At dawn on Day 129, Kezra, Yseld, and Paxa left the Mile 6 shelter to begin the final six-mile climb back to Empty Choir. The weather remained crystal-clear and bitterly cold, the morning sun striking the jagged peaks in blinding sheets of copper and rose. A light skiff of powdery frost had fallen during the night, dusting the dark shale slopes with a fragile white skin that crunched cleanly under their boots.
They climbed past Mile 4.5, checking the dangerous hairpin turn once more in the early light. The bellied retaining wall stood as they had left it, the outward bow of six inches throwing a sharp blue shadow across the rubble below. Kezra checked that the red boundary stakes she had set along the inner wall remained firm, marking the safe wheel-track for the carts that would follow.
Above Mile 3. There, the road left the stunted spruce behind. Then he climbed into the bare alpine scree below the high ridge, Yseld suddenly froze. She raised her hooked staff horizontally, signaling an instant halt.
“Hold,” Yseld whispered, her voice barely carrying above the mountain breeze. “Look at the snow.”
Kezra and Paxa stepped up beside her, their eyes following the point of her staff. Thirty paces ahead. There, the graded road wound past a natural shoulder of dark banded rock, a line of fresh footprints broke the white frost crust. But these were not the broad, flat prints of their own mountain boots. They were the narrow, hobnailed impressions…
