Matthias Harlow
The Pass of Klamat, Dur-tan-Orit, Amell Mountains, Temeria
1253
The ring had been in my pouch for six nights now.
I was beginning to get used to being around Syanna whilst wanting to tear her throat out again, though for safeties sake I spent most nights a distance away from camp and returned only around dawn. Tonight had been a boring one, but I was looking forward to the sun coming up, it was peaceful out here. Syanna's heartbeat a familiar and manageable rhythm half a mile behind me at the camp.
The pass was not barren, it was a major trade route and the stone walls of it held the ghost-scents of everyone who had moved through in the past week, merchants, soldiers, travellers, the accumulated human traffic of a well-used road.
But those were old impressions, layered and fading, the olfactory equivalent of footprints in drying mud, right now, in this immediate stretch of cliff and shadow, it was just me and the occasional critter.
I had my fingers clawed into the rock face forty feet above the road, my body hanging off the cliff, in the secret recesses of my mind I couldn't help but wonder what I would look like to a passerby, a pale figure impossibly perched on a flat incline just staring up at the sky.
I had long since had my fill for the week, but hunting helped something in me settle, so now I was just passing time. The waiting was fine. I did not get tired. The cold did not bother me. My grip would not slip. What was bothering me was the air.
There was something in it tonight that I had not felt in weeks, not since the early days out of Caed Dhu when I had tried to reach for the power the foglets had left behind and gotten nothing but a splitting headache and the faint shimmer of disturbed air for my trouble.
I had not attempted it again since then, the cost had seemed too high for too little return, and the ring's suppression of my senses had pushed the awareness of it further back into whatever corner of my consciousness it lived in.
But the ring was in my pouch back at camp. And tonight strangely the thrum was back.
It was not sound exactly. It was not sensation in any way I had a word for. The closest I could come was the feeling of standing near something large that was vibrating at a frequency just below hearing, the kind of thing you felt in the chest rather than heard with the ears. A pulse in the air itself, steady and deep.
I had been half-ignoring it for the past hour, attributing it to the mountains, to the particular acoustic qualities of a narrow stone pass, to the general strangeness of a world that ran on Chaos rather than physics. But it had been getting stronger the longer I stayed out here, and stronger in a way that had a direction to it.
I turned my head slowly, the way I had learned to do when tracking by sound, letting the sensation find its own angle rather than reaching for it.
There.
Northeast. Up and into the rock, higher than the surface of the cliff, on top of stone that had been here since before men had names for things. Not coming from above or below or along the road but from atop the mountain itself, a source that had nothing to do with wind or animal or human activity.
I stayed on the cliff face and thought about that for a moment.
The foglets had left me a residue of something, a map of sensation more than a skill, the shape of how Chaos moved through low places and damp air and shadow. I had never managed to do anything useful with it beyond occasionally feeling the edges of things before other people did. It was less a power than a sensitivity, the difference between having good hearing and being able to play an instrument.
But what was in the air tonight was not a foglet's trick. This was older than that. Heavier. The foglets' Chaos had been thin and clever and cunning, a monster's magic, manipulation of surface and perception.
This was something that sat in the bones of the mountain and breathed at its own pace, unconcerned with anything that moved across its surface. It was strangely soothing, the magic I felt in the air. For the first time since I had killed that bear, the noise inside my skull had gone quiet.
Not suppressed, I could feel th echoes still, but genuinely calm, the way still water was calm, from the surface even if it was turbulent beneath. Louis was quiet. The foglets were quiet. Even the forktail's slow territorial pulse had gentled to something barely perceptible.
The smart thing to do would be to ignore this feeling and go back to camp. But something that radiated this quality of calm was difficult to classify as a threat, and I had learned in the past weeks to trust the distinction between the things that set my instincts on edge and the things that didn't.
I pressed my palm flat against the rock face and reached, carefully, the way I had learned not to reach after the headache, just touching the edge of the thrum rather than grasping at it.
