The inner archway of the worm chamber opened onto a broad stone terrace halfway up the wall of the Wild Cradle, where warm geothermal steam met the cold mountain fog in shifting white curtains.
Right at the fork of the terrace stood a weathered three-sided pillar of grey gneiss, waist-high and crusted with orange lichen. The twig-legged wooden beetle hobbled to the base of the pillar, tapped its green front stick once against the stone plinth, and folded its legs underneath its split cedar belly to rest.
Osha knelt by the pillar, pulled her father’s small leather notebook from her satchel, and used the back of her horn spoon to scrape the dry lichen out of the carved grooves on each of the three faces.
“Here,” she said, holding the open notebook page beside the stone so Ysabet and Chaska could see. “Amren drew these three marks from the oldest sanctuary surveys before the Ashen Spear closed the archive.”
On the northern face of the pillar, a deep spiral was cut into dark, iron-streaked slate. On the western face, three branching lines spread outward without closing. On the southern face, a single straight furrow led down into a carved cup.
