Zale moved like the mountain itself had birthed him. Where the path – if you could even call the crumbling, rain-slicked scramble, a path – demanded precarious balance, he flowed. Where jagged outcrops forced awkward contortions, he slithered through with unnerving grace. He set a punishing pace from the moment we left the meager shelter, heading not down towards the washed-out lower trails, but up, along a terrifying spine of rock he called the Serpent's Back.
Within minutes, the difference was brutal. Roan, strong and seasoned, matched Zale step for step, but his breaths came sharper, his movements more deliberate, the strain evident in the set of his jaw. Marco and I, however, lagged further and further behind, lungs burning, muscles screaming with every slippery handhold, every treacherous foothold. The hailstorm had turned the rock into a treacherous ice rink in places, masked by thin sheets of meltwater.
My arms trembled from the effort of hauling myself up another sheer step. Below, the drop yawned, dizzying. Marco, just ahead of me, slipped, his boot skidding sideways. He caught himself with a grunt, scrabbling for purchase, his face tight with pain and exhaustion.
"Kylendor!" He barked, the sound raw and breathless. "Slow the hells down! Are you trying to kill us?"
Zale, perched effortlessly on a narrow ledge ten feet above, looked back. Genuine surprise flickered across his grimy face. "Apologies," he called down, his voice carrying easily over the wind whistling through the rocks. "I didn't realize… it's this bad for you?" He scanned our strained faces, the white-knuckled grips on the rock.
"I used to run deliveries along routes like this. Almost every day. Before…" He gestured vaguely, almost as if saying, you know, life and all.
"Used to run?" Marco spat, hauling himself onto the ledge beside Zale, gasping. "Playing with us, pathfinder? Or just enjoying the view while we break our necks?"
Zale let out a short, sharp laugh, devoid of malice but mild amusement. "Neither. The rain changed everything. Washed out the stable gravel, exposed the slick basalt beneath. Usually, it's… manageable." He offered Marco a hand up.The latter, after a tense second, grudgingly accepted. Zale's grip was strong, pulling him up with unsettling ease.
"Come. The worst is just ahead, but there's a wider section beyond." He deliberately slowed his pace, choosing handholds and footholds more carefully, pointing out the safest route for us.
We followed, a ragged line against the grey sky. The 'wider section' Zale mentioned was barely two feet across, but after the sheer face, it felt like a boulevard. We paused, leaning against the cold rock, gulping air. The view was terrifyingly vast – mountains clawing at the bruised sky, the valley floor lost in mist far below. The air here was thin and biting.
I wiped the sweat and grit from my eyes, my gaze fixed on Zale, who stood calmly at the edge, scanning the route ahead. The ease with which he navigated this deadly terrain, the casual mention of daily runs… it spoke of a life utterly alien. "Zale," I rasped, the question forming before I could stop it. "You know this land. You know… the ways here. What do you know of the Culling?"
Zale turned, his green eyes sharpening. He leaned back against the rock face, crossing his arms, a gesture that pulled slightly at his wounded side, though his expression didn't flicker.
"The Culling?" He nodded slowly, his gaze drifting towards the distant peaks where the Volanema wolves were said to den. "It's the proving ground. The winnowing." His voice was matter-of-fact, devoid of the dread the word usually carried. "The Volanema are strength. Pure, primal strength. They are our shield against what waits beyond the borders – the blood-drinkers in the shadowed forests, the things that hunger in the night. A weak bond weakens the pack. Weakens the defense."
He pushed off the rock, his eyes meeting mine, then Marco's, then Roan's. There was no cruelty in his look, only the stark acceptance of a fundamental law. "The Culling ensures only the strongest, the smartest, the most resilient get the chance to bond. No room for doubt. No room for weakness. One weak link…" He shrugged, a small, fatalistic movement. "… and the whole chain fails when the night things come calling. The mountain tests you. The Culling proves you. That's the way it's always been." He glanced back at the sheer drop we'd just scaled. "This?" He gestured at the treacherous path. "This is just walking. The real test is bonding the wolf. Surviving that... that separates the stone from the scree." He turned, ready to lead again.
