The vessel climbed away from Euclid until the city shrank to a scatter of grey roofs behind them, and the world beneath the hull turned white. Trafalgar watched it happen from one of the tall windows near the bow, where the glass ran floor to ceiling and framed the whole of the Morgain territory in a single pane. Snow. Nothing but snow, laid over mountains that had no business standing that tall, their peaks catching the light like rows of broken teeth.
He had grown up under those mountains. He had almost died under them more than once. Familiarity did nothing to make them less hostile.
Far off, riding a current between two of the higher summits, a pair of wyverns turned slow circles over a kill. Lower down, where the treeline gave out, other creatures moved through the drifts, too far off to name and big enough to be a problem. The land his family ruled did not forgive carelessness. It never had. That was half the reason the Morgains were what they were.
