The six-sided flat stone slab raised stone road didn’t crumble into a chaotic slope of rubble, nor did it taper away into an abandoned construction bed. It ended with the total, knife-straight finality of a butcher’s cleaver.
Kezra Venn stood two paces back from the edge of the cliff edge. She looked down between the toes of her mountain boots.
The six-pace-wide roadbed simply ceased at a perfectly flat, upright stone face that dropped two hundred feet straight down into the shadowy depths of Needle Gorge. The cut was so clean that a single six-sided dark rock flat stone slab at the brink had been sliced squarely in half. The southern twelve inches of the stone remained firmly mortared to the roadbed under Kezra’s feet. Meanwhile, the northern twelve inches were entirely gone. That left a polished, upright cross-section of dark fiery dark rock that showed no chisel marks, no wedge holes, and no explosive blast-scars.
Needle Gorge was not a gentle mountain valley. It was a deep pit carved by ancient ice-slow torrents, four hundred paces wide at the rim and plunging two hundred upright feet into an unending twilight of ice and shadow. Down in the bottom of the gorge, a roaring torrent of grey, silt-heavy snowmelt churned through a chaotic jumble of fallen boulders, its thunderous roar amplified by the upright rock walls until the sound shook through the soles of Kezra’s boots like the deep pedal note of a cathedral organ.
