Dawn didn’t break over the eastern gorge as warmth or color. It seeped through the thinning snowfall as a flat, leaden clear sight that turned the sheer slate cliffs on either side of the goat track into wet iron walls. With Daro Kesh still leagues behind them on the summit return and four people left to carry three patients across a narrowing shelf, the party had been forced into short, ten-pace relays along the flattest sections of the ledge.
The slope leveled out enough that the pine poles didn’t tilt vertically. Each time, Seyun handed his ash measuring pole to Mina. Then he took the rear left corner of Maren and Tov’s litter opposite Osen Tal. Meanwhile, Pera and Mother Renn steadied Vey’s lighter frame behind Ilyra. Even fifty paces of level load across flat shale exacted an immediate toll inside Seyun’s chest.
Beneath his breastbone, the raw third mark sworn to Nara Soth throbbed like a freshly split tooth against cold water. A heavy, non-aimed reminder that his own unfinished return paths were now linked by vow to a woman standing inside the mountain’s crushing pressure field above. True to Mina’s rule, the moment his outward pulse skipped a beat at the end of a fifty-pace relay, Seyun set the pole down without waiting to be scolded and resumed his scouting point with the ash stave.
