The blizzard had retreated, leaving behind a world that looked as though it had
been dipped in liquid diamond and then shattered. The "Ghost-Winter" was over,
but its departure had not brought warmth. Instead, a sharp, crystalline
stillness settled over the Obsidian Peak, a silence so profound that the
rhythmic clink-clink-clink of the workers' picks in the valley sounded like the
heartbeat of a new civilization.
I stood on the lower ramparts, the stones beneath my boots still stained with
the grey, leaden residue of the Southern arrows. The "Sanguine Range"—the
mountains of red glass that had once been a wall of fire—were now a soft,
glowing rose quartz. Under the pale morning sun, they looked like the lungs of
the earth, breathing a gentle, amber light over the tundra.
My body felt like an old map, every mile of the war and every second of the
dungeon etched into the ache of my joints. The "Sieve" was no longer a roaring
