Chapter 18: Aldrath Worsens, and the Weight of the Shard Shifts

The ascent into the Ashpeaks' lower passes took three days, and Aldrath deteriorated across all of them with the patient, remorseless consistency of a structure whose foundational stone has been quietly removed.

I noticed it on the first morning. This was not, I should clarify, a mark of any particular acuity on my part — I had simply been paying attention to Aldrath in the way that I had, by this point in the journey, come to pay attention to everything: steadily, without announcement, and with the cartographer's fundamental understanding that the most important features of a landscape are often the ones that appear, at first, to be merely background.

What I noticed on the first morning was the way he descended from the cart.