deviation. In these mountains, she was accountable for both herself and Maggie.
She had already noted possible shelters during her daytime passes, and now she located one quickly — a cave cut into the rock halfway up the slope. Below her, a forest of stone stretched to the horizon, each boulder the size of a Neverwinter district block. Looking out across it, she felt a peculiar sensation: that some enormous, patient hand had shaped all of this, had pressed and sculpted these peaks and ridges and left them here to cool over centuries.
Streams threaded between the mountains. In rain or flood they became torrents that funneled through the valleys with no warning. Weather in the ridge was never uniform — clear sky on one face, storm on the other, a man reading sunshine while his camp drowned a kilometer away. Anyone who pitched a tent on a low slope at night risked waking — or not waking — in a wall of white water. Lightning had watched three floods roll through since she entered the range. Height was the only answer.
Unlike other mountain chains she had explored, where cliffs were sharp and vertical, the formations here were composed of rounded boulders perforated with holes and crannies, as though the rock had once been liquid and frozen mid-flow. Round as they were, they held firm — enough to shelter a person, enough to weather a night.
This cave was generous. Roughly a hundred square meters, carpeted in old twigs and dried weeds, the scattered remains of bird nests that had not been occupied for some time. Lightning checked every corner for danger before she signaled Maggie, then started clearing the floor.
By the time the darkness became total, a snowy owl swept in through the entrance and landed on a clean patch of stone. Maggie shook herself back into her human shape and held up a bundle like she was presenting a gift at a festival.
“Look what I’ve got, coo!”
Lightning unwrapped it: a chicken, and four large bird eggs. Deep in the Impassable Mountain Range, that was a find. Even Maggie, who had been hunting these landscapes for weeks, didn’t always come back with this much.
“Good job.”
Lightning ruffled Maggie’s hair, earning a triumphant grin.
The fire went up fast. Lightning built a small stove from packed earth scraped off the mountain’s foot, shaping it to block the firelight from the cave mouth. She coated the chicken in mud, packed it tight, and rolled it into the coals with the eggs.
Thirty minutes.
They cracked the hardened mud and the smell rushed out — rich fat, caramelized skin, the faint sweetness of the spices still trapped beneath the clay. The skin came off in pieces to reveal white, juice-running meat underneath. Not overdone. Perfect. They ate every scrap of the chicken, cracked the bones for marrow, finished the eggs, and sat back.
Maggie belched deeply and announced, “Nothing beats food you caught yourself, coo.”
Lightning glanced at her. She still remembered the first time Maggie had watched her roast a bird, and the noise of protest that had followed.
She shook her head, almost smiling. “Any luck today? Other than the food.”
“Well, no, coo… It all looks the same out there. If there were demons, I’d spot them immediately, coo.”
God’s Stone mines were another problem. Buried underground, invisible from above — Lightning had no sense of where they lay, and without the supporting God’s Punishment Witches to triangulate a rough direction, the search had the frustrating quality of feeling thorough while possibly missing everything.
“Since you found nothing,” Lightning said, “make me a bed.”
“OK, coo.” Maggie padded to the spot Lightning indicated, white hair drifting behind her, and shifted into her Devilbeast form.
Lightning put out the fire and lay down against Maggie’s stomach. It was warmer than any sleeping bag — a furnace’s warmth, steady, radiating through the cold dark of the cave. The wind found the entrance and curled into the space and achieved nothing.
The only drawback: Devilbeast hide had a roughness to it that Lorgar’s fur, soft as river sedge, had never had.
“You’re not sleeping?” Maggie asked.
“I need to record today’s entry.” Lightning held up the Stone of Lighting. “It won’t take long. Sleep first.”
“Alright.” A pause, heavy with something unspoken. Then, quietly: “You’ll keep bringing me along — for the future expeditions, right?”
Lightning looked at her. The question carried more weight than it sounded.
“Of course,” she said.
I’ll take care of you, she thought. Ashes is already gone.
Maggie’s breathing slowed. Lightning sat still for a long time in the dark, listening to the wind move outside, before she finally pulled her journal from her pack.
Ten days since they had entered the northern mountains of the Kingdom of Everwinter. One hundred and twenty kilometers covered. The deeper she went, the smaller she became — not in the way children feel small, but in the way you feel small when a thing simply outscales anything you have words for. No human foot had touched most of this terrain. She had seen things here she could not have imagined from a map: the stone forest, vast and pale as the Fertile Plains; an icefall that dropped from the heights in a single sheer curtain all the way to the northeast sea; a sea of cloud that spiraled slowly upward from the valleys; and the great rapture at the ridge’s center — a wound in the earth so large she had initially taken it for a plain. The Impassable Mountain Range that divided the four kingdoms, the range that had marked the edge of the known world for every generation she knew of, was nothing but a foothill ridge of this one. All those wonders had been hiding behind the crests, unreachable without wings.
She understood now why her father had given his life to exploration. The world was immense and indifferent and endlessly itself, and knowing it — even a small fraction of it — was the only response that felt equal to the fact of it.
She could explore all of it eventually. Not yet. She was on a mission, and straying too far from the Kingdom of Everwinter would strand her from the supporting team and cause problems she had no interest in causing. The Roland should have reached the Everwinter port by now.
She turned to the hand-drawn map on the last page and rested her eyes on the rapture.
From above, it had appeared to be a protruding plain rising out of the stone forest. But it was hollow — she had felt the emptiness below when she had circled it. How deep it went was impossible to say.
She could see the fault lines beneath the crust. The cracks that said the earth here had been pulled apart, not merely folded.
If the next pass turned up nothing — no God’s Stone mines, no trace of demon activity — she would return to the Kingdom of Everwinter and meet the supporting team. Reconvene. Decide the next step.
She closed the journal, set down the Stone, and lay back against Maggie’s warmth.
Above the cave entrance, the stars were very sharp.