“Days. Not quite a week.” I looked at the sky. “The last heavy snowfall was four days ago. These are partially filled.”
“So whatever made them was here before us.”
“Yes.”
“And came from the north.”
“Yes.”
He looked northward, a slight change flickering across his face. It wasn't exactly fear, but rather a calm, calculated expression—like a man trained to assess threats and currently doing so.
“Captain, let’s hurry your men along with their task.” He waited for the two men to move away. “And there’s nothing north of here?”
“Nothing,” I confirmed. “According to everything I know, there's nothing north of Iskaeld.”
“And what do you feel?” he asked me quietly. He saw my sharp look and met my gaze without flinching. It was the closest he'd come to saying it outright, or I was being extra paranoid. “What does your gut say, Trailfinder?”
My gut.
“Something's wrong,” I said carefully. “This whole place feels… off.” I watched him closely. “But you already know that. It’s why you’re here, isn’t it? It’s not for diamonds.”
He didn't confirm or deny it. He just held my gaze with that steady, unreadable attention, letting the silence sit between us like a third person.
“The tracks lead into the tunnel,” Baxley said quietly, walking up behind me. I hadn’t noticed him walk away. “I checked. They’re faint, but now I know what to look for.”
Nicco turned to him. “You went back in.”
“Briefly.” Baxley's voice was entirely unrepentant. “There are signs all the way down. Whatever it was, it went where you went.”
The column.
I thought about the pulse. The resonance. The way my magic had opened like the lid had been taken off whatever had been containing it.
I thought about Skallfen, and the Frosttaken that walked its streets. About the Hulgrim, and the Drift Wolves, and the way this entire journey north had felt less like a path chosen and more like one followed.
“We need to go back down,” I said, turning back to Nicco.
“No,” Nicco said with the flat finality of someone not to be argued with.
I stepped closer to him. “Something has been to that column. Something that came from the north, where nothing is supposed to exist. Don't you want to know?—”
“I want to leave this basin before the light fails.” He turned to search for Marson. “Captain, pack up your men. We leave soon.”
Marson looked between us with the expression of a man who had long since decided the friction between Nicco and me wasn’t what he was getting paid for. “Aye,” he said, then turned to his soldiers.
I glared at Nicco, and he met my glower with a cool tolerance that only fueled my anger.
“You're making a decision without all the information,” I said, knowing my jaw was tight. I wasn’t going to win this argument, but that didn’t mean I wasn’t going to try.
“I'm making a decision with the information Ihave.” His voice was equally quiet, but cold and precise. “Which is that something larger than a man has been visiting a strange underground column that almost feels alive, in the northernmost part of a kingdom where monsters roam, and we are nothing but a handful of soldiers, three mercenaries, and one trailfinder with wet boots.” He held my gaze coolly. “We have what we came for. We leave.”
“Whatdidwe come for?” I asked, refusing to budge. “Because I don’t see any people for you to count.”
His expression shifted into one that looked a lot like exasperation. Or irritation. Either way, I saw it before he could mask it.
“Evidence,” he said. “That's what we came for. And we have it.”
He walked toward the tunnel entrance, where the soldiers were beginning to gather their gear, and I stood in the basin with Baxley beside me, the pulse in my chest, and the footprints of something enormous leading down into the dark.
