Though part of Jon wanted to run screaming into the night as soon as the fighting was done, he couldn’t. Not only was the promise of food and warmth irresistible to him, but the entire complex was a strange cave of wonders that he might spend a lifetime studying and never understand. 

The giants that stood silently in the warehouse were only the largest and strangest of the mysteries, and though Jon figured out how to open one of them, the cockpit and their mechanisms of control were almost entirely inscrutable. There were familiar words and controls he’d seen in the train yards, of course, but there were other concepts like ‘hydraulics’ and ‘operational time’ which were entirely beyond him. 

For the next week, he spent each day looking for food and each night locked in the back office with a brand at the ready, reading through different manuals and reports in an effort to better understand why the dwarves would have a building full of weapons tucked away in the middle of nowhere, and no one to guard it. The answer seemed to be winter more than anything. This time of year, dwarves hated to be here, and humans would never dream of coming up this high into the middle of nowhere to a place that didn’t exist, officially, at least. 

One of the more interesting finds he located was a rail map of the region. He found the place he was labeled as ‘Giant Depot #4,’ on a lonely stretch of track deep in the white spires and more than fifty miles from the closest human villages marked on the map to the south. Jon had never seen the shield lands put into perspective like this because most dwarven maps only contained a single rail line or region, but now that he could see them all laid out, he at last understood why the mountains that Dalmarin was tucked away in were called the shield lands.

Perhaps a hundred and fifty miles to the east southeast of where Jon was now stood the White City there on the coast, and for over a hundred miles in every direction not covered by water lay the kingdom of men. The coast took up much of the southwest, but to the north and east were farmlands in every direction, all the way to the mountains, forming natural barriers in every direction. 

Jon wondered what lay beyond them, but the map didn’t say. What it did say, though, in a sense, was that the human lands used to be smaller. Along the edges of the kingdom’s current boundaries lay long stretches of rail line with occasional spurs that the dwarves used for some purpose. He could also see where older lines a few valleys back had served the same point previously in slowly expanding concentric circles that told the story of the kingdom’s growth as readily as tree rings told the story of how an oak might grow. 

Of course, it was also to see how the under kingdom laid out compared to the human kingdom above. He was able to find Khaghrumer less than 50 miles from Dalmarin without much trouble. He found the powder mill, too, eventually, or at least he thought he did. It was labeled Grulgenthor on the map, but it wasn’t so far from where he was now or the ocean, and he thought he might have walked that far in the dark. Most of the other cities meant nothing to him, but he did find it interesting that the capital of the deeps was almost due south of him, and at 40 miles to the west of the White City, it wasn’t so far from the human capital. Was that a coincidence, he wondered, or something more?

In the end, these theoretical questions eventually gave way to practical concerns. He also took the welcome respite to get clean for the first time in months, taking advantage of the dwarf’s love of hot water. Once that was done, he did a little crude sewing with some twine and turned his ratty furs into a pair of leggings that would hopefully be enough to get him out of the mountains. Once that was done, he made himself a shirt that was really more of a poncho out of a rug that seemed thick enough to keep the chill away. It was a garish red color which would make him visible in the snow from miles away, but given the choices, his priority was not freezing to death, and he had a lot of walking to do. 

Once that was done, he did his best to erase all traces he’d ever been there, and stealing a little more canned food and a lot of dwarvish powder, he grudgingly went back outside into the cold and, using the rail bed as a path to avoid the deepest snow he started down the slope. 

On his way out, Jon had contemplated just blowing the whole thing up somehow as another blow against his dwarvish captors, but with that much power in one place, he had no idea how he’d ever get to a safe distance in time. Leaving it like this - with nothing important taken and their people missing would be almost as unnerving to the stone men, though. They’d rip the mountain apart looking for the reason why, but they would never find one, he thought with a smile. 

The day of Jon’s departure was chosen almost as much for the weather as the feeling that he was starting to overstay his welcome. According to the schedule, trains visited the depot monthly, but the log books showed many unexpected visits as well, and Jon did not wish to be caught red-handed in a mountain fortress by a whole group of angry dwarves. So, with a brand on his shoulder supporting a satchel of supplies, he started walking down the mountain with a tuneless whistle on his lips while he appreciated the sun on his face. 

The weather wasn’t precisely warm, but it was warmer than it had been in days, and that was enough. Besides, with a few pounds of powder, he could now give himself a quick jolt of warmth whenever he felt the need. Still, Jon did this sparingly and stopped for the night whenever he found a good deadwood-laden campsite or a decently sheltered spot to hide from the wind, even if there were still hours left in the day. 

