“Hey Fyn. Are you doing alright?”

Fyn looked up and then back at me. He smiled wide, still limping forward over the rough stone. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

I raised an eyebrow at the smiling man. My ears twitched at the tone of his voice. Cheerful as normal, sure, but it was also shaky. He was hiding something. Trying to mask the pain, if I had to guess.

My eyes fell to the section of his leg where the armor was still charred at the edges of a hole. Except, instead of showing a searing burn underneath, tightly-wrapped bandages covered his hurt skin. After the attack, the other knights had treated him—applied some kind of magical herb I’d never heard of—but that had been it. There hadn’t been much else they could do.

We had to wait until we could find a healer in Ord for anything more.

But after another day and a half of walking, the effect of the wound was all too noticeable. He was getting better—along with Lionel, for that matter—but he hadn’t been nearly as talkative. Whereas Lionel had kept up his confident charm at every opportunity, Fyn had faded a little bit into the background.

Even after more than a day without complications, he was still just limping along with a weak smile at his lips. It was as though he felt unworthy to break into conversation anymore. A trait that was especially concerning considering how boring our endless marching had become.

“Well that’s a plain lie,” somebody said. Another knight in our backing party—a more lightly armored one. The tall, bearded man turned on his heel to shoot a concerned glance at Fyn. The cheerful knight shook him off.

“It still hurts, obviously.” He laughed half-heartedly. “But I’m fine. I’ll be fine once we get to Ord.”

My eyebrows arched at the contradictory statement. Especially at the fact that he’d given it in nearly the same light tone he always used. Still, I held my tongue.

The bearded knight, however, had a different idea. “Bullshit, Fyn.”

“En, I could use without your help, really,” Fyn said. The knight—En, I remembered as Fyn’s words sparked the connection—simply laughed.

“Well, you’re halfway right,” En rattled off. “You will be better in Ord. But, there is no use in pretending now. You got a gangly ass burn in your leg!”

Fyn grimaced, still smiling somehow. “Could you…” He simply shook his head. “Yeah, whatever. There’s also no point in whining. As you said, I can’t do much about it until we get to Ord.

En smiled. “You could ask to apply more fervo sap.”

I furrowed my brow at the term, but the cheerful knight’s eyes widened. “I don’t need—” He stopped himself, taking a breath. “I’m not thinning our supplies any more than I have to just for a little pain.”

“How much do we have?” Kye asked from alongside me. Blinking, I turned to the inquisitive huntress. Her lips were pursed as she stared at the cheerful knight.

Fyn faltered, his face contorting with all the eyes turned his way. In the corner of my vision, I noticed the other two knights in our backing party shooting a curious glance his way as well.

“I don’t know,” he finally admitted. “It can’t be that much, though. I mean, how much fervo sap could they have planned to bring anyway?”

My eyebrows pulled together for the second time at the mention. The name—fervo sap. I’d heard it before when the more medically inclined of our legion were treating the wounded. It was supposed to dull the effects of burns, after all. Yet I’d never even heard of it before then.

Kye folded her arms and shifted her weight with each step. “Probably more than you’d expect.” She arched her eyebrows. “The whole point of this legion is to march against the mother of destruction. The queen of the dragons.” Despite the warm afternoon air, a shudder poured down my spine as she spoke. “If they’d pack any aid supplies more heavily than others, it would be fervo sap.”

Fyn’s eyebrows dropped as he nodded. The smile faded. “Maybe. But really, I’m fine.”

“Still calling bullshit,” En added. His eyes flicked to Kye. “I think we’d have plenty of the stuff regardless of where we were marching. We didn’t tread lightly when preparing for this trip.”

Kye rolled her eyes, a smirk ghosting her lips. “The world knows that as much as any of us do. The Lady even has a few knights delegated strictly to supplies, doesn’t she?”

En nodded, curling his lip and running a hand over his beard. “Pretty sure. Though, they’re in the”—his tone lowered—“main group.”

I rolled my eyes and disregarded the dry stab at levity. Turning to Kye, my expression darkened. “What is fervo sap anyway?”

