Night settled into the valley on the eastern side of Blackglass with a dense, quiet cold that smelled of dry sage and cooling dark rock.
In the circle of their small camp beside the dwarf willows, the fire burned down to a mound of glowing tamarisk coals. Fellis had already banked his bedroll on the leeward side of the pack frames, his breathing slow and regular as he slept the deep, healing sleep of an exhausted boy. Paxa sat by the coals, checking the seals on her medicine flasks by the red light, her sharp profile lit up against the dark willow branches.
Kezra Venn knelt by the fire, her wool coat unbuttoned, her working route journal laid flat across a smooth dark rock flat stone slab that served as a table.
Beside the journal lay two scaled parchment leaves that she had drawn days and leagues apart.
On the left was the sketch she had made on Day 17 on the western slope of Blackglass (Chapter 118). The drawing of three displaced limestone stair treads emerging from a barren scree slope of black fiery tuff, with a small cairn whose windward stones were fully bare. Meanwhile, their leeward faces were covered in thick, hundreds of years-old crustose lichen.