Jon followed the rails for another reason, too, of course: even if they weren’t the most path, they were his only hope of navigating his way out of the mountains without getting lost. As much as he liked the idea that he could just start walking between the two mountains that lay directly to his south, he knew from his short trips through deep snow that way was fifty times harder and a hundred times more dangerous, even if it might be ten times shorter. 

This advantage faded a little bit after the fourth night when he was forced to huddle for safety under a towering fir tree and spend three days tending a tiny campfire until the snow and the wind died down. He wasn’t too worried, though. He still had more than a week of food and a blanket that made sleep almost bearable. 

After the storm finally cleared, and he started walking again, the trail was a little more difficult, and his walking was a little slower, but the canyon of snow that came up to his shoulders in places was no less difficult to follow, at least. Even if Jon was no longer making good time, he knew that every step was getting him closer to civilization. 

On the third day after the blizzard stopped, the final rise and looked down into the valley that lay beyond. There the elevation was low enough that the white slopes of snow eventually gave way to the green bottomlands of the valley near the horizon, and that made him happy enough to take a break and give thanks to all the gods he could think of that might have had a hand in his deliverance. 

“I’m not home free yet,” he cautioned himself as he felt his joy starting to bubble over. From the way the rails meandered, he could see they were following a cliff line or perhaps paralleling a frozen river under the snow, and there wasn’t a ton of firewood between here and there, but soon. In another night or two, he would be sleeping on grass instead of ice, and he couldn’t wait to experience such luxury. 

The view of distant warmth and the rain showers that followed the following day did nothing to warm him, but Jon kept going, even though all that, until his fine dwarven boots were splashing through the slush, and then the mud and his path got lower and lower. 

On Jon’s first day amongst the early spring grasses, he slept at a roadside shrine to Hestiana that was obviously rarely visited even by the farmers of the area, and he left her a few of the copper eighths he’d taken off the dead dwarves at the giant depot. She wasn’t the most appropriate choice, of course, but hers was the only shrine that lay here for him to show his obedience to the divine. As a traveler, Tollen-va, the god of merchants, would have been a better choice, and Bendona, the goddess of secrets and death, would have worked almost as well since he was technically a criminal on the run, even if no one knew it but him. 

Two days later, he saw his first village, which had been named Crondell on the map he’d previously studied, but Jon decided to steer well clear of it since it had a train station. Trains meant dwarves, after all, and In a place this small, he would be remembered if he lingered. He had no doubt that when his break-in in the mountains was discovered, they would go at least this far in their search for answers if not all the way to the sea. 

So he skirted the edge of the fields and pastures that bordered town and traveled through the area as quickly as possible on his trip south. Now he didn’t follow the rail line specifically because people might see him and think it strange. Instead, he followed the main trade road that went further south as he got closer to his sisters’ homes one step at a time. 

It was only when he was completely out of food that he started asking some of the farmers along the way if they might help a stranger. Of course, he wrapped his brand in a cloth first because it was rare to see a human with one and would have raised questions, but it turned out that his ragged outfit and unkept hair were enough to raise enough questions all on their own. And he was refused far more often than he was aided as he made his way slowly between the small communities that dotted the lower slopes of the Whitespine Mountains. 

Still, hunting was always an option, and he spent the best part of a week in a forest hunting camp after he brought down a deer, skinning it and taking the time to smoke as much meat as possible for the road that lay ahead. Technically he was sure he was poaching on some lord’s land, but the area was so wild that he doubted anyone would notice. 

The stop was a nice rest, especially in light of the rain, but it would get him no closer to the sea, so eventually, he ate his fill, then he packed what he could carry and kept going. Another week went by, and another list of names of villages and hamlets he’d never see again. Tarvaren. Jacob’s Hollow. Frostburg. Lake Town. 

Each of them was reminiscent of his home in their own way, but otherwise equally forgettable except for that last one. Lake town struck him as odd enough to ask about since there was no lake there, but he learned that was something dwarves had done years before. It turned out that there used to be a river and a whole chain of lakes that went to the sea, but then one day, the dwarves decided that the water was needed elsewhere, so they just took it all away.

While that sounded strange to Jon, he had to admit that between the giants and managing to survive long enough to walk halfway from the edge of the known world to the sea, it wasn’t the strangest thing he’d heard on this trip by a long shot.