Before returning to his sleeping mat for the night, Seyun walked out from the western nook to the northern dark rock low roof wall of the abandoned seal court and rested his scarred palms on the frost-cold coping stone. Above the jagged dark shape of the upper ridge, the pale ring of Heaven’s Measure turned slowly against the winter stars, its lower returning hub hovering unseen twenty feet above the broken roof of the eastern shrine. Higher up on the terraced slope to the west, the four banked watchfires of the rebuilt village dugouts glowed steady and warm against the mountain dark.
Behind him across the wind-scoured flat stone slabs of the courtyard, the people who would decide the fate of those valleys over the next twelve nights were finishing their evening tasks without fanfare or dramatic speeches.
On the stone steps outside the eastern nook, Ilyra sat by a hooded oil lantern tying off a fresh soaked-rawhide grip wrap above the three hemp cords holding her cracked five-foot marsh-iron spear shaft together. Despite the dark circles of post-breakthrough fatigue beneath her eyes, her Newly reached Early Jade breath moved with a quiet, spacious steadiness that no longer crowded the stone around her boots.
