Chapter 99 - A Touch Burned Into Stone

We'd gone up to the Bleak Spire because Krix said the thread pulled tightest there, and I'd learned by now that when Krix said a thread pulled, arguing with the metaphor wasted time we didn't have. It was close to midnight. The sky over the fortress was clear in the particular hard way it only gets in deep winter, stars scattered edge to edge without a cloud to soften any of it, and I remember thinking, in the last ordinary moment before everything stopped being ordinary, that it was a good night for nothing in particular to happen.