She reached her hand up and took hold of the rock. As she shifted her other hand, her stomach lurched and suddenly she teetered there. Adrenaline raced through her with the sudden surge of fear.
She grabbed for a hold, but her hands found nothing, and a moment later she was falling. She hit the stone ground hard. The arrows in her quiver clattered, the sound ripped away almost immediately by the wind. It took her breath along with it.
But only half a second later she felt herself moving again. She twisted as she slid, realizing at once that the gravel beneath her had given way and now skittered down the slope, pulling her body and several large stones in its wake. She flung her hands out for something—anything—to grab. Only more rocks surrounded her, each one sliding by her side. They struck her pale, frozen hands and cut a hundred tiny scrapes into the fingers and knuckles. Beads of blood bloomed across the backs of her hands and along her wrists. A moment of warmth came with the blood as it leaked out onto her palms, only making them slicker. Panicked, she kicked at the ground and dug her heel in deep, trying everything to slow her descent as she slid across the razor-sharp and impossibly cold stones.
Another drop loomed just in front of her. The foremost stones of the avalanche already tumbled over its edge.
The rumbling, cracking calls of stones sliding and bouncing on stones filled her ears. A large boulder sat just beside her path, steadfast in its hold on the mountain. She prepared to grab it; she had only one chance.
As she skidded by, she flung both arms out towards it, grabbing for the ridges on its surface. Blood smeared the rock as she pressed her fingers to it. It made the rock slick in her grasp, and her fingers scraped past. And then the boulder was out of reach again.
Oleja’s stomach seized. The drop neared with every second, and now nothing stood between her and its edge.
But then she snapped to a stop, her cloak pulling tight around her neck, threatening to choke the air from her. Rocks still slid past around her. Some of the smaller ones bounced and struck her head and arms. She looked up; Tor clenched the end of her cloak tightly in his mouth, his body pressed to the upper side of the boulder as he clung to it for not only his life, but Oleja’s as well.
When the avalanche ceased, Oleja managed to haul herself back onto sturdy ground. She climbed up the slope back to where Tor sat, panting, his rapid breaths coming out in clouds that quickly vanished in the wind with her own. She knelt and wrapped an arm around him.
“We go around the cliff. This time, we go around. But by the sky, we will see the top.”
She picked the remainder of her route carefully, avoiding any steep cliffs or the most unsteady looking patches of ground. Snow clung heavy to her eyelashes. The blood on her hands dried quickly, leaving them stained dark but no longer bleeding. When at last she pulled herself up onto the peak of the mountain, the relief filled her with power and confidence anew.
But that confidence could not warm her, so she gave herself only a moment of pause and congratulation.
Wind blew with uncontested power around her, impeded by nothing in all directions, ripping through its own domain in the sky and going wherever it pleased at greater speeds than Oleja knew it could. It pulled her hood from her head and made her hair and cloak flap wildly in the gust. She pulled the cloak back around herself and turned her back on the wind.
Taking the jar from her bag, she filled it with snow from a pile between multiple loose slabs of stone. With the stuff packed tightly within in as great a quantity as she could manage, she placed it back in her bag and then went for just a moment to stand at the other side of the summit, the tallest point of the mountain.
Looking out across the world—or what limited amount of it she could see through the storm—the landscape filled her with the greatest sense of awe she had ever felt. Peaks rose up all around her, but she stood above them all. Below, valleys ran deep, filled with lakes and joined by rivers. Not a single tree or speck of green lay anywhere in sight—only stone and ice and water. For just a flash of a moment, the immensity of it gave her a feeling unlike any other she had ever had: a profound and deep humbleness, as if she herself was entirely inconsequential.
But then the feeling vanished. She was Oleja Raseari, and only three more trials stood between her and becoming the hero of all of Ahwan—and soon after, the hero of her people.
Her eyes drifted east for a moment—due east, to where the mountains shrunk to hills, but beyond that the storm obscured the land farther below. A sense of dread came over her suddenly. She looked around at the mountain’s peak.
Frigid air still gnawed at her skin, and she knew she needed to descend back down the slopes as soon as possible, but she had one last thing to do before she left. She bent down and took up a large slab of stone, moving it to the tallest point of the mountain.
She repeated the process again and again, taking large slabs at first but then switching to smaller rocks as she worked her way up, building them into a cone-shaped tower there on the mountain’s pinnacle. Her breaths came heavy as she struggled against the wind to suck in the thin wisps of air she needed. Finally, she placed one final stone atop the peak of her pile and stepped back.
It wasn’t much, but it was a more proper memorial. At least it didn’t lie at the bottom of a crevice in the middle of nowhere. She just hoped that if he could have seen it, Pahlo would have been honored. He would forever stand as the tallest point in all the land.
But if he had been there to see it, he would also have shouted at Oleja to quit taking her time and get herself off the mountain before she froze to death. No one was there to make a monument for her, after all—save Tor, but he lacked the strength and thumbs necessary to build such a thing.
