The wind at two thousand two hundred paces height carried the bitter, metal tang of high height. It whistled through the joints of the abandoned royal highway.
Where the dark rock paving split into two divergent branches beneath a towering prow of grey baked flint-rock, a four-foot monolith of dressed mountain granite stood embedded in a socket of mortared bedrock. The stone was weathered by two hundred years of sleet, its southern face crusted with brittle orange caloplaca lichen and grey map lichen.
Yseld Arken grounded her hooked staff against the paving flags and whistled softly. “Look at that socket, Kezra. That stone wasn’t erected by local herders. That’s a royal corps junction datum.”
Kezra Venn unslung her external pack frame, resting it against the dark rock curb. She took her small bone-handled scraper from her drafting kit and gently cleared the crustose lichen from the edge cut into the northern face of the monolith.
Beneath the yellow flakes of lichen, deep, square-cut Roman block capitals emerged from the stone, chiseled with the uncompromising care of the old survey corps:
N. REL. — EST. GALLERY MOUTH — 14 MI. S. PASS — STONEWAKE DATUM I — 18 MI. ELEV. 2,240 P. — REF. Spirit vein IV
