Beneath seventy tons of high-pressure leverage, the rusted through iron locking bar of the western armory groaned.
Three inches of stone-hard frozen ground cracked along the bronze threshold. It fell away in jagged sheets like broken slate.
Lu Chen stood before the underground blast doors of the abandoned royal castle.
His wolf-skin cloak was dusted with gray snow, his bare forearms corded with thick veins of hardened black glass melted rock waste.
Inside the deep stone galleries of Weeping Pass, the air ran ten degrees colder than the frozen ridges above.
Yet the skin across Lu Chen’s collarbones radiated a steady, dry heat of seventy degrees.
Every breath out sent pale plumes of expanding steam curling into the dark vault.
Behind him, Blacksmith An Ni stood beside their two mountain draft mules, her heavy leather apron cinched tight over double-layered wool.
