The Keystone fragment was inserted into the Gate of Thessara at sunset.
Veiled-Three carried it up the internal stairway carved into the Gate's eastern pillar ...a narrow, spiraling passage that ascended two hundred feet through stone older than human memory. The stairs had been cut with impossible precision, each step exactly the same height and depth, the surface worn smooth not by centuries of use but by the passage of time itself, as if the stone was slowly being polished by the weight of existence pressing down upon it.
The stairway emerged onto a platform at the apex of the arch, a flat surface perhaps ten feet square, open to the sky on three sides and bounded on the fourth by the curve of the arch itself. From here, the valley of Thessara spread below like a bowl carved by giants, its floor perfectly flat, its walls rising in sheer cliffs to jagged peaks that caught the last light of the sun.
