The watching ridge was a broad, wind-polished knife-edge of white granite that rose between the high spine of the Spine and the northern drops. Kezra Venn topped the final rock step of the upkeep cut. Then, the mountain opened before her with a sudden, breathtaking clarity that made her chest tighten inside her coat.
The late afternoon sun was sinking toward the western peaks. It cast long, razor-edged violet shadows across an expanse of stone so vast, so geometrically deliberate, that for several heartbeats no one spoke.
Directly across a six-hundred-pace snow saddle lay Empty Choir.
It wasn’t a natural peak, nor was it a simple alpine plateau. It was a huge, stepped terrace carved out of the living bedrock of the mountain by human hands ages ago—a massive square platform measuring a full thousand paces on each side. Its surface was arranged in wide, level stone benches that dropped toward the north in three huge, level steps of cut granite: a lower terrace at base datum, a middle bench rising four paces higher across the central third, and an upper eastern shelf rising another four paces above the rest.
Even from half a mile away, the shape was clear. The northern boundary didn’t follow the meandering contours of the ridge. It marched due east and west along an unbending, north-lined up line, its three bedrock steps cut with the exact same elevations, the exact same four-pace risers, that Kezra had spent weeks measuring beneath the castle walls of Stonewake…