He moved off along the ledge, his figure once again blending with the rugged landscape, leaving us with the chilling echo of his words and the terrifying image of suckers lurking beyond the edge of the known world, held back only by wolves bonded through brutal, necessary sacrifice.
The last hundred yards weren't climbed; they were clawed. The Serpent's Back didn't end so much as crumble away, dissolving into a steep, muddy slope choked with storm-loosened scree. Every step sent miniature avalanches cascading towards oblivion. Marco was swearing with every ragged breath beside me, a continuous, guttural litany against the mountain, the rain, Zale's ancestors, the unfairness of existence and whatnot. My legs felt like lead, my world narrowed to the patch of mud directly in front of my boots. Roan moved with grim determination just ahead, his face set, sweat carving clean tracks through the grime on his cheeks. Only Zale seemed untouched by the brutality, his movements economical, occasionally reaching back to offer me a steadying hand or point out a marginally more stable foothold to Marco, his breathing annoyingly even despite the bandage visible beneath Flynn's borrowed tunic.
Then, suddenly, Zale stopped. He stood poised on a final, jutting tooth of rock, silhouetted against the rapidly changing sky. The bruise-purple storm clouds were shredding, ripped apart by a wind scouring the peaks clean. Golden late-afternoon light, sharp and thin, spilled through the gaps.
"There," Zale said, his voice carrying a quiet finality. He pointed, not down, but out.
I dragged my gaze up, past his shoulder. The world fell away.
Not into another ravine, but into… space. Openness. After hours of crushing rock walls, treacherous ledges, and the suffocating intimacy of shared terror, the vista punched the breath from my lungs. We stood at the ragged edge of a vast, high-altitude meadow.
It sloped gently downwards, a rumpled tapestry of wind-whipped, rain-soaked grasses, shimmering emerald and gold where the sunlight struck. Wildflowers – hardy purple thistles, bursts of yellow hawkweed, and stubborn white blooms I didn't recognize – dotted the expanse like scattered jewels. The air, previously thin and biting, now carried the rich, damp scent of earth and crushed vegetation, a heady perfume after the sterile smell of wet stone. Mist clung to the lower reaches of the field and curled like smoke around distant, solitary boulders, remnants of some ancient glacial shrug.
But it wasn't just the sudden, breathtaking beauty that struck me. It was the evidence.
Dozens of faint paths, like the veins of a leaf, converged from different points along the encircling peaks onto the field. Near the center, wisps of smoke curled upwards from several small, well-hidden campfires, almost invisible against the grey backdrop of the farther mountains. Scattered across the nearer slopes, like the discarded shells of strange insects, were makeshift shelters – lean-tos of branches and canvas, hollows scooped beneath overhanging rocks, one even utilizing the ribcage of some long-dead, colossal beast half-buried in the turf. Discarded scraps of cloth, a broken waterskin, the charred remnants of a small fire pit – the detritus of desperate hopefuls who had arrived before us.
Marco stumbled the last few feet onto the level grass, collapsing onto his hands and knees with a groan that was half relief, half agony. "Hells… finally." He pressed his forehead against the cool, wet earth.
Roan lowered himself more deliberately near me, sitting heavily, his chest heaving as he scanned the field with the vigilance of a hunted animal. I could see his eyes cataloging the distant campfires, the shelters, the converging paths.
I simply stood, swaying slightly, drinking in the impossible openness. The wind, no longer howling through confined spaces but sighing across the endless grass, tugged at my hair and clothes. It felt like surfacing from drowning. For a single, treacherous moment, the sheer relief of solid, non-vertical ground threatened to overwhelm me, pushing aside the grief and the fear.
Zale walked a few paces onto the field, turning slowly, his green eyes sweeping the landscape with the familiarity of someone returning home. There was no triumph on his face, as many of us had. "The Field of thorns," he stated, his voice carrying easily on the wind. He tilted his head, sniffing the air like the wolves we sought. "Others are here. Many probably came before the storm."
Roan made his way to stand beside Zale, stretching his arms upwards, "We're probably among the last to enter the field."
I couldn't disagree when the evidence was right there, now all that was left was hoping that are numbers were satisfactory enough for this bloody trial to end.