The rock was cold under my hand. Ordinary stone, gritstone and limestone layered by whatever geological compression had built these mountains over centuries. Nothing changed. No shimmer, no flicker, no wisp of mist. But unlike before, there was also no spike of pain behind my eyes. Just the thrum, steady and patient, coming from somewhere above and northeast, indifferent to my attention but not hostile to it.
Let's go see what you are.
I launched off the wall. Forty yards across the gap, the far cliff face rushing toward me in the dark, and then my hands found stone and my fingers hooked into the rock without thought, the impact absorbed through my arms and shoulders as though it were nothing. I stayed there for a moment, pressed against the cold face of the mountain, the pass dropping away beneath me, and then I began to climb.
I went up the way the mountain with a supernatural quickness, hand over hand, feet finding purchase on ledges too small to support a boot properly, covering in seconds what would have taken a climber with ropes and daylight the better part of an hour.
The top of the ridge opened before me and I pulled myself over the edge and straightened up. What I saw stopped me.
From a distance it might have just seemed like another shard of rock on the ridge, one of a hundred jutting up from the spine of the mountain against the night sky, but here upclose it looked different. It felt placed, like everything around it had been shaped over centuries to leave this one thing untouched, the wind and the frost and the slow patient weight of time working around it rather than through it.
The air changed as I approached. It thickened, each step felt slightly heavier, the sensation of moving through something invisible. The wind dropped away behind me. The mountain went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the hour.
Then I saw the symbol properly.
It was not sitting on the surface of the stone. It was coming from within it. A green glow, pulsing faintly with a rhythm that was almost biological. The symbol drew my eyes whether I directed them there or not.
I could feel it before I was close enough to touch it, a low hum running through me, as though it were vibrating at a frequency that bypassed hearing entirely and went straight to the bones.
Axii, my mind supplied, A witcher sign. Influence. Calm. The oldest and most fundamental of the five, the one that reached into a mind and stilled it.
But this was not a witcher's mark.
This was something that predated witchers. Something the sign had been named after rather than named for, the original thing that they had found a way to approximate.
A place where the concept of calm had pressed itself so deeply into the world over so long a time that the stone had begun to express it.
Up close, the rock was wrong in the way that only became apparent when you were standing against it. Parts of it were too smooth, worn in a way that had nothing to do with weather, the surface almost polished in the places where hands had touched it repeatedly over what must have been centuries.
Thin cracks spread outward from the symbol's centre, glowing faintly at their edges, like veins carrying something through the mountain rather than fractures weakening it. The closer I got, the sharper the light felt, cutting into the dark rather than pushing it back.
I stood before it for a long moment.
My mind was quieter than it had been since the cave in Caed Dhu. The crowd of inherited influences that lived in the back of my skull had drawn back to a respectful distance, and what remained was something I recognized with a faint shock as simply myself.
I reached out slowly, and touched it.
The world did not crack open. Nothing dramatic happened. There was no vision, no voice, no surge of power moving through me like electricity. Just the thrum, closer now, running up through my fingers and into my arm and settling somewhere in the chest alongside the hollow place where a heartbeat should have been.
And then the calm deepened, and the night deepened with it, and somewhere between one moment and the next I stopped tracking time.
When I opened my eyes the sky had lightened.
Not dawn, twilight, the particular grey-blue that preceded it, the world caught between dark and day. I blinked, oriented myself, found the ridge, the symbol, the drop below. My skin had begun to catch the first suggestion of pre-dawn light, the faint shimmer of it building slowly at the edges.
I took a breath, more out of habit than necessity, and tasted the air. The only human scent on it was Syanna's, half a mile below and behind me, still in camp.
Good.
I looked at the symbol once more. The glow had quieted to something barely visible in the growing light, patient and contained, the way it had probably looked for the past several hundred years and would probably look for several hundred more.
I turned and ran.
The ridge dropped away beneath my feet, the edge of the mountain arriving in seconds, and then I was airborne, the pass opening below me in the grey pre-dawn light, the road a pale thread far beneath, the camp's embers a faint orange suggestion against the stone.
