The gray light of dawn broke over the southern horizon not as a triumphant blaze of gold. But as a pale, bruised smudge of silver through low clouds.
The Blackwater River, swollen with mountain runoff, finally spilled out from the choking jaws of the Southern Gorge. Here. There, the towering two-thousand-foot dark rock castle walls melted into rolling, barren plateaus of red sandstone and wind-twisted juniper scrub, the survivors of Low-Khorat staggered to a halt.
Behind them, sixty miles to the north, Mount Khorat was a jagged black tooth against the sky, shrouded in a permanent plume of purple ash that drifted south like fine snow.
Ahead of them lay the vast, arid expanse of the Ashen Barrens—hundreds of miles of lonely salt-scrub, dried riverbeds, and ancient ruins that led south toward the mythical coast and the Sunken Library of Alexandria-Khorat.
In a wide, natural tiered arena formed by curving sandstone bluffs two hundred paces from the riverbank, the refugee column collapsed.
There were no tents. There were no pavilions. Men, women, and children dropped where they stood in the red dust. They curled into the shelter of stunted juniper bushes or pressing their backs against the sun-warmed sandstone. For thirty hours, they had marched on sheer animal terror. Now that the iron jaws of the mountain had slammed shut behind them, the fight-or-flight rush drained away. That left a congregation of three thousand hollow-eyed ghosts caked in dried mud and chemical soot.
