Chapter 25: Aldric Makes His Move at the Ash Gate

The Ash Gate was not what I had expected.

I had imagined something dramatic — iron and dark stone, perhaps, something that announced its own significance. What we found instead was a natural formation: two columns of volcanic rock, each perhaps forty feet high, standing close enough together that a loaded cart could pass between them but no wider, the gap worn smooth by centuries of wind carrying ash from the Forge's throat. The ground between them was pale grey, the colour of old bone, and utterly silent in the way that places are silent when the life has been cooked out of them by a proximity to something older and hotter than life.

We had been walking since before dawn. The volcanic plain had been, if anything, worse than the landscape preceding it — featureless in all directions, the horizon a smear of orange-grey where the Forge's permanent exhalation met the sky. The Shard had been pressing against my sternum with an insistence that was no longer merely warmth. It felt, now, like urgency. Like a held breath.