At sunset on Day 117, the common hall of Alderfast fell into a breathless, expectant hush.
Outside, the cold mountain twilight was turning from pale violet to deep indigo, and fine flakes of dry snow were beginning to swirl across the stone sills of the high windows. Inside, the large birch-log fire crackled on the hearth, casting long, dancing shadows across the long frame stand table where Kezra Venn sat with her open bonded survey notebook.
Surrounding the table were the people whose lives had been bound together across seven locked days. Adra Pike, Davren, watchwoman Cressa with her arm in a clean sling, Fellis Dain with his braced hand, Yseld Arken, Paxa Sel, and miner Voss.
Beside the notebook lay a tuned twenty-minute sand-glass. The last grains of fine white quartz sifted through the narrow glass neck. Then, Kezra placed her right palm flat against the center of the advancement ledger.
Across every scale in her book—from the forty-pace Step formulas up to the two-hundred-and-fifty-six-pace Quarter diagrams—the dense slate-grey cooldown bar that had frozen her ledger since the morning of Day 110 began to dissolve. The grey ink faded into see-through vapor, replaced by crisp, sharp, unbending black lines:
