Nyx finally felt comfortable enough to keep her hood down, and had stopped wearing long sleeve shirts beneath her armor, since she no longer needed to cover her skin. Both her and Cerin were more comfortable in the cooler weather given their blood.
The pathway before us was a simple one made of dirt that rose up along the side of the mountain beside us. It looked as if whoever had built it had had quite the time, for up ahead, large rocks were cut through to make room for the path. Far above me, where the air was thick and foggy with snowfall, I could see just the hint of shaky wooden and rope bridges crossing over the gaps between peaks. The journey from here on out would be more perilous.
“Was this path made for just Whispermere?” I asked, my question mostly directed to Theron and Cerin.
“It's possible it was created for that, but it leads to many places,” Theron replied, looking above us at the cold gray rock of the nearby mountains. “Cel Pass is the only way to get from western Chairel to eastern Chairel if you don't want to go far to the north or south. It splits in multiple places along the way. The dwarven city of Brognel lies to the northern end of the mountains. It is a beautiful city; half above ground in the peaks, half below. The Mirren River leads directly from the coast of the Servis to the north to underground, where the lower half of the city was built around it. It is entirely self-sustaining and sends out trade carts to Comercio only sparingly.”
“You have been there,” I commented, listening to the detail in his description.
“Yes. It is the reason I was out here at all. They sent requests out to all of Chairel about a decade ago, offering crazy sums of gold for defensive jobs. Dwarves pay extraordinarily well, given they are the ones who mine the gold.”
“My father always complained about dwarves for just that reason,” I said, watching the snowfall so far above. It was amazing that I could see it snowing, but the view was from so far below that the snow didn't reach it here. I had always found snow to be beautiful. I was sure traveling in it would begin to change that perspective. “He said their constant influx of gold depleted its value and constantly put Sera's economy at risk.”
“I am sure that is true,” Theron acknowledged. “But when you need skilled mercenaries, and your city is so isolated, you need to offer them enough gold to make the trip and the job worth it, and so they did.”
“What sort of trouble did they come across that required such a request?” Nyx asked, curiously.
Theron watched her carefully as he replied, “Their miners broke through to the tunnels of the Alderi.”
“As I thought,” Nyx commented.
“The two don't like each other, I gather?” I asked, noting Nyx had expected such a clash.
“They abhor one another,” Nyx replied. “The Alderi believe the underground belongs to them, and that dwarves are infringing on their territory. We are built for the underground, while the dwarves are an above ground race, so we are taught it is our right and our natural habitat, while they are the aggressors.”
“But you don't believe that,” I commented. I knew Nyx had nothing but love for the dwarves. They tended to be such partiers that I was sure she had both befriended and bedded quite a few of them while they were tourists in Sera.
“The underground is gigantic, and the only parts the dwarves are interested in are the areas ripe with gemstone. The Alderi can go suck on dwarven cock.”
Her statement had humored and shocked the lot of us. It was the first time her despisal of her own race had shone through to Theron or Cerin, so the two were caught off guard.
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“I have a feeling you know a little bit about what that is like,” I teased her.
She grinned. “The dwarves are as hungry for sex as the Alderi, friend. If they didn't despise each other, we would be overrun with a new race of half-breeds. If I were able to bare children, the majority of the illegitimate bastards would have dwarven blood.”
That Nyx was rendered barren was both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, that option had been forever taken from her as a child. Most Alderi children were sterilized forcefully; only the Queen and a select few of her most prized heirs were allowed to breed with the males. Male breeders were selected for both their looks and their strength; all others were deemed unworthy. It was a wonder that the Alderi were able to continue to exist under such a culture of incest. Nonetheless, as an heir to the Queen but far from the first in line, Nyx had been sterilized as a young teen. However, she had never once lamented this fact. She valued her freedom and her wild ways, and I doubted she would ever lose sleep over the absence of children in her life.
“Are there any places in the mountains we can stay to be safe out of the weather?” Silas asked, bringing our attention back to the journey ahead.
“Caves and the like,” Theron replied. “Brognel and any mountain settlements I know of are too far off the path.”
“Perhaps we should begin our trek, then,” Silas said, impatient with the talk at the bottom of the mountain. “The sooner we're off, the sooner we can look for shelter.”
Theron raised his eyebrows at me. Maybe he was as surprised as I was at the elf's impatience. “Shall we?”
We began our trek up the path, leaving the Seran forest behind us. The change of scenery would be nice; we had traveled through grasslands and forests for nearly half a year, though that proved to be much easier than the uphill climb now. The path was also over hard ground and rock, causing back aches much sooner than walking over softer ground.
Over the next few days, the path became steeper and colder, and looking toward the ground at the bottom of the mountain range only served to instill fear in my gut. The Seran forest looked laughably small from here, the trees that had once towered above our heads now appearing as dots along the landscape. All it would take was one tumble, and one of us could be dead. I found it hard to believe that I had blood relation this far up in the mountains. The weather was bitter and uncomfortable for me here, and now that we had stayed in the mountains for many days and nights, there was a chill persistent in my bones that no amount of campfires could cure. Surely, if it was this hard for me to journey through it, it would be even harder for those related to me to live.
We finally reached the highest path of the first mountain, where the snow was thickest and heaviest. The day had been long, and we were all fatigued. Just off the path was the blackness of a hole that had been cut into the rock of the mountainside, the rubble still sitting on the ground beside it, though covered in snow.
“That was not here the last time I came through,” Theron commented, his voice raised so he could be heard over the biting winds. He motioned toward the cave.
“Let's check it out,” I suggested. “We could have our shelter for the night.”
The others quickly agreed. The night before, we'd had no shelter save for our tents that we'd had to resort to setting up on the side of the path. My body felt stiff with how cold I was and had been for days. At this point, even Nyx and Cerin were desperate for warmth.
Theron led us into the cave. As soon as the shadow of the rock walls fell over me, it felt almost warm. It wasn't, of course, but the lack of wind and snow in here was deceiving our bodies into thinking it was. The entrance to the cave was long, winding, and dark; whoever had built this hadn't meant to create a cave as a shelter, but a path to a destination.
From within the stone walls, the wind outside sounded like nothing more than a low whistle. The farther we got, the lower it became. At a certain point, Theron turned, asking us if we wanted to stop and turn around. We decided to keep going.
Finally, after feeling as if we'd been walking for the better part of an hour, we saw natural light ahead of us from through the rock. I wondered if we had entered the cave on one side of the mountain just to walk through to the other. It was clear once we got close enough to the light, however, that that wasn't the case.
Theron was the first to escape the rock tunnel into a large, open cavern. There was a few inches of snow on the center of the floor ahead, just below where the mountain broke open to the sky above. The cavern had to have been thousands of feet across, and the ceilings were at least one hundred to two hundred feet high. Because it was so open and had direct access to the outside, it was much cooler here than it had been through the tunnels.
“Well, we came all this way to rest, just to find it's still cold,” Theron said, sounding apologetic.
“It's better than the outside, at any rate,” Nyx replied. “It actually feels pretty good in here. To me, anyway.”
“There is more to this place,” I said, pointing to the other side of the cavern, where it appeared black. From this distance, I couldn't see the contents of the room the opening led to. Given that all other sides of the cavern shone with the natural light bouncing off of cold or moist rock, I knew the darkness meant the absence of a wall.
“Let's go over there, then,” Nyx suggested, starting to walk across the cavern. “We don't want the humans to freeze to death.”
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