Seyun stood ten paces before the carved pine pillars of Ash Reed Sect’s outer gatehouse. He was struck first by a purely physical illusion. The timber arch looked half as tall as it had on the winter afternoon of his expulsion. Two months ago, when he had walked down these wet slate stairs carrying his torn sleeping mat and the three copper needles Elder Hesh had pressed into his palm, the curved roof edges and green-tiled roof of the gate had seemed to fill the entire southern sky.
From his eleventh year to his twenty-second, those pine pillars had marked the boundary between a life that mattered and a life thrown away. Now, looking at the gatehouse with eyes that had measured the eighty-foot deep gap of the eastern gorge, the spear-width sky-slit of the Hollow Summit. The dark, steady plane of Daro Kesh’s sword, he saw the stonework in its true scale.
The green roof tiles were chipped along the western drip-edge where winter frost had pried the mortar loose. The vermilion lacquer on the pillars was peeling in thin curls near the base. And the courtyard behind the arch was a modest forty-pace terrace of river flat stone slabs.
