By the second morning above the juniper line, the two extra days they had spent carrying Deyun out of the pollen meadow presented their bill in full.
Winter did not creep into the Stormglass Teeth; it dropped out of the north in the middle of the night and buried the summer mule track under fourteen inches of wind-packed snow. When the clouds tore apart at sunrise and the sun cleared the eastern horizon, the world above the pass turned into a blinding furnace of broken light.
The towering ridges that gave the range its name were not ordinary granite. Great tilted fins of milky quartz, volcanic glass, and translucent selenite rose hundreds of feet along the spine of the saddle, wind-scoured to razor edges. As the low morning sun struck straight through those transparent stone walls, the ridges acted like massive lenses, splitting the white glare into broad, shifting bands of crimson, violet, amber, and sharp green across the snowfields.
“Wrap your scarves below your eyes,” Ashaun called back from the head of the file, squinting through a narrow gap in her wool muffler as she broke trail with her right hand on her sword pommel and her stone left forearm shielding her brow. “Thirty minutes of staring into that glare without a visor and you’ll be snow-blind by noon.”
