The late afternoon light on the seventy-fourth day turned the upper walls of Needle Gorge into a towering canvas of cold amber and bruised violet. She stood on the cut raised stone road brink with her back to the two-hundred-foot upright deep gap. Kezra Venn knelt upon the cold six-sided dark rock flat stone slabs. She didn’t gaze across the empty air toward the stranded eight-sided tower perched on its distant pinnacle. She had learned long ago in the limestone quarries of Kilnstep that staring at what had vanished was the habit of frightened amateurs. The true history of an altered landscape was never written in the empty space where stone had once stood. It was recorded in the physical scars of the rock that remained behind.
“Fellis, bring the chain,” Kezra called softly, her voice flat and steady against the rising roar of the mountain wind. “Yseld, take the iron hook of your staff and clear the saxifrage along the mountain base. Every inch of it.”
Behind them, old Orren sat huddled upon the roadside retaining curb. His deerskin gloves clamped was tight between his knees. The mountain guide had spent thirty years shepherding salt wagons and drovers along the high pass. But he was staring at the young scholars with wide, troubled eyes. He watched their deliberate, unrushed movements with the superstitious unease of a herdsman who had wandered uninvited into a burial ground.
