The Foggy Peaks don’t get less imposing when you’re up close, no mountain does. The ground didn’t take long to turn into hard stone, and the air chilled as our ascent continued. Something about altitude just doesn’t get along with heat. Maybe it’s the harsh winds, maybe it’s a hint from the universe to stay down low.

  Gruin laughed.

  “Mountains!” he roared, “this is where a living thing ought to stuff itself, mountains. The only thing above-ground worth seeing. Look at this! Schist, silica, that’s pink granite, over there is limestone. Oh, igneous and metamorphic rocks. REAL fucking rocks, out in the open and standing high where they belong!”

  It was the most enthusiasm I’d seen Gruin show about anything, ever. And I was happy for him, kind of. If nothing else it was good to see the Grynkori feeling happy about something other than bludgeoning people to death, and with luck it’d make him a lot more pleasant to travel with.

  As happy as Gruin was, though, everyone else was equally unhappy. Mountains were just not a pleasant place to travel through. The wind snagged our clothes, the cold cut right through them and down to the bone. And soon enough we were moving high up, creeping along too-thin mountain passes that overhung a drop of hundreds of feet.

  Could I survive a hundred yard fall, as I was now? Maybe. If I landed on dirt. But the jagged rocks awaiting me below were promising an impact that wouldn’t much care how strong I’d become. I stuck close to the walls.

  “FUCK!” I heard a shriek run out, turned just as I saw Dubin thrown off-kilter by an unexpected gust and moments away from falling off the cliff. Il’vanja was right beside him, but she only stepped back from his flailing limbs as he started to topple. I lunged and just about grabbed the man.

  Dubin wasn’t a big man, fortunately, and so despite the sixty or seventy pounds of gear he was weighed down with I managed to haul him back without even jeopardizing my own balance. He was panting by the time he hit the stone path beside me, as if the fear alone had drained him of strength. All eyes rounded in Il’vanja.

  “What the fuck was that?” Dubin snarled, scrambling to his feet and rounding on the aelf, “you were about to let me tumble over the edge.”

  “I do not have the upper body strength to arrest your fall and drag you back up,” she replied, “and had I remained by your side you would have grabbed me in a panic, possibly dragging me over the edge to fall alongside you.”

  “How about we see what my fucking chances of dragging you over that edge are,” Dubin snarled as he advanced on the aelf. Il’vanja remained entirely unfazed, though I saw that she slipped back from him faster than might a retreating shadow. Morlo was injecting himself before things could further degenerate.

  “That’s enough,” he growled, “I’ll not have any of you killing each other.” He glared from the aelf to the human, then to the other humans who, following the natural flow of intra-species-loyalties, had immediately sided with Dubin in his contempt for the woman who almost let him fall.

  Dubin had the shortest temper of the trainees, even before the siege had made short tempers and impulsivity the world’s most negatively selected survival trait. I didn’t know, at first, whether everything would descend into blood and violence. If he crossed Morlo now, the Thaumaturge would most likely just send him flying off the cliff with a brief exertion of will.

  But Dubin lowered his gaze and settled for dark mutterings instead of attempted murder, de-escalating things. Barely.

  We walked more, and the winds picked up. It got darker without us finding a shelter, and before long I realised with a great flood of dread that we’d be sleeping out on the mountain. Morlo, fortunately, was not mad enough to trust our luck in just lying flat across the pass and hoping we didn’t roll over it in the night.

  “Stay back, if you get in the way of this you’ll instantly die.” Before any of us could respond to that with some useful questions, like ‘why’, Morlo was working his Thaumaturgy. Force blasted out across the mountain, cracking rock and forcing it upwards into a jutting section that served to box us into where we planned on resting.

  It wasn’t much of a wall, had we been relying on it to turn away an attack I’d not have been too confident. But we weren’t. It’d stop us from falling and it’d provide cover from arrows if the wretchlings found us in the night, that was the main thing.

  “Bloody cold,” Morlo grunted as we all hunkered down, “no heat. Nowhere. I can’t work fire or warm us up.”

  I’d felt around to do just that myself and couldn’t, hearing that Morlo himself was limited in the same way was like a fist in my gut.

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  But I’d taken enough actual fists in my actual guts that it didn’t faze me much, and surprisingly enough the thought of lying in the dark next to a deadly drop didn’t actually make it harder for me to fall asleep. I chalked that one up to my upsettingly large amount of practice in sleeping under, quite frankly, far more pressing dangers.

  We still kept a watch on, though. Relative safety was still the farthest thing from actual safety, and none of us wanted to roll the dice on a night-time ambush.

  Come morning, everyone was chilled down to the bone and about as miserable as it was possible for a person to be. Save Il’vanja, of course, who didn’t appear to mind the frigid conditions more than she had any others. We kept the march up as much to warm our leg muscles as anything else.

  Only four hours into the new day’s journey did something happen besides more walking and misery, Gruin staring at Morlo, eyes uncharacteristically wide and voice uncharacteristically awed, “we're ... .You're taking us…there!?”

