Chapter 112: THE MOUNTAIN’S PANTRY

The two watchers let them pass.

Aiden trusted that about as far as he could throw the mountain. He turned at every step, checking if the watchers moved.

The two sentinels’ eyes followed Aiden and Cinder, but neither moved to stop them.

He climbed up from the first shelf at midday, following a chimney of black glass that would have cooked a normal man in his boots.

"They’re letting us up," he said to Cinder on a ledge where the air bent with heat. "Which means they don’t care, or they want us somewhere."

Cinder’s ears were forward. She was already looking at the next stretch.

"I’ve stopped believing in don’t care." He glanced at Cinder. "Yours, I believe. You just keep walking."

Cinder’s tail wagged once, and she climbed a little faster toward the second shelf.

Aiden followed, then paused at the edge.

Heat rolled off the second shelf and made every breath harder. It was like walking into an oven.

Harvesters wore charms, the only protection they had against the first shelf’s heat. Even then, a third of them never came back. On the second shelf, those same charms would offer little protection.

Aiden had something else. He felt his own core climb to meet the heat.

Solar Plexus. For five seconds at a time, his body pushed the mountain’s heat away.

Then the five seconds ended, and the mountain’s heat slammed back against him.

Five on. Then nothing until it resets.

He used the five seconds to cross the hottest sections and rested on the cooler ledges between them.

After an hour, the rhythm felt almost natural.

I thought this trait protected me from the cold.

It was never about temperature. It keeps my body from being overwhelmed by the environment.

On the first shelf, the golden motes had been a thick haze.

Up here, Perception let him see through them. He could tell which parts of the black glass were solid and which were only a thin crust over a four-hundred-foot drop.

Where his plain eyes saw black death, Perception showed him a safe path through it.

Then the path ran out.

The black glass cracked open across the slope. A ten-foot gap separated the two sides, with nothing between but an incandescent glow.

Aiden looked at it for a while.

He raised his palm and drew out the Acid Weave. A thin green thread slipped from his skin. He stepped closer to the edge, swung his arm, and threw the thread across the gap.

It landed on the black glass on the other side and stuck.

He pulled on it once. The thread held.

Cinder jumped first. She cleared the gap and landed safely on the far side.

Aiden gripped the green thread with both hands and hauled himself across. His legs hung over the gap, and when he lowered his head to look down, Miasma pressed a foot against his cheek and pushed his face back toward Cinder.

Right. Right. No looking down. No imagining myself burning. Thank you.

Aiden pulled himself over the edge and rolled onto the burning ground. He stayed on his back for a moment, breathing hard.

Then he laughed. It came out thin.

"I’ve had this for months, and I used it to cut two ropes and melt a lock. I’m a slow learner. Don’t tell anyone," he said to the cat, who’d ridden across on Cinder’s shoulder and looked unimpressed.

Miasma climbed off his shoulder onto the hot glass and walked to the edge of the gap.

She looked down into the gap. Then she looked at the green thread stretched across it. Finally, she looked up at Aiden.

Her spines lifted once.

"Yes," Aiden said. "That was yours. I know."

She held his eyes for another second. Then she climbed back up his arm and settled.

Are you disappointed I’m not using the trait I inherited from you more, or happy I finally did?

She gave him the offended gaze, but only half of it. The other half looked almost approving.

Alright. Both then.

Aiden sat in one of the cracks to catch his breath. Nyx slipped from his coat and disappeared into the darkness ahead.

He watched it go. A moment later, it came back and led him toward a narrow split in the rock.

The gap was barely wide enough for him to squeeze through. Inside, the black glass gave way to rough stone, shaded from the mountain’s heat. The air was cooler there.

Aiden followed Nyx into the crack and felt the heat ease off his skin. He could breathe again.

Nyx slipped out again and continued ahead. It found another crack farther up the slope and waited for him there.

I thought I’d have to carry you all the way up and that you’d refuse to leave my coat with how little darkness there is in this country.

Instead, you’re finding every patch of cold the mountain leaves behind.

Aiden sat in one of those cracks with Nyx flat against his ribs and got his breath back.

"Thank you," he said.

Nyx did not move. It stayed against him as they climbed.

They reached the edge of the second shelf by dusk.

The climb had cost them two days. Two days he did not have.

Somewhere in the eastern wing of the Academy, a clerk turns a page and pauses over my name.

He’d deal with it if he survived.

He used the last of the light to scan the mountain through the golden haze for Magma Sap.

Sap so hot it should kill the tree carrying it. On his Perception, those trees would blend into the mountain.

He swept the second shelf. Nothing.

He scanned the slopes leading to the third shelf. Nothing.

Then he caught a faint flicker high on the mountain.

He gazed at it through the haze, searching for the source. The flicker grew brighter near the burning centre.

Then he saw them from the edge of the second shelf.

A grove of black-barked trees with orange veins running through their trunks, growing together in a sheltered bowl deep inside the mountain.

We found it!

Not one vial. A whole grove of it!

More than the smith said any man has ever seen.

Then he saw what surrounded the grove.

Watchers.

Not three. Not a picket-line on a fringe.

A ring. A dozen of them and more, standing close around the trees.

They’re guarding the trees.

And above them, coiled through the heart of the bowl, over and into the grove, was something so large his Perception could not give it a shape.

A flood within the flood. A fire so total it drowned out everything around it.

It sat, enormous and ancient.

"What the hell is that?" Aiden’s voice came out strangled, and only after the words escaped him did he realise he had stopped breathing.

He sat down, hand on his chest, and did the physician’s breathing exercise. His lungs were cured. But facing that thing, he was breathing like they weren’t.

That’s what everything on this mountain answers to.

And it’s guarding the trees that can take Cinder to Tier Three.

The sentries near the lower shelves were never there to keep climbers out.

They were part of the beast’s watch, guarding its pantry from the lowest shelf to the top.

Aiden sat at the edge of the second shelf in the failing light.

Cinder stood beside him, salivating as she stared toward the bowl.

"Of course it’s a pantry. Of course the thing that can save us from the cold is growing in the one place we can’t reach."

Cinder put her head against his shoulder and kept looking up at the bowl.

She was not afraid of it.

You’d walk up there tonight if I let you.

Then, because his new eyes never let him focus on just one thing, he turned and scanned the trail they had climbed.

He froze.

Far below, on the first shelf, the golden motes parted. A hole in the haze. Cold, in a country that was nothing but fire.

The Frost Wolf had followed them into the fire-country.

It was walking up the black glass on a frozen trail.

Please, just fall off the mountain.

It should not have been able to climb this far. Nothing cold should survive in this furnace. But it came on anyway, patient, certain, Vane’s.

It did not care that the country was wrong for it, because it had been trained to enjoy fire almost more than frost.

Aiden looked up at the pantry he could not raid.

Then down at the wolf he could not beat.

They were both on the same mountain now.

"Oh," he said. "Now that’s interesting."