The night was brittle with cold in the mountain wastes where Drake waited. The air was so sharp it seemed to cut the skin with every breath, the kind of cold that stole the warmth from bones and made silence feel eternal. His campfire smoldered low, little more than a circle of glowing embers gnawed down to ash. Now and then, a thin tongue of flame licked upward before withering, curling its smoke toward a starless void.
Drake had been listening for hours. He always listened, listened to the rhythm of silence, to the whispers of wind crawling between jagged rocks, to the solitary cry of a hunting hawk circling somewhere above. The wastes had a voice if one knew how to hear it, a voice of patience and stone.
And then the sound came.
A horn.
