The mountains had teeth, and their name was the Frostfangs.
Theron had heard stories about this place, whispered around campfires in the long winters, told by old hunters who had ventured south and returned with tales that seemed impossible. He had listened to those stories the way he listened to everything—with a survivor's ear, weighing truth against exaggeration, trying to find the kernel of reality beneath the myth.
The stories had not prepared him for this.
The pass they had taken out of Nithgard had led them into a labyrinth of peaks and valleys, a maze of stone and ice that seemed to go on forever. The wind was constant here, a howling, screaming thing that tore at their clothes and tried to drag them off the narrow paths that wound between the cliffs. The cold was worse than anything he had known in the wastes, a biting, penetrating cold that seeped into his bones and refused to leave.
And the things that lived here—the things that had given the mountains their name—were watching.
He saw them sometimes, out of the corner of his eye. Shapes that moved in the mist, shadows that were darker than the stone, eyes that glowed in the darkness when the sun set behind the peaks. They were old, these things, older than the Skylords, older than the Aethyr, older than anything that had a name in any language he knew.
His father walked ahead of him, his steps sure, his eyes scanning the cliffs and the passes with the practiced ease of a man who had spent a lifetime navigating hostile terrain. The marks on his chest were hidden beneath his clothes, but Theron could see the tension in his shoulders, the way his hand never strayed far from his blade.
They had been walking for three days when the first of the Frostfang creatures showed itself.
It was a bird, or something like a bird, with wings that stretched wider than a man was tall and feathers that gleamed like ice in the weak sunlight. It landed on a spire of rock ahead of them, its head cocked, its eyes—black, depthless, ancient—fixed on them with an intensity that made Theron's skin crawl.
His father stopped, his hand moving to his blade. "Don't move," he said quietly. "Don't look at it."
"What is it?"
"A memory. A ghost. Something that was old when the first men came to these mountains." His father's voice was low, barely audible over the wind. "It's not hungry. It's not hunting. It's just... watching."
The creature—the memory, the ghost, whatever it was—spread its wings and launched itself into the air, spiraling up into the clouds until it was nothing but a speck against the grey sky.
Theron let out a breath he hadn't known he was holding. "Are there more of them?"
"More than you can count. But they won't hurt us, as long as we don't give them a reason."
"A reason for what?"
His father turned to look at him, and for a moment, there was something in his eyes that Theron had never seen before. Not the rage, not the grief, not the hunger that lived in the marks on his chest. Something older. Something that looked like fear.
"They remember," his father said. "They remember the world before the Skylords. Before the Aethyr. Before the pacts and the wars and the things that men did to each other in the names of gods who didn't care. And they know what's coming."
"What's coming?"
His father didn't answer. He turned and continued walking, his steps sure, his back straight, his hand still resting on his blade.
And Theron, following in his father's shadow, wondered if he really wanted to know.