Looking down at Emberhollow was an interesting site in the winter. Steam from the forges billowing out from chimneys, creating swirling clouds that caught in the wind before quickly disappearing. Below the hurried scutter of dwarves from one hearth to another, all seeking shelter from the cold.

  Today was in fact a good day for work.

  Turning back to the chosen path he hitched his pack and tightened his hood against the wind. It would make for great fires, if anyone found a way to harness its essence. Focusing on his footing, Harbek searched for the first marker.

  Harbek had chosen this route because its marks had faded. When one of the old surveyors was questioned about it, they only shrugged and stated “Wasn't important. The vein was dry”.

  He crossed an old line of cairns half-buried in frost, then a cut stone scar along the ridge — markers meant for those who knew how to look. They confirmed the path without insisting on it.

  He left a single smooth stone tucked into the sheltered crook – unmarked, but set where another would notice. Safe passage if you knew how to read it.

  Carefully making his way up the trail the wind started to change pace and direction. Harbek's gaze constantly picking out small divots where water pooled - a soft memory of old footsteps. Every so often a crude downstroke scarred a rock, too clean to be natural.

  The wind whipped at his cloak now. With clumsy fingers, numbed from the cold, he tied the cloak down the middle to cut the worse of it. Keeping his hands free for balance.

  His breath streamed thick as he climbed higher, the path fading until it was little more than a suggestion. Ahead, another set of Cairns sat wedged against a fork where the chasm narrowed. One path sloped left and downward, its stones were smooth with use. The right lay almost untouched save for a few markers Harbek didn't recognize.

  He stopped only long enough to tear a small chunk off the bread and take a drink of water that bit the back of his throat. He pulled out the charcoal and gave a quick rub under one of the unfamiliar cairns –a quiet acknowledgement, nothing more – then turned right.

  The chasm narrowed as he followed it, walls closing enough that the wind lost its bite, turning instead into a low, restless moan that passed overhead rather than through him. The markers thinned here—older, more uncertain—until at last the stone walls broke apart entirely.

  Unauthorized usage: this tale is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

  Harbek stepped out onto the mountain’s face.

  The world opened all at once. Below him, Emberhollow was gone—swallowed by distance and stone. Above, the sky had cleared into a deepening dusk, stars beginning to prick through the thinning cloud. Far off to the west, the storm still raged, a dark, churning wall of snow and wind tearing across the peaks it had already passed. Lightning flared once within it, distant and soundless, like a memory of violence rather than the thing itself.

  The wind here was steady but clean, no longer searching for him. It tugged at his cloak and then let go.

  Harbek stood for a long moment, reading the mountain the way his father had taught him to read metal—watching how the air moved, how the snow settled, where the stone had been scoured smooth and where it gathered in quiet drifts. He could go higher. The path allowed for it. But there was no urgency left in the air, no insistence.

  Not tonight.

  He turned his gaze back toward the stone behind him and began looking—not for a path forward, but for a place the mountain would allow him to stay.

  Following the chasm back down the trail he’d come, Harbek kept his eyes out for small kindling and old man's beard for starter. He found shelter beneath a large, windswept pine, its fallen trunk creating a shallow overhang against the mountain face — just wide enough, a little taller than himself, with a natural recess cut into the stone.

  At the shelter Harbek gave the trunk and roots a quick once-over.

  They will hold.

  He set the kindling up carefully, tucking the old man's beard beneath it, then he steps back out to drag a severed limb from the fallen pine. Returning with it, he retrieved his pack and struck the fire steel along the spin of his knife sparks catching quickly in the waiting tinder.

  Once the fire had taken and the chance of smothering it had passed he fed the limb in slowly. Green wood, but it would burn well enough now.

  Harbek ate slowly, tearing the bread with his hands and letting the heat from the fire seep back into his fingers. The wind moved above him, but the shelter held.

  He checked his gear without hurry—cord dry, steel where it should be, knife clean. His hammer rested within reach, its weight familiar even at rest.

  Satisfied, he set his flask beneath the lip of stone where meltwater slid free from the warming rock, catching drops as the fire coaxed them loose. By morning it would be cold, clean, and full.

  He fed the fire once more and let it settle, watching the coals breathe and dim. Outside, the mountain lay quiet in the storm’s wake, stars sharp and unblinking above the broken ridge. Harbek leaned back against his pack and pulled his cloak close, eyes lingering on the dark slope beyond the shelter’s mouth.

  The mountain did not turn him away.