Midnight came and went. He wrapped the community of Alderfast in the deep, freezing silence of the high mountains. In the small, stone-walled sleeping nook behind the council chamber, a single animal fat candle burned steadily in an iron wall sconce, its pale flame lighting up the rough straw pallet where Kezra Venn sat with her knees drawn up to her chest.
Around her shoulders she wore her heavy fleece-lined coat, buttoned to the chin against the creeping frost that coated the stone mortar joints like white moss. Across her lap lay the heavy, brass-bound folio of her bonded land-mapper’s notebook, its calfskin cover scarred by rock scrapes, stained with dried peat, and burnished smooth where her palms had gripped it through forty-three grueling circuits.
Kezra turned the thick linen pages back to the preliminary survey she had recorded inside Stonewake Citadel between Day One Hundred and Two and Day One Hundred and Four. Across those twelve pages were drawn the preliminary boundary map points of the castle. The four-thousand-pace outer edge, the locations of the ancient royal benchmark monuments, and the five-hundred-and-twelve-pace upright strata profile sounded in the deep drainage galleries beneath the keep.
At the bottom of that strata page, stamped in purple royal ink, sat the formal sign-off mark that had satisfied one of the three massive progression requirements to unlock Horizon rank. It was an honest, checked record of mountain bedrock. And yet, as an operable survey for the impending exchange, it was fully and legally…
