Snow in early autumn. Fantastic.

  The Ashmark Pass did not care about the calendar. It started snowing on our second day of climbing and committed to it with the kind of dedication I generally admire in other contexts.

  Dren navigated by memory and a map that argued with the actual mountain on several key points. We followed Dren.

  The pass took its name from a vein of dark stone running through the cliff face on the eastern side — a long black streak against the grey rock. If you were the type to read things into natural formations, it looked like a scar.

  My wrist pulsed when we got close to it. Just once, firm and specific.

  "Does it react to places?" I asked Lyra.

  "Historical sites with high destructive residue, yes." She looked at the black stone. "There was a battle here, War of Cinders. A lot of ash-magic expended in a small area."

  I looked at the streak. "Feels like something's buried."

  "Memories, probably. That's what ash carries." She glanced at my wrist. "You're sensitive to it because that's what you're made of. The same stuff."

  I turned that over in my head as we kept climbing. Made of the same stuff as battlefields and old grief. Somehow that felt both terrible and true.

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  We hit the summit on the third day.

  The eastern view opened up like a door swinging wide — a huge valley, forested floor, a city's skeleton visible at the far edge. Grey and broken and wrong in a specific way I couldn't immediately name.

  "Ash-Mordhen?" I asked.

  "At the far edge," Dren said. He was looking at it the way you look at a scar you've carried for twenty years. "We don't go through it. Around. Southern edge of the valley, then north to the Valdris road."

  I kept looking at the ruins. Even from this distance, something was off. No birds. No smoke. And the silence around it wasn't natural silence — it was the silence of a place things chose to avoid.

  I thought of ash figures in the shapes of people.

  "Around," I agreed. "Definitely around."

  That night, camping on the eastern slope, the fire was bigger than usual. Nobody said anything about it. Sometimes you just need a bigger fire.

  "Talk me through the Sealstone again," I said.

  Lyra looked up from her notebook. "Focus object. It doesn't contain the binding — that's already in the ley-lines under Ash-Mordhen. The stone channels your power into the binding matrix at the right frequency. Without it, you'd be throwing Ashborn energy at a structure you couldn't see or target." She set the notebook down. "Think of it like a key. The lock already exists. You just need the right shape to turn it."

  "And I'm the one who has to actually do the absorbing. The stone can't do it for me."

  "Correct. The stone translates. The power is yours."

  I stared at the fire.

  Lyra watched me for a moment, then said: "You can do this, Kael. I need you to understand that. Not because I need you to feel confident, but because the binding actually works better if the mage isn't terrified. The historical accounts are consistent on that point. Fear makes the channeling unstable."

  "So I need to not be scared while absorbing an ancient immortal being's destructive energy."

  "Ideally yes."

  "Cool. Easy."

  She almost smiled. "Dren said get some sleep."

  "Dren's not my boss."

  But I slept anyway, because she was right and the pass had taken a lot out of me and tomorrow the valley waited.