With one final glance around at the world, she set out, back down the western slope of the mountain the way she had come. Though she no longer had the promise of a view of the world waiting for her after the next leg of her day’s walk, she had something that, at the moment, sounded infinitely better. And she wanted nothing more.
As soon as she got back down to the lower slopes, she was going to build herself a nice warm fire.
Chapter Twenty
For another several days, Oleja passed through mountain valleys and over long ridges that led her south. In her second day of walking since leaving the trial mountain, she came to a landscape unlike any other. Trees covered the land—tall pines similar to those around Ahwan that dotted the lower slopes of the mountains, except these were far, far bigger. At the base, their trunks were as thick as an entire building. An orange hue colored the bark, rough and rigid like rock, creating an appearance that they were made of the stone of her village. Towering high above, they hung heavy with deep green needles and long branches that formed a massive canopy overhead. The entire forest before her contained more beauty than any landscape she had ever seen.
Though she longed to dwell in the forest for longer—especially knowing what lay ahead—she continued on, and soon returned to mountains similar to those she walked through before, except the air about her now hung drier and the ground turned loose and sandy the farther she went. As she descended the final slope of the mountains, she looked out to the world ahead—flat, sandy brown, broken up only by low hills that could not compare to the immensity of the mountains. Met with that sight, she consulted the map and turned her course southeast.
Apparently, some spoke of the difficulty of the iron trial. In their opinions on the matter, climbing the mountain was the easiest, but braving the desert heat came with many more challenges. Oleja could see why they may feel such a way—they were mountain natives, and summiting one might demand a certain level of fitness, but ultimately that trial never removed the people of Ahwan from their element. For Oleja, that hadn’t been the case; she had no familiarity with the cold, or snow, or mountain climbing. The second trial nearly took her life, while others could complete it with little difficulty.
But for the next trial, she had the advantage. Desert terrains were what she
knew best, just the same way the mountains served the people of Ahwan. Though she had no love of the searing heat, she had lived her whole life beneath that hot desert sun, and taken much longer journeys beneath it than most. Crossing the desert promised a relatively easy trek for Oleja, better prepared for it as she was.
The end goal of mining offered a quick trial that she knew she could take care of without issue. She hated the idea of mining again, but she would do it by her own will, not by the demands of eclipsers who threatened starvation if she disobeyed.
And the walk through the heat did indeed prove easy. For five and a half days she walked the desert, finding nooks amidst the hills in which to camp beneath a makeshift tent during the hottest part of the day, then walking in the cooler evenings and into the night. The map showed a handful of major water sources, and she hopped from one to the next with ease, filling her waterskins and canteen before they ever ran dry, never going thirsty. Despite this, she often found herself rationing out of caution anyway.
Tor seemed much happier in the desert than he had since arriving in Ahwan. He ran about through the blue desert night, finding himself quick meals of small rodents or jackrabbits. When Oleja took breaks to eat or drink water or rest her leg for a moment, Tor rolled about in the sand, filling his fur with a million tiny stars that glinted in the moonlight. Oleja laughed and tossed old sun-baked sticks around, which he loved to run and retrieve and then return to her so she could repeat the process. A totally useless waste of energy, surely, but he seemed to have it in heaps. Plus, she found the trick amusing. More fun to watch than the endless expanse of sand and rocky hills, at least.
The air in the desert she crossed here, south of the mountains, did not hang as heavy about her as that of the desert she crossed before reaching Ahwan. The days passed in uncomfortably hot waves that drew all the moisture from her body in beads of sweat, of course, but she found it a good deal more bearable than when last she crossed similar terrain.
Or, perhaps it was just that now she didn’t suffer from extreme dehydration. Impossible to tell, really.
At sunset on her sixth day of walking, only a short while after setting out for the evening and night’s walk, she crested a hill and spotted her destination below her. Ridges of rock descended in formations like wide, tall stairs leading down into a curving and unusually shaped pit. Grey gravel and rubble and what looked to be tailings from the mine rose up in heaps all around like a tiny mountain range, or hundreds of grave memorials.
Together, she and Tor descended the hills to the quarry’s edge.
For the second time since leaving her village, she wished she still carried her pickaxe. The proper tool would make the job at hand far easier, but even if she had known before leaving that one day she would find further use for the thing, she still would never have brought it with her. Too much weight, and not enough reason to lug it around. She could piece something together now, just as she had last time.
“Hey, Tor, want to find me a stick?” The coyote flopped into the dust and looked up at her, tongue hanging loose from one side of his mouth, bobbing as he panted. She gestured as if throwing a stick. He rolled back to his feet. “A stick, any stick. Just as long as it’s sturdy, and about…” she estimated the appropriate size with her hands, “this long.” He couldn’t take the words she said and translate them into the image of what she needed—that she knew. To Tor, a stick was a stick.
He bounded off after another moment, and Oleja watched him go. Maybe he’d find what she needed, or maybe not. If it was the latter, she could always find one on her own. But it didn’t hurt to try.
From her bag, she took some tinkering materials—a long piece of metal, thick cord, a wide-headed nail. She began to work the piece of metal with her hammer, striking it as she held it atop a rock. She didn’t need something pretty, nor something that could withstand years of use—just something functional for one quick job. And then, with any luck, she would never have to lift another pickaxe again in her life.