I hit the ground beside them and the impact cracked the rock under my boots.
Epine startled badly, hooves scraping, eyes rolling white. Syannas horse threw his head up and stepped back hard against his tether.
Syanna sat up from her bedroll in one sharp motion, hand going automatically to where she kept her dagger, and then she saw me.
Or rather, she saw the light coming off me. "Gods," she said, squinting, her free hand coming up to shield her eyes. "You're hurting my eyes. Where is your ring?"
I looked down at myself, the shimmer was considerable. My skin catching what little light existed and scattering it in pale fragments across the rock around me.
Right.
I ducked into my tent, found my coat, found the pouch, found the ring, and slid it on. The world immediately dulled to something quieter and more manageable. The shimmer died back to nothing.
I came back out.
Syanna had lowered her hand. Her expression had the particular quality it got when she had been startled and was recalibrating and did not particularly want me to know she had been startled. "Well?" she said.
"Come on," I said, beginning to break down my tent. "We're almost out of the pass. If you're quick about eating and getting ready I might even tell you a story to pass the time."
She looked at me for a moment and scoffed. "I am not a child."
But she still moved about gathering her tent quicker than usual. I noticed but wisely said nothing.
Though I am sure she noticed my smirk.
Matthias Harlow
The end of The Pass of Klamat, Dur-tan-Orit, Maribor, Temeria
1253
The jagged peaks of the Pass of Klamat began to pull back, yielding to the wide green expanse of the Maribor region, not the city named after it. I sat in the saddle comfortably, with the looseness I had come to adopt to spare Epine from the full awkward weight of me. We rode at a quicker pace today, two weeks of mountain riding finally giving way to flat ground, my eyes fixed on the horizon, focused on accurately retelling my favourite story.
"He didn't get to stay," I said, my voice carrying easily now that the wind had lost the sharp edge the pass had given it. "After everything, after the mountain, the darkness he fell prey to, the ring and all that it cost him, Frodo couldn't find peace in his own home. He told his friend, we set out to save the Shire, Sam, and it has been saved. But not for me."
Syanna looked at me sideways, brow furrowed. "That seems a bit forced, doesn't it? Isn't the whole point of these epics the hero's triumphant return?"
"Well, yes, broadly," I said. "But I think the author wanted to say something honest about the traumas of war. A way of depicting what it does to the people who survive it, the ones who come home to find that home has become a foreign country while they were away." I shifted in the saddle, tilting my face toward the sun as I did so, a habit I had developed since we cleared Angren.
The warmth of it pressed against my skin without scattering and I leaned into it with a quiet gratitude I had at one point expected to never express publicly again.
My skin was still cold to the touch, still hard beneath the surface in a way flesh was not supposed to be, but it absorbed the heat slowly and stubbornly the way stone did, and I preferred it considerably to being a cold slab.
"Anyway. He eventually decided that the peace that felt out of place for him was not worth clinging to. He went to the coast. To the Grey Havens. There was a ship waiting, a white ship made by elves. The last of the high kings and the wizards were boarding. They were leaving the world to men, to the mundane and the fading."
I paused.
The pass had released us properly now and the land ahead was nothing like what we had left behind. Angren had been grey and persistent, a landscape that wore you down not through hostility but through sheer relentless damp, the sky always low, the ground always wet, the air always carrying the smell of peat and distant rain.
The pass itself had been worse, narrow and cold and pressing close on all sides.
This was different.
Dense forest lined both sides of the road, the trees broad and well established, their canopies catching the autumn light and scattering it in fragments of gold and amber across the ground below.
Beyond the tree line the land opened into wide stretches of agricultural ground, fields laid out in the neat geometry of land that had been worked for generations, the soil dark and rich looking even from a distance.
Farmhouses sat at intervals along the lower ground, smoke rising from their chimneys in thin unhurried columns. The road itself had widened and filled, travellers and carts and the occasional mounted rider moving in both directions with the purposeful energy of people who had somewhere to be and the weather to be getting there in.
And beyond all of it, still some seventy miles off and barely visible yet, the suggestion of Maribor on the horizon.