The huntress straightened up as she turned to me. The smirk on her face slipped back into a gentle smile. “It’s a sap extracted from particularly magical trees.” I opened my mouth, but she already had a hand raised. “None of the ones near Sarin have them. They’re tall and sturdy ones that grow in soft spots of the mountainside.”

I nodded, and En mirrored the action in the corner of my eye. “Sturdy is correct,” he said. “Extracting from those things is a hair more difficult than it should be.” An exaggerated attempt at a scoff followed his statement.

“You’ve extracted it before?” I asked, rolling my shoulders back.

“Of course I have,” En said, his voice far too matter-of-fact for my liking. The white flame flickered in dim annoyance before going back to its activity. Back to sifting through memories in the back of my mind as though hoping it somehow struck gold.

“It helps with burns,” Kye cut back in. Turning to her, I saw the side-eyed glare she shot at En. The bearded knight didn’t seem to notice. “Pretty sure their sap is the reason those trees are almost impossible to burn down.”

“Oh, it is,” En said again without turning back to us. I groaned inwardly and shared a glance with Kye. She stifled a giggle before the man spoke again. “We had a pyromancer try to—”

Fyn shot his hands out. “Whatever,” he said, forcing a smile again and showing more exasperation than I’d seen on him before. “I’m fine, really. I chose to be in the back here for a reason, you know. Even with a burned leg, I can just sit back.”

“Limp back is more accurate,” En said. The cheerful knight let out a singular amused breath before flashing his companion a tight grin and whipping around.

Once he looked back at us, Fyn rolled his eyes. “It won’t be accurate after we arrive in Ord.”

A grin tugged at the corners of my lips. I let it through without question, only keeping back a chuckle as questions rose in my head. “When will we arrive in Ord, by the way?”

Fyn’s eyes skipped over to me. As my eyebrow raised, his smile deepened. “We should be there within—”

“Before the end of the day,” En interrupted. Fyn stopped in place as words died in his throat. The bearded knight chuckled. “We’re almost there already. You can see Ord’s entrance spire from here.”

I blinked in disbelief as the knight smirked. He gestured forward and inclined his head in the direction of the sloping, boulder-like rock feature that was more than a hundred paces in front of us. No, I realized. He was gesturing past it.

And as my gaze followed, I saw it too. The thin metal spire in the distance that struck above the stone immediately in front of us. With how far away it was, I couldn’t tell what the thing was attached to. I couldn’t tell much about it at all, actually. But it was there. Ord was there.

Before I knew it, I was beaming. My lips stretched wide and nearly touched my ears as my eyes latched onto the signal of construction. Of a manmade structure. Of civilization. Even the white flame stopped its grating and still unsuccessful reconciliation attempts to watch through my eyes in wonder.

We were almost there.

“Exactly,” Fyn eventually said. Blinking, I returned to the people I was walking with. The cheerful knight was trying his best to glare harshly at En. But somehow, he just couldn’t get the smile to fade. “Anyway. We’ll find a healer in Ord, do some extra preparation, and then…” He didn’t finish as his grin became toothy. None of us needed him to finish, anyway.

We knew.

Shuddering, I shrugged off my conceptions of Rath for the moment. My worries and fears of what we would truly meet when we got there. Instead, I focused on what came before that. On the next step.

“What can we expect in Ord?” I asked.

Fyn turned, his joviality dampening for a moment as he thought. En, however, was far quicker on the come-back. “Towers,” he said.

My eyebrows knitted. “Towers?”

En nodded. “Towers.” I didn’t miss the way Kye rolled her eyes beside me. But eventually, the short-winded knight continued. “Expect buildings more vertical than you’ve ever seen. Expect buildings built even higher than some of the peaks around here.” He gestured out to the mountain range at large. “Because that’s what we’re going to get.”

“They…” I started as his words processed. “They build their structures predominantly vertically?”

“Yeah,” Kye said without waiting for En to shoot back. I offered her a grateful glance. “With their terrain, they have to make use of all the space they can. And building into the air is much easier than carving out swaths of rock.”

