The convoy made camp in a sheltered valley just beyond the Runestone Gate, a natural bowl in the foothills protected from the worst of the wind by towering walls of ancient stone. The knights moved with their usual efficiency, tents rising, fires crackling to life, and the familiar rhythm of survival asserting itself against the deepening cold.
I sat apart from them, on a flat rock at the edge of the camp, wrapped in my fur-lined cloak and staring up at the sky.
The stars were different here.
In the South, they had been soft, distant, and blurred by the haze of humidity and the lights of cities. Here, they were sharp and brilliant, each one a shard of frozen light embedded in the velvet darkness. They seemed closer, somehow, as if I could reach up and pluck them from the sky. The cold had cleansed the air, stripped away everything soft and obscuring, leaving only clarity.
I had never seen anything so beautiful.
