The air at the entrance of the northeast fissure didn’t smell of wind. It smelled of ozone, stale marsh mud, and singed wool.
Mira walked three paces ahead of the draught ox, her boots crunching through the crust of grey frost. Her right arm was held level before her, bare to the shoulder, the smoky quartz catching the sullen dawn in ripples of violet light. Her crystal fingers twitched left, then right. She felt the chronological tension in the air the way a blind man’s palm feels the warmth of a hearth.
“Slow,” Mira called back, her voice echoing in the narrow defile. “The seam narrows here. Keep the left wagon wheels on the black stone.”
Ren Prime walked beside the ox’s bridle, his fingers knotted in the lead rope. The beast was trembling, its breath puffing in ragged white plumes, its nostrils flaring in terror at the ground beneath its hooves.
And with good reason.
The Vale of Dual Echoes was not a single valley. It was two contradictory moments in history occupying the same map points in space, forced into violent coexistence by the pull of the Great Loom.
To the left of the trail, thirty feet away, the sky was pitch-black, swollen with monstrous storm clouds that dumped pouring, freezing sheets of blue-grey rain. The ground on that side was a churning quagmire of knee-deep mud, choked with rotting reeds and the swollen carcasses of drowned warhorses. Shivering phantom soldiers in rusted chainmail waded through the mire…
