In the black throat of the ice tunnel, Mu Qingyan led the way, one hand wrapped around Cai Zhao's, the other lifting a night pearl high above his head. The pearl's glow was thin, but it was enough to pick out the path ahead. At every fork he pressed a strip of cloth to the air, reading which way it stirred, then left a mark before moving on.
Cai Zhao stumbled behind him, worse off even than the plump Jin Baohui at her side. She could not stop seeing it: Qian Xueshen's severed head rolling to a stop at her feet, his face still locked in terror. She had already retched against the ice wall once, tears falling one after another, her palm scraping raw against the wall as she fought to stay upright.
This was the first time in her life she had watched a friend die.
Somewhere in the dark, it occurred to her how unlike her aunt she truly was. Cai Pingshu had never feared the unknown, only craved it. A bottomless cave would have sent her in eagerly, torch raised. A storm at sea would have met her at the prow, daring the waves to do their worst.
Her aunt's nature ran toward light even where the path did not. Across a lifetime of reckless adventure, Cai Pingshu had buried friends and brothers without number, yet she never let grief root in her. She simply walked forward, again, lighter for it somehow.
Time stretched unbearably as the ground beneath them began to climb. Over Jin Baohui's labored breathing, Cai Zhao asked quietly, "How long have we been walking, do you think?"
Mu Qingyan answered at once, his calm unbothered by the dark. "An hour and a half. We can rest here a moment."
When Jin Baohui moved to sit, Mu Qingyan kicked him further off without a word. Jin grumbled but obeyed, shuffling ahead with his torch, knowing he held no cards to play.
Mu Qingyan spread his grey fur cloak on the ice for the girl to sit on.
She looked up at him, puzzled. "How did you know it's been an hour and a half?"
"Your pulse," he said, settling beside her. "It was racing earlier. It's steadied now."
They sat close enough to hear each other's hearts. Beside her, his stillness felt like something load bearing, a mountain she could lean her weight against, and slowly her own pulse began to match it.
"Zhaozao," he said, low.
"Mm?"
"Qian Xueshen's death isn't on you. He was already theirs