  Morlo grinned at him.

  “I was waiting to see how long you’d take to notice. Bit inattentive, to only do so now, don’t you think?”

  “We can’t go through there,” Gruin snapped, “you don’t understand. Khara Gunth isn’t safe. It’s—”

  —”it’s a bunch of overstated rumours,” Morlo cut in.

  “Sorry,” I interjected, “uh, Khara Gunth, what is that exactly?”

  The idea that Gruin was afraid, or whatever emotion Grynkoris approximated fear with, was good cause for me to find out more as soon as I fucking could.

  “Would you like to tell him, Gruin?” Morlo asked. Gruin glared and said nothing, and after a moment the Thaumaturge sighed. “Very well. Khara Gunth was once the largest Grynkori fortress in all of Anglyn, built right here. Beneath the skin of the Foggy Peaks. It was a sprawling and impressive hive—”

  —”hive?” Vonti cut in.

  “Yes, hive, Grynkori civilisations are called hives, now hush. It was a sprawling hive that crept across hundreds of miles of tunnel, cavern and more. By most accounts it was thought to be unassailable. Obviously, not true.”

  Everyone was silent at that, all of us just listening, captured by the story.

  “Eventually the Grynkori dug too deeply, and too greedily. They awakened something from the depths. Other Grynkori, as it happened.” Gruin spat at that, and Morlo continued. “There’d been a second hive, more or less the same size, directly below them for a century. When they stumbled onto each other the resultant war lasted generations, and ended only with both hives too mangled to continue existing.”

  I just stared at the Thaumaturge. “That’s it? They just…eradicated each other?”

  “Grynkori are even more aggressive than humans,” Il’vanja added, which earned another flurry of swearing and threats from Gruin. She promptly ignored it all and kept her eyes ahead. I just tried to take in what I’d been told.

  “How can they have completely eradicated one another though?” I asked, “surely there must’ve been some survivors.”

  Morlo shrugged. “I wasn’t there, this was all a few decades ago and I was…busy at the time. One imagines the stories are exaggerated to some extent, perhaps the wretchlings exterminated the handful who survived one another’s wrath.”

  Gruin spat again. “No wretchling could do that. You’re trying not to mention the Demon.”

  Morlo rolled his eyes. “There is no bloody Demon. People always want there to be a Demon, but there never is one.”

  I tried to believe him as we continued up the mountain, but I suspected that I wasn’t the only one who found the reassurance a bit hollow. Maybe I was just paranoid, but I’d seen far too many horrid things to ever go into a situation assuming I’d find a harmless myth awaiting me at its core.

  Something that did absolutely nothing to abate my fears was when we came to a large, deliberately carved stone door. The workmanship was like nothing human I’ve ever seen, and I understood in that moment why Gruin was so eternally smug about the crafts of man when it came to stone or metal.

  It was circular, a set of concentric rings built into the sheer rock, etched over with runes, seeming almost to hang there through levitation. I couldn’t feel any hint of magic—Thaumaturgy or otherwise—about the structure, and yet I could think of no other way such a thing might have come to exist.

  “How does this…work,” I croaked, feeling suddenly overwhelmed as I stared at the stonework and tried to make sense of it. Everyone else seemed to feel much the same way, save for Morlo and Gruin. Even Il’vanja appeared fascinated by the construct.

  “Do you know about the basics of pressure differentials and how they can be used to induce movement within a closed system by regulating air density across different parts of a plane?” Gruin asked me.

  “No.” I told him.

  “Then it’ll take too long to explain,” he grinned, “just rest assured that proper Grynkori engineering is about a thousand years past your idiot people.”

  Gruin seemed oblivious to how friendly the humans in his company were feeling after that remark, but none of us kept our annoyance strong for more than a moment.

  “This is a door, right?” Vara asked Morlo. “It opens? Do you know how?”

  Morlo peered at it, seeming to run his eyes along odd sigils I saw carved around its edges. “If I’m reading the script right…yes, I see, it’s a riddle. An old one. It challenges whoever reads this to best the Grynkori craftsmasters who made it in wits.”

  Gruin started laughing outright. “Fat chance of that, wizard. You seem to know a chunk of our language, but I doubt even you can—”

  Morlo blasted the door with a wall of force greater than any I’d seen him conjure so far. It was like a cannonball had struck it, and I stumbled back and screamed as debris shot out in all directions. What shocked me more than the magic was seeing the dust clear, because that was when I found out that Morlo hadn’t even smashed all the way through.

  “Grynkori craftsmanship," he grumbled, “good for something then. I really wish it’d gone in one blast. Destroying something so old and precious is hard enough already. Everyone cover up!”

  He shielded us from the worst of the shrapnel just as he had the first time, but it was still a terrible sight to behold. Feet of rock blasted open like a roof tile struck by a halberd. The biggest delay was in waiting for harsh mountain winds to clear away the dust, and then we could see right into the pass ahead.

  I took about two seconds to realise that the stairs were leading down, and less than one more to start panicking.

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