My head tilted back. “So verticality is just practical?” Kye nodded at that, and I nodded back while my fingers drummed on the hilt of my blade. “What makes their terrain any different from that of Norn?”

Kye let out a breath of amusement before opening her mouth. Except, instead of some concise explanation lined with snark, she only furrowed her brow. Luckily, there were knights around that were more familiar with the area.

“The ground is more uneven,” Fyn said, pushing back a grimace as he smiled at me. “The rocks are more jagged—though, they’re more lucrative, too. As a general rule, the further you go from the initial mountainside, the worse it gets.”

“And Ord has the worst of it,” En chimed in. “Veron has it worse than Norn, but they’re not this far out, and they’re on the smoother side of the valley anyway.” He gestured to the valley on our right, which was a lot less vast at this point. After a time, the two sides appeared to just converge back into a rocky wasteland. “Only the world knows why the hell they built a city that far out.”

Fyn all but giggled, regaining more of his cheery stride. “Oh you know exactly why Ord is where it is.”

En turned, his expression perplexed. Then his eyebrows dropped and he stared half-lidded. “Sure, sure, I—”

“Ord produces more coin in a season than Norn does in a year, you know,” Fyn said. He seemed to take great joy in cutting off his companion.

“I know that,” En said. “But I—”

“And I mean produce, too.” Fyn’s grin grew further as En’s face flushed red. “They extract enough silver to line an entire mountain in coin.”

En clenched his jaw. “I know, dammit.” Fyn chortled, slowing his pace a little to avoid getting smacked. “It’s hard not to know. Ord is called the mineral capital for more than mythological reasons.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Mythological reasons?”

En turned, his eyes widening at my serious question. “Yeah. You know, the stories about Ord that everyone knows are way too exaggerated to be true.”

While thinking, I pursed my lips. I pressed my tongue against my teeth and tried to work out my prior knowledge with the curiosity burning in my chest. It didn’t satisfy. But before I could speak up, Kye had already taken an additional step forward.

“No. What stories?” The huntress tilted her head and fixed En with a stony glare. The fact that she didn’t know either made my shoulders sit just a little bit higher.

En rolled his eyes. “The ones about untold riches.” He glanced back in anticipation. Neither of our faces budged an inch. “Maybe they’re not common outside of the mountains, but Ord is older than either of the other mountain states, and most people haven’t ever been because of how far away it is.”

Kye leaned her head back. “So they only know vague details about something they don’t understand.”

“Yeah,” En said, his smugness returning little by little.

“Prime myth-making material,” Kye muttered. She shook her head. “What about Ord creates myths of untold riches?”

I raised my eyebrows at that, shifting back to En for an explanation. Fyn, however, was quicker this time. “Because it—” He stopped himself as his leg shook in pain and hs dragged it onward. “Because it contains untold riches.”

En scoffed. “It’s wealthy, sure, but untold? Just because they have whole mage crews dedicated to shaping minerals and resources out of the rock doesn’t mean their riches are ‘untold.’”

Fyn turned, stifling a wince with his playfulness. “Really? Does any other city on the continent have those kinds of teams?”

“Well they—” En bit off words before they could come out. Then he sighed. “No. But that doesn’t mean anything. They’re obsessed with efficiency over there—it’s a symptom of that.”

Slowly, as the talk of Ord sprawled in front of me, the white flame crept out. It stopped with its fruitless efforts to latch onto new information. And with my own curiosity, I wasn’t one to let it go unfed.

“They’re obsessed with efficiency?” I asked, assuming it a good place to start.

The two bickering friends stopped and turned to me. En went first. “Yeah. Probably something that developed over however long the city has existed. In terrain this bad”—he gestured to the patch of jagged rocks only a few paces to our left—“they have to be good at making do. That’s why everything is so vertical, too. They don’t waste space.”

“There is an advantage of the terrain, though,” Kye piped up. En jerked his head back at that, but the huntress shrugged. “They don’t even have an order of knights like is usual around here, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer. “I’d bet they don’t get threatened all that often all the way out there.”

“Not except the cult,” I mumbled. The words just slipped out. And by the time I’d heard them, I’d gone as rigid as the people around me.