A scraping sound approached not long after. Hollow and shrill, it sounded like dozens of claws all scraping against stone and gravel, as if a many-footed beast dragged all of its limbs without ever lifting them from the ground or stepping. She turned. Tor approached, dragging beside him a long and gnarled piece of wood. It looked to be an entire shrub—or had been at one point, at least.
He reached her and dropped the wood from his mouth. Certainly longer than she asked for, and with many more branches than necessary.
“That’s…” she started. But then she sized up the wood again. Several of the smaller branches, if snapped from the whole, could serve as a handle for a small pick at least. The box she had to fill with ore wasn’t big—a small pick should work fine.
Tor panted up at her as he swished his tail back and forth through the air.
“That’s not what I had in mind, but you know what? It will do.” She ripped a piece of meat from the food in her bag and tossed it to him. The bite vanished before hitting the ground.
With her pickaxe assembled, she descended into the quarry. Paths led this way and that, and she selected one that zigzagged down to the bottom and followed it, Tor trotting along behind her. At the base of the quarry, she looked around for a bit. A nice vein of ore cut along one wall, the surface illuminated by the fading daylight. Oleja approached the ore and began to mine.
She chipped away at the quarry wall as the sun set and darkness shrouded her. Not long after dark, she collected the mound amassed on the ground and filled the wooden box from her bag. Storing it once more, she turned to Tor.
“Three trials down. That one was almost too easy.”
As if punctuating her statement, a jumble of sounds found their way to her ears as they echoed through the night—a creaking sound joined by a shrill metallic rattling. Oleja stopped and let the noises reach her ears unimpeded. They came from the east, just outside the quarry.
Staying low, she hurried back up the path. Near the top, at the final ledge before the ground level, she paused and listened. Voices joined the creaking and rattling now.
“Put the wagons over there, and make camp there,” said a gruff voice. “Unload the cargo in the center here so we can keep patrols up there and around the sides.”
Slowly, Oleja climbed up the quarry side to poke her eyes up over the final ledge. Through the dim light of dusk, she saw three large shapes about four hundred feet from the quarry—wagons, she noted after a moment, though not drawn by horses, rather by two rows of people, and with no domed cover like the wagon the raiders traveled with. A few other shapes moved about—more people, and many of them, all hurrying this way and that. Oleja counted at least three dozen.
Below her, Tor let out a low growl. Oleja gestured urgently for him to be silent, but as she returned her eyes to the people, none moved in a way to suggest they heard the noise. Oleja peered closer, squinting through the dark. Though she could not make out the details, their forms were small—humans, certainly, too short to be eclipsers. So what made Tor so unnerved?
Something odd stuck out to her, a detail in the way some of the people moved. She studied them closer. Many stuck to lines, and the clanking of metal rattled in time with their steps. Then, in the darkness, she saw it: chains linking their wrists, each connected to the person before and behind them. Thick metal manacles clamped around their wrists. Oleja sank back below the ledge in horror—she looked upon a group of slaves, no different than she had once been.
Fury flared in her at once. The fire of that desperate need for revenge she had stoked for so long suddenly blazed to life, white hot and ready to eat whatever stood in its path. She couldn’t kill the eclipsers of Itsoh—not yet, at least—but she could kill the ones that drove this group onwards through the desert, taking them to some abysmal hole in the ground. She nocked an arrow in her bow and poked her head up over the ledge again. Up and down the rows she scanned for taller figures, likely armed. Somewhere, the eclipser masters lurked, and as soon as she found th
em, she would kill them all.
And then she spotted two figures following up at the back of one shackled line. They did not stand quite as tall as many of the eclipsers she had seen, but they certainly loomed taller than any human. She watched as they came around the side of the wagon.
But as they did, a detail caught her eye, and her tense grip on her bow slackened. Each of the two eclipsers—and they were eclipsers, that much she could now tell—had their hands bound before them with thick rope wound tightly around each wrist multiple times. The chains that bound the line before them did not stop at that last human, but continued, linking the two eclipsers into the rear of the procession. Oleja gaped. What on earth went on before her?
She scanned through the lines again—all humans, and just as varied in shape and size as the people of Ahwan. A few looked like her and her people, with the same brown complexion and dark hair, and others starkly different, but one thing shone as clear as the sun: all but the two eclipsers were humans.
But who chained up humans and eclipsers together? Did eclipsers treat lesser members of their own kind in the same repulsive manner that they treated humans? Did these two commit some great crime for which they now endured the treatment typically reserved only for their captives?
She looked again to the people who walked free of the lines. No chains linked them together, nor did manacles or rope bind their hands. In fact, most of them carried swords or crossbows. They shouted directions to one another and to the lines of chained captives.
And all were human.
Oleja dropped back down to the floor of the ledge and lowered herself to sit against a sturdier section of cut stone wall. Humans carting around other humans as slaves? And keeping eclipsers captive as well? What drove a human to such madness—to such vile treatment of their own kind?
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