The valley dawned broken.
It wasn't a metaphor.
Craters where flat ground had been. Cracks cutting through the terrain like scars. The rocks of the northern canyon collapsed into irregular piles. The air still smelled of burnt energy, of ozone, of something harder to name.
Alex looked at it from where he sat.
He hadn't slept.
Not exactly. He had closed his eyes sometime between midnight and dawn, and something resembling rest had occurred, but the Fragment murmured even in that state, softer than before, more background than foreground, but present.
Always present now.
Grim was beside him. Eighty centimeters. Latent form. His ribs still showed cracks, his left arm at an angle that wasn't quite right, the frost from the wyvern's breath still embedded in some joints.
But he was breathing. Or what Grim did instead of breathing.
They were alive.
Both of them.
---
Maya was the first to move when the sun touched the horizon.
