.

   

   

   

   

       .

   

   

  .

   

   

     

    Now.

      

    

   

           Again.

      

  Where would they go?

The guild was a strategic junction for anyone travelling the Snowtrail by conventional means. Moving west to east, travellers like the witch and her party reached the guild by ascending a long flight of makeshift stairs that led to the platform. On one side, the ground fell away into open depth; on the other, the mountain rose in a sheer, unbroken wall. The King’s Cliff stretched for over a kilometre in both directions, its crown a sprawls of sawtooth-peaks. The guild itself was hewn directly into the rock face beneath the Datan peak, flanked by lookout points and layered defences. It was not just place designed for rest and revival. It was a meant to control passage.

The west entry lay at the lower level, from the platform that opened into the Common Room. From there, the route divided. Two exits wound through the mountain’s interior and emerged on the far side, continuing the Snowtrail beyond the King’s Cliff. One led upward, and the other further down. In core, the guild functioned as a tunnel through the Datan, a passage threaded through the stone.

Yu had never seen the upper exit. To reach it from within the guild, you had to go all the way to the highest floor. He had arrived through the lower one. And even with that one, he had barely registered it. Exhaustion had reduced the endless wilderness of ice around him to a sequence of motions: talons lifting, talons setting down, snow giving way beneath them. Everything else had blurred.

What he knew was crop milk; pre-digested explanations offered by others. Tria had shown him sketches of the Snowtrail more than once; diagrams, routes, elevations and such. Well, just about now, Yu very much wished he had listened. It had all seemed so pointless, back then. Mainly because he had also not listened, much further back, when she had tried to teach him how maps worked. He had found those lessons particularly pointless, because he had firmly intended to never go anywhere.

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