On Day One Hundred and Thirty-Six, the alpine winter relented for a single gray, brooding day, replaced by a cold, soaking drizzle mixed with pellets of soft sleet that blew across the lower switchbacks from the south.
Kezra Venn, Yseld Arken, and Paxa Sel dropped through the wet larch forests below the timberline. Their heavy wool cloaks were dark and sodden with moisture. The trail here was not engineered rock. It was an ordinary mountain track of packed dirt, exposed roots, and jagged slabs of dark grey rock shale that had been cut by hundreds of years of Alderfast woodcutters and charcoal burners. Under the steady autumn drizzle, the dirt had dissolved into a slick, greasy slurry of yellow mud. Meanwhile, the wet dark grey rock slabs took their boot leather with all the traction of greased iron.
Kezra walked with deliberate, agonizingly slow steps, her eyes glued to the path six feet ahead of her toes. Her left hand held her field route book wrapped inside an oiled parchment sheath to shield the leaves from the rain. Her right hand gripped Davren’s ash walking staff. She used its hardened iron spike to probe every mud puddle and test every exposed root before committing her full weight.
