The dawn broke slow and colorless, as if the sun itself had faltered at the sight of what Hollow Pass had become. A gray light seeped into the valley, laying bare the ruin that the night's shadows had tried to conceal. What had once been a battlefield was now a charnel plain, every ridge and slope carved into testimony of men's fury and men's fragility. Broken spears jutted like rotten teeth from the ground. Armor glinted dully beneath heaps of ash. The bodies of horses lay twisted beside their riders, their eyes wide and blind, mouths frozen in final screams.
Ryon stood in the heart of it.
The cheering had died with the night, replaced now by a silence as heavy as the stones that lined the gorge. Men busied themselves with the work of the living: gathering the wounded, stacking the dead, tending the fires. Yet even amid that labor, their gazes returned again and again to him, the warlock, the vessel who had not broken.
