The carriage rattled softly as it rolled along the stone road, its mana engine humming with a steady, restrained pulse. It was not an expensive vehicle, nor an elegant one, but it moved with purpose, covering distance far faster than any walk would have allowed. Through the wide side windows, the land slipped past in long stretches of muted color, the city gradually thinning into open terrain.
Then the mountain came into view.
It dominated the horizon in a way that made everything else feel provisional. A colossal mass of stone rising straight from the earth, its height measured not in meters but in scale, the kind that forced the eye upward until it instinctively gave up. The peak itself was hidden behind a thick veil of clouds, as if the sky had chosen to keep that part of it to itself.
