To the mountain

**Kelly Thompson's POV**

The mountain is a blade.

Black glass pierces the sky, its slopes shimmering with prismatic fractures that slice the auroras into jagged ribbons. Lumi walks ahead, her small fingers brushing the obsidian rock, frostbite scars glowing faintly where they touch the Veil’s sigil. The vial at my neck is silent now—Veyd’s essence spent guiding us here. Jara scans the cliffs, her knife replaced by a cultist’s bone spear, its edge serrated with teeth from creatures I don’t recognize.

The air hums with static, each step forward bending reality: one moment, the ground is ice; the next, warm sand that reeks of salt and decay. My shadow—the frayed knot of Hunger and Echo—twists uneasily. *This place is alive*, it murmurs. *And hungry.*

Lumi pauses at a fissure in the glass, her breath fogging into shapes that mirror the spiral sigil. **“Inside,”** she whispers—her first word since the Frostmother’s death.

Jara frowns. **“Kid’s got a flair for the obvious.”**