Sitting propped against the grey limestone stone support prop fifty paces above the seam, Kezra Venn brought Fellis Dain’s brass spyglass to her right eye, resting her elbows firmly against her knees to dampen the leftover tremor in her forearms. Through the circular field of ground glass, the eastern embankment leaped into sharp, tactile focus. The pale, fractured limestone face, the hairline fissure weeping dry grey rock flour. Old Toric standing motionless with the chisel-point of his six-foot iron scaling bar wedged firmly into the rock layer seam.
“What do you see through the lens, Kezra?” Paxa Sel asked, kneeling on the felt groundsheet beside her and tucking a second heated flannel cloth around her ankles to keep the frost draught from creeping into her shins.
“Toric found an unbuttressed frost block,” Kezra said, her voice quiet, steady, and clear in the crisp mountain air. “When Empty Choir sat eighteen miles north on the high divide, that eastern corner of the plateau was banked with sixty feet of frozen scree and ice-slow talus. The weight of that loose gravel acted like an external retaining wall. It pressed the fractured face tight against the cliff like a balance weight. But the thousand-pace prism translated south into Alderfast’s socket. Then, the talus stayed behind in the snowfields. The rock face here is exposed to open valley air for the first time in a century. The frost wedge at the top has zero sideways push to keep it seated.”
