Ashe had not warned them about the first hour.
The path from the compound's upper gate into the mountain's lower face was fine — maintained, the footing clear, the gradient manageable. The second section was where it became something else. The maintained path ended at a cairn of stacked dark stone and after that it was simply the mountain, which had opinions about people climbing it that it expressed through increasingly vertical rock and the thin cold of altitude that cut through jackets designed for the compound's outer ring rather than eight hundred meters above it.
Vane climbed and said nothing about this.
Nyx, three steps behind him, said: "You could have mentioned the path stopped."
"I did mention it," Ashe said from above them. She was moving through the rocky section with the ease of someone who had been doing this since childhood and found the difficulty categorically uninteresting. "I said bring the heavy jacket."
"That is not the same information."
