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As though she had summoned them, Dawsyn feels the thin air collapse momentarily. Yennes appears alone, her eyes on her feet as they sink into the snow. She gasps as the cold finds her, reclaiming the woman who dared to escape it all those years ago.

“Yennes,” Dawsyn calls to her, the wind nearly swallowing the sound. “All right?”

The woman balls her hands within her gloves and lifts her feet from the drift. Though her eyes are far away with what Dawsyn imagines are a thousand lived memories, she nods. She lifts her face to see the tops of the pine.

Baltisse appears a second later with Esra. A length of fabric tied around his mouth and hands.

“You gagged him?” Ryon murmurs to Baltisse.

The mage tucks her hair into her hood. “He cannot be trusted to shut up,” she says. “He squawks so.”

Esra is indeed mumbling incessantly beneath the gag. Growing more and more infuriated by the moment.

“Es, shut the fuck up like Baltisse says, and we can unbind you,” Ryon tells him.

Esra complies, albeit unwillingly, and Ryon pulls the binding from his mouth.

“Oh, mother of hell my cock has pruned to the size of my smallest toe–”

Baltisse snaps her fingers and the sound of Esra’s whispered ramblings are cut off. He simply gapes like a breathless fish.

Tasheem grins. “Why bind him in the first place if you could have done that?”

“For the deep satisfaction of it.”

Salem groans at the mage. “Yeh could’ve saved me years o’ his nonsense, Baltisse. It’s been right torture.”

“I find satisfaction in that, too,” she quips, pulling her cloak tighter.

“Enough,” Ryon says, rubbing a weary hand over his eyes. “If there’s a wit between any of you, ready it. Baltisse?”

The mage raises her eyebrows at him.

“You and Yennes both must mind your limits as you fold in and out of the Chasm. If either of you begin to feel any strain, you should–”

“The bounds of my magic are no business of yours, Ry,” Baltisse interrupts. “Stop worrying about us. We will all face challenges tonight.”

Ryon nods, looking once to the others, and then to Dawsyn. “Time to go.”

“Hector?” Dawsyn calls “Are you ready?”

Hector’s gaze is far away, and Dawsyn knows the feeling – to be sent back to this mountain after knowing the ground. He sighs, takes out a long knife. “After you.”

The walk through the grove is shorter than Dawsyn remembers. Strange how small this shelf seems, now that she’s seen how far the world stretches. The virgin snow does not seem so endless, the pine does not tower as it once did. She and Hector turn the trail they always have, their feet knowing it by heart. Around the pocket of Edgarton trees, marked with an E. Through the copse of the Dervichs’ claim, then the Tarrows. When they reach the end of the rows, with the cabins pocketed in a long line before the Face, they stop.

Ryon and the rest are nowhere to be seen. She cannot hear them.

Hector reaches over and squeezes her hand with his, just once. They breathe together. Once more they stand on this treeline looking out on the shelf they were once confined too. They see the flickering glow of firelight illuminating the tiny windows. See the chimney smoke quickly claimed by the eddies of frost in the air.

Then, just as they did as children, Dawsyn and Hector step out from the cover of trees together, and advance into the open.

There are only two others who brave the cold this night. The two forms huddle in their furs over dark lumps upon the snow. Bodies.

Two slowly freezing bodies, left out in the night before they are thrown into the Chasm come morning. The two hovering figures are either mourning, or scavenging. Both eventualities are just as likely as the other.

When Dawsyn and Hector come closer, the pair straighten, like animals caught unawares.

“Nevrak,” Hector murmurs to Dawsyn. “The Splitter.”