Silence crept in afterward. It forced us to think, to imagine ideas my words had brought out. Eventually though, I got tired. We’d already worried about that enough, dammit.

“If the…” I started, the question forming in my head as I spoke, “terrain gets worse as you progress through the range—what lies past Ord?”

All eyes turned to me. The three members of my backing part who I’d been talking rather casually with for the past handful of minutes rose from their thoughtful stupors only to glare. To fix me with gazes of confusion as if my question was ridiculous on the very face.

Kye’s expression softened first. She coughed once after blinking the glare away and brushed away a strand of chestnut hair from her face. My lips tweaked upward at the simple sight, my mind flashing to memories of more than a day past. Then I shook my head.

Another time, I reminded myself.

“I don’t—”

“Maybe nothing,” En said, cutting the huntress off. That was enough to bring her glare right back. “It’s hard enough to believe that Ord exists. But past that?” He shifted his shoulders as though shaking off a chill. “It might be impossible to build much of anything large-scale. And I… I don’t want to know what hides out there.”

“Probably just more mountains,” Fyn admitted. His cheer had bled into a sort of indifference at the question that apparently, none of them had considered before. “And Rath’s temple, I suppose.”

The silence swept back after that. Before any of us could even react to the statement, a blast of wind cut us off. We didn’t try to speak once it had gone. Not for a while, at least. Because none of us wanted to follow up what Fyn had said. From what we knew, Rath’s temple was out past Ord.

It was just a little hard to accept that the thing existed at all.

Each time I came back to it, the dread didn’t lighten. Even as I tried to be logical, even as I tried to remember our responsibility—it didn’t matter either way. Rath was imposing even as simply an idea. Yet we were marching against her near the moment of her rise. It didn’t sit well. It hadn’t sat well for days.

I shook my head. Tried to clear my thoughts and let the dread at least fall back to a place where I didn’t have to see it. Back down somewhere deep in the black void of my mind. And as the silence persisted—only sparsely interrupted by the laughter of knights far ahead of us—the white flame became bored.

It went back to the back of my mind. Back to trying to reconcile all of our incompatible memories that the beast had cursed us with sharing.

Instead of watching its obsession, though, I grabbed the hilt of my sword. I took a deep breath and raised my head.

“At least our legion will get bolstered even further in Ord,” I said, pouring every ounce of feeling I could into my voice. “We’ll pick up reinforcements and have time for rest and extra preparations.”

As my unconvinced words floated in the air, the rest of the backing party started to perk up. En still had his uninterested eyes fixed on the ground. Kye still stood with her shoulders locked and her lip curled. But Fyn grabbed the hopefulness, at least.

“Yes,” he said, still limping. “We will retrieve even more knights to assist our cause. Even more—” He cringed in pain and waved. We all knew what he was saying.

“We’ll also meet a Vimur,” En added. That term put a thin smile on his face, and it made the one on mine grow even more.

“Exactly!” Fyn said, smiling wider than his pain. “The Scorched Earth doesn’t stand a chance. Rath’s temple doesn’t stand a chance.” He chuckled, gesturing to the multiple rows of knights marching in front of us. “With all of this and more, I don’t think anything could stand a chance.”

“Being optimistic there,” En noted, visibly resisting the grin on his face.

“You should try it sometime, En,” Fyn shot back. Despite the weariness creeping in at the edge of his eyes, the cheerful knight was looking like himself again. Even as he fell quiet, the smile stayed up.

‘Optimistic’ felt like it didn’t even scratch the surface.

But, I supposed what he’d said was right. Not only could En use a little more optimism and hope—we all could. A thought that we had to remember if we were going to make it long enough to even see if our optimism was warranted in the first place. It was one that Kye seemed to appreciate as she perked up and held her head a little higher.

It was certainly a sentiment that I had to hold onto. Especially as time marched forward with even more regularity than our legion. As our next step came into view with a stone gate preceded by a myriad of stairs that revealed itself past the stone formations.

So that was what I did. I held onto it as tightly as my sword and believed it. It was important, I reminded myself.

Because whether we liked or not, we were almost there.