By midday, the Plains of Ash had buckled into a maze of frozen dunes, their crests whipped into grey razor-edges by the northern gale.
The wagon sat wedged into a dark rock hollow, hidden beneath the shadow of a stone-hard fiery ridge. Grey soot drifted down from the sky in thick, sluggish flakes. It hissed as it settled against the hot iron rim of the fire bowl.
Around the coals, the Council of Selves gathered like ghosts at an unpaid wake.
Ren Vale Prime sat on an overturned grain barrel, his elbows resting on his patched wool knees. In his right hand, he held the ivory bone awl, its silver tip tracing dry circles in the dust between his boots. The hunger in his gut was quiet for now, banked beneath the sheepskin cinders Vane had burned at dawn. But his tongue still carried the dry, bitter-salt taste of dead ink. Every breath felt heavy, his borrowed thirty-year-old lungs laboring against the sulfur-choked wind.
Across the fire bowl, Vane Vale had spread a sheepskin survey map over a flat slab of shale. The merchant stood with his velvet coat pulled close, gold piping catching the dull embers, his brass pocket counting frame balanced on his knee.