Syanna had straightened in the saddle at the sight of it, some of the road weariness lifting from her shoulders.
"The story ends with them sailing into the west," I continued, "away from everything they had known. They followed a straight path over the curve of the sea until the air grew sweet and the mist turned to glass. And then, finally, the grey rain curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he saw it."
"Saw what?" Syanna asked. There was an eagerness in her voice that she was not bothering to suppress, the kind that had been surfacing more easily over the two weeks in the pass.
"White shores," I said, eyes still on the road ahead. "And beyond them, a far green country under a swift sunrise. That was the end. The hero sailed into the light and his friends stood on the dock until the ship was nothing but a shadow on the water. They went home to their gardens. The magic left the world." I paused. "The end."
The silence that followed was contemplative rather than heavy. Syanna stared at the distant suggestion of civilization on the horizon, and I thought she looked quietly relieved to be under open sky again after so long in the pass.
"A far green country," she muttered. Something crossed her face, longing or bitter envy or some compound of the two she was not going to name out loud. "Sounds like a lie a holy man would tell, Matthias."
"Funnily enough," I said, "I think it was meant to be exactly that. A metaphor for death." I let that sit for a moment. "The man who wrote it had come back from one of the most harrowing wars my world had ever produced.
A generation of young men fed into something vast and industrial and merciless, a war that didn't end cleanly, that left the survivors standing in fields that used to be villages wondering what they were supposed to do with the rest of their lives." I watched the lush land below us, the green of it, the ordinary unheroic business of people going about their days in the sun.
"He wrote the story years later. Some people think the grey havens, the ship, the white shores, all of it was his way of saying that the men who didn't come home had gone somewhere better. That the cost had bought them something real." I exhaled slowly. "Whether he believed it or whether he just needed it to be true, I couldn't tell you."
I paused, still taking in the land around us.
"The white shores aren't a destination," I said. "They're a permission. Permission to finally put it down. To stop carrying it." I glanced at her. "I find that useful, as a thought. On certain days more than others."
She looked at me for a moment with that careful attentiveness of hers. Then she looked back to the road and was quiet for a moment, turning that over.
Then she said, "Your elves are considerably more impressive than ours."
I glanced at her, pale brow raised.
"In your story," she continued, with the tone she used when she was winding up to something, "the elves are these ancient luminous beings, wise beyond measure, so beautiful they make men weep, sailing off into the eternal west on ships made of starlight or whatever." She gestured vaguely at the road ahead.
"The elves here are largely bitter and angry. They would sooner slit your throat for the crimes of your ancestors than inspire you to compose a ballad about them."
"That's a somewhat uncharitable characterization," I said. "They were driven out of their homes and to the point of extinction by humans, after all."
"And your dwarves," she continued, ignoring me entirely, "noble craftsmen of the deep places, makers of wonders, proud and honorable and loyal unto death." She raised an eyebrow. "Most dwarves I know of are just merchants or scammers. Often both."
"Well I'm starting to see a pattern here," I pointed out.
She settled back in the saddle with the satisfied expression of someone making a closing argument. "And a halfling in this world is just as likely to pick your pocket as to sit contentedly in a garden somewhere composing songs about second breakfast."
I looked at her. "I wasn't aware," I said, the smirk clear in my tone, "that I was travelling with a racist."
She opened her mouth to respond but I got there first. "Well, at least you're bigoted toward all races equally and not just one," I added. "Though now that I put more thought into it that doesn't seem all that much better."
"I am not a racist or a bigot," she said, with considerable dignity. "I resent that remark."
"Syanna," I said, still laughing a little, "just enjoy a story for once in your life. Not everything needs to be interrogated for structural flaws." I shook my head. "You are far too pessimistic for a teenager."
"I am a realist," she said.
"You are fifteen years old and you have the personal outlook of a piss soaked old man," I said. "Which, to be fair, might just be how teenagers are. I don't have a large enough sample size to say for certain."
