To call the Blasting Mountains a mountain range was like calling a kitchen knife a lethal weapon. It could be argued to be true, but it missed enough vital context that it seemed disingenuous.

  The mountains looming in the distance were not the largest on the continent. That title went to Mount Bromid, so tall that the cold and thin air was nearly impossible to adapt to. It was truly a place that only a god could survive.

  Nor were the Blasting Mountains in the most expansive range. That would be the Coastal Mountains in the south of Eswar. They stretched across most of the north-western seaboard, running right into the Empty Gulf. Their depths have never been fully explored.

  No, the Blasting Mountains had pure danger as their claim to fame. They were arguably the least hospitable area on the whole continent, never mind that they were far and away the most dangerous range of mountains. The cloying ash and smoke hung thick in the air, putting to shame the difficulties of breathing on Mount Bromid. Visibility was dubious outside of sporadic valleys where the smoke failed to settle, making navigation troublesome even where it wasn't outright impossible.

  And then there was the terrain. Jagged rocks jutted from every surface that wasn't carved from razor-sharp obsidian. Lava flowed like water from volcanoes that could not contain the pressure within, bursting from the sides of mountains where the material ejecting from the crater could not keep up with the broiling gases within. Valleys between volcanoes provided the only relief from the cloying air, yet they were filled with countless layers of ejecta that made every step into a harsh scramble.

  Despite all that it was still a preferable route to the one where Durin the Heavy would be hounding us until our deaths, where even Drifter seemed unsure about his prospects in a real fight. We could see Durin sporadically on the horizon, little more than a hovering dot at the extreme distance he followed us at, but as long as we travelled no further south he seemed to be content with our path. He would protect his territory, which seemed to encompass some amount of the Plains of Shattered Glass and Black Desert that we tried to pass through, but he cared little about our passage into the mountains.

  It was a shame that Durin was intent on being our enemy as his presence seemed to hold the mana storms of the plains at bay. With that, we only needed a little luck to avoid an ash storm coming over the Blasting Mountains, and we seemed to hit that minor jackpot.

  Looking at Drifter's condition, I figured that was for the best. Since his engagement with Durin, such as it was, he appeared haggard in a way I had never seen in him before. He was physically fine, fully capable of keeping up with us and carrying his enormous load of tent frames, but his eyes were unfocused in the way I only recognized in myself from days spent studying without sleep. It was a mental weariness that could drag down one's whole being if they pushed too hard.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  As we crossed the Black Desert, seemingly clear to approach the mountains, I fell in line with Drifter. "Do you need to rest? You look exhausted and it's not getting better."

  He shook his head. "No. Rest won't help."

  Normally he would see the confusion on my face after a bit and clarify, but today his eyes were locked just ahead of his feet, so I had to be explicit. "Why not?"

  "It's Durin." I looked at the dot floating along the horizon, keeping pace with us since we last saw him. "He rejects my presence. I think."

  "I'm not sure I understand."

  He shrugged. "I don't either."

  We reached the foot of the mountains just before nightfall. Without storms to slow us down, and with a terrible monster lurking just at the edge of our sight, we crossed the distance significantly faster than we had as we fled the storms into the plains.

  As I traced the path and timeline in my head, I wondered if something unnatural had happened to help us along. Did Durin have some magic that shuffled us away without noticing? Or maybe there was some more literal sense in which this was a time between ages, as the preachers called it. I was unsure whether it added up.

  That evening Olivia sat with me as I pondered these questions and organized my notes. She seemed to be doing some thinking of her own, as it took her some time to ask me a question. "What am I still doing here? My brain says I should cut my losses and head back north, probably to Norport at this point, but I can't seem to bring myself to go. And now is the time, even if the desert is going to suck; the mountains are going to be horrible."

  "I have no idea. Honestly, I'm not sure why you came with us to begin with." Not that I didn't appreciate having another relatively normal person in our party, but I did have the thought more than once that she had the least reason to be in this situation out of all of us. It would have made the most sense for her to cut north out of the Beornian borderlands long before we entered the Wastelands. Wystole was in a civil war, Beornia would follow suit soon, and Leuthernia was difficult to make a living in, but all of those options were better than the Wastelands to the average person.

  Olivia was quiet for a moment as she constructed her next question. "Why are you so set on travelling with Drifter? I can't seem to peg him down, which makes it doubly hard to peg you down."

  "Oh, that's easy," I replied as I slid my papers into a protective folio. "I think he's going to join and win the Contest, so I'm recording his journey."

  "Does he know that?"

  "I informed him."

  She laughed. "So, what, you met him at a bar and saw him beat someone up in a really cool way?"

  "No, actually, he happened across me while I was being mugged and beat up the bandits in a really cool way." I reflected on the moment, as well as the days that followed. "Then... he kind of ignored me and I followed him? And I guess we became friends somewhere along the way? And then in Faraton we met Orwyn and we all travelled to Beorne together, then you know what happened there..." I felt like I was missing something, but we really hadn't done much leading up to the incident in Beorne, and we really hadn't done much since. I looked to Olivia for an explanation of my recent life choices.

  "Don't look at me. We're apparently both making questionable travel choices." She stood up and stretched. "Well, I don't know why, but that settled my brain a bit. See you in the morning."

  Unfortunately, my brain was less settled. I pondered what the hell I was doing walking into the Blasting Mountains for a biography until I was ready to pass out.