The dawn came grey and cold, as it always did in the Nithgard wastes. The sun—if it could be called a sun, pale and distant and barely visible through the clouds—rose over the mountains, painting the snow in shades of silver and shadow.
Kaelen stood at the entrance to the pass, looking back at the land that had been his home for five years. The frozen rivers, the jagged peaks, the endless expanse of white that stretched to the horizon. He had come here to die, once. To hide from the world and let the cold and the silence and the slow rot of his broken soul finish what the Skylords had started.
But he had not died. He had survived. And in surviving, he had found something he had thought was lost forever.
He heard Theron's footsteps in the snow behind him, felt his son's presence at his shoulder.
"Are you ready?" Theron asked.
Kaelen looked at the path ahead, the narrow valley that would lead them south, out of the wastes and into a world that had forgotten them. He thought of the road ahead, of the things that waited for them in the darkness, of the war that was only beginning.
And he thought of the man he had been, the man he had become, the man he might yet be.
"I'm ready," he said.
He turned away from the wastes, away from the cave that had been his home, away from the silence and the cold and the slow death he had chosen for himself.
He walked into the pass, and his son walked beside him.
Behind them, the wind swept away their tracks, covering the snow with a fresh layer of white. The wolves would find Sera's grave, eventually, and the crows would pick at the stones, and the memory of the battle would fade into the endless grey of the Nithgard sky.
But the path ahead was clear.
The hunt was over.
The war was beginning.