She gave me a look that communicated, without any ambiguity whatsoever, exactly what she thought of my attempt at humour.
"The point of the story," I said, before she could respond, "was not the accuracy of the elves or the moral character of the halflings. The point was the ending. The grey rain curtain turning to silver glass." I looked at the road ahead, where a checkpoint had appeared at the end of the narrow path, considerably more guarded than the one we had left behind in Angren. "The idea that there is something on the other side of all of this that is worth the cost of getting there."
I nudged Épine forward.
"Now come on," I said. "Let's get through this checkpoint and find an inn, somewhere to sleep for a bit, perhaps clean our clothes. If we keep a good pace we could be in Maribor by this time tomorrow."
---------------
"It was a pleasure and an honour to host you, Ser! Pleasant travels!" called our host from the yard as we made our way out, his voice carrying a warmth I had come to associate with commoners trying to suck up to people of higher status.
Aldous Pembry, innkeeper of the Wayfarers Rest, had been miserly on first impression, the tight-eyed assessment of a man who had learned to size up travellers at the gate and price them accordingly.
That had lasted approximately until Syanna had addressed him in the clipped, unhurried diction of someone who had grown up being obeyed, at which point something behind his eyes had recalculated and his entire manner had performed a complete reversal.
By our second morning he had been pressing extra bread on us at breakfast and had very nearly refused our coin at checkout, which Syanna had declined to allow on the grounds that it set a bad precedent.
"Your hospitality was appreciated," I called back, turning briefly in the saddle. "A proper reprieve from the sweat and dust of the road. Be well."
He waved until we had rounded the bend and the inn disappeared behind the treeline.
It had been good, I had to admit, so good we had to stay another day to recuperate. The bath alone had been worth the coin, the first proper one since Dregsdon, hot water and soap and the particular satisfaction of watching two weeks of mountain road disappear down a drain.
My clothes had been laundered and returned smelling of something herbal that I could not name but found inoffensive. Syanna had emerged from her own bath looking like a different person, or rather like herself with the road stripped away, which was a meaningful distinction.
She had also informed me, with the diplomatic directness she used when she wanted to be honest without being cruel, that the food at the inn was considerably better than my attempts at camp cooking.
I had provided meat consistently enough throughout the pass, hunting at night when the ring was off and my senses were sharp again, but the results had been variable. The goat in particular had defeated me. Even properly bled and dressed it had retained a gamey quality that I could not entirely account for and that Syanna had consumed without complaint but also without enthusiasm.
Properly cooked, properly seasoned food prepared by someone who had spent thirty years doing it professionally was, apparently, a different category of experience entirely. I filed that away as something to prioritise more highly going forward.
The road to Maribor had changed character overnight. Where yesterday it had been a reasonable country road moving through forest and farmland with occasional traffic, this morning it was a proper thoroughfare, the kind that had been worn smooth by decades of heavy use and maintained accordingly.
The farms had multiplied, their fields spreading wide on either side, the soil dark and clearly productive. Orchards appeared between the fields, the trees heavy with late autumn fruit, and further back from the road small clusters of buildings had grown up around wells and crossroads with the organic sprawl of settlements that had started as convenient stopping points and become communities over the course of generations.
The people had multiplied too.
Carts laden with produce moved in both directions, their drivers nodding to each other with the easy familiarity of people who shared the same road every week. Merchants on horseback picked their way through the foot traffic with practiced patience.
Groups of labourers walked in loose clusters, their tools over their shoulders, heading toward the fields or away from them depending on the hour. Children ran between the legs of adults on errands that had been given to them and immediately forgotten.
It was, after two weeks in the pass and the better part of a month in Angren before that, an almost overwhelming quantity of human activity.
They noticed me in return, the glimpses of my face past the edge of my cloak hood catching eyes the way something different always did, not with immediate alarm but with a delayed double-take.
Most looked away again quickly. A few stared longer than was polite, their gazes moving from my face to the sword at my hip to Epine's quality with the rapid recalculation of people deciding whether what they were seeing was a threat or simply an oddity.
The sword and the horse did the work I needed them to do. Nobody stepped forward. The whispers stayed at a distance I could hear clearly but no one acted on them.
I considered the helmet briefly, the plates still secured on Épine's back where they had lived for most of the journey. Then I considered how strange a helmed knight riding into a city in damaged armor but no wounds would look, and decided against it. Strange was manageable. impossible to explain was a different problem.
The walls of Maribor were visible properly now, rising above the treeline ahead with the solid reassurance of serious fortification surrounded by a river. A couple of hours at this pace, perhaps less.
I glanced across at Syanna, who had her hood down and was watching the road ahead with the alert, cataloguing attention she brought to new environments, taking inventory without appearing to. "Proper civilisation," I said. "And your first city, technically. Well, mine as well in a manner of speaking, though we've talked about me enough these past couple of weeks." I studied her profile for a moment. "How are you feeling, Rhenawedd?"
The name came out with the slight deliberateness it always had when we were in public, a reminder rather than a correction, though after two weeks of relative isolation in the pass it felt slightly strange to reach for it again.
She glanced at me at the use of it, registering the shift, then looked back at the city walls ahead.
She was quiet for a moment, taking stock the way she did when a question deserved an honest answer rather than a quick one. The walls of Maribor were close enough now to make out the detail of them, the bridge, the gatehouse towers, the guards at the approach, the steady stream of people and carts moving in and out of the gates, the whole thing well organised.
"Strange," she said finally. "I have spent most of my life either in Beauclair this is the furthest I've been from home, and now I am about to ride into the seat of another Duke, under a false name with a vampire for a guardian." She paused, considering.
"Stranger still that this feels like the most normal my life has been in months."
"That says something about the months," I said.
"It says something about the company," she replied, which was as close to a compliment as she tended to get without immediate follow-up deflation. She looked at the gate ahead, then at me. "What exactly are we doing here? Beyond the obvious."
"The obvious being?"
"Not dying," she said. "Which has been the primary objective since Caed Dhu."
"Beyond that," I said, "we have a long road still ahead of us. Maribor is as good a place as any to stop and do it properly." I glanced at her, at the angles of her face that were still too sharp, the wrists still too narrow where they emerged from her sleeves, better than they had been but not yet what they should be.
"You need feeding up. Properly, consistently, for longer than a week at a stretch. You need clothes that actually fit and boots that won't fall apart before spring." I shifted in the saddle. "I need my armour repaired by someone who can resize it to fit while they're at it, and some coin wouldn't go amiss. There's work in a city this size for someone willing to take it."
She raised an eyebrow. "What kind of work?"
"The kind that pays," I said. "We'll see what the city has to offer."
She looked at the gate again, at the steady flow of humanity moving through it, at the smoke rising above the rooftops in the morning sun.
"And after Maribor," she said.
"After Maribor," I said, "we ride north."
She nodded once, slowly, with the particular quality of someone filing a thing away rather than arguing with it.
We joined the flow of traffic approaching the gate, absorbed into the ordinary business of people arriving at a city on an ordinary morning, even though we received some stares, we were allowed entry, the walls of Maribor rising around us and swallowed us whole.
Authors Note: I'm sorry it took longer than usual, studying aside, I've honestly had the worst week of my life, I don't even know where to even begin... I don't want to get too into it or rather I don't even know if I should, but I honestly did not think I'd ever be at home again, this was much as a way not to think about it then just me trying to keep to my obligations.
Anyway back to the story. That's it for chapter 20, and the end of Volume 1: Frozen Blood.
I'm not slowing down or taking a break, this just felt like the right place to draw the first line.
Everything from the cave in Caed Dhu to the gates of Maribor has been the introduction, Matthias finding his feet, Syanna finding hers, the two of them finding each other in whatever way that's going to mean going forward.
As always please leave a like and review if you enjoyed it, criticisms welcome, the comment section is not just for compliments. Ko-fi and Patreon links are in my profile for anyone who wants to support the writing or read ahead.
See you in Volume 2: Crooked Crowns