They found the first sign of the old war on the fourth day.
It was a scar in the mountains, a wound that had never healed. The stone was black here, fused into glass by a heat that had been hot enough to melt the very bones of the earth. The ground was bare, scoured clean of snow and ice and everything else that had tried to grow in the shadow of the mountains.
And in the center of it all, there was a crater. A hole in the world, a pit that went down and down and down, into darkness that had no bottom.
His father stood at the edge of the crater, his face pale, his hands clenched at his sides.
"What happened here?" Theron asked.
"The war." His father's voice was flat, empty, the voice of a man who had seen too much to feel anything anymore. "The war that was supposed to save the world."
He knelt, picking up a piece of the black glass, turning it over in his hands.
"This was a city, once. The greatest city in the Frostfangs. A place where men and the old things—the things that came before—lived together in peace. And then the Skylords decided that the old things were a threat, that their power was too great, that they had to be destroyed."
He crushed the glass in his hand, letting the fragments fall to the ground.
"They sent me. They gave me an army, and a purpose, and the power to do what needed to be done. And I did it. I burned the city to the ground. I killed everything that lived here. And when it was over, there was nothing left but ash and glass and a wound in the world that would never heal."
Theron looked at the crater, at the darkness that seemed to go on forever, and tried to imagine what it must have been like. The fire, the screaming, the weight of a thousand deaths on his father's shoulders.
"You did what you had to do," he said, because it was the only thing he could think to say.
"No." His father shook his head. "I did what I was told. I did what Valkara asked me to do, because I believed that she was right, that the Skylords knew best, that the things I was destroying were evil and dangerous and needed to be wiped from the face of the earth."
He stood, and for a moment, Theron saw something in his father's face that he had never seen before. Not rage, not grief, not hunger.
Shame.
"I was wrong," his father said. "I was wrong about everything. And now the things that I destroyed are gone, and the world is poorer for it, and there is nothing I can do to bring them back."
He turned away from the crater, from the wound in the world that he had made, and began to walk again.
"There's nothing here for us," he said. "We need to keep moving. The Sunken Dominion is three days south, if the old maps are right. We can make it by the end of the week."
Theron looked at the crater one last time, at the darkness that had no bottom, at the black glass that glittered in the weak sunlight.
And then he followed his father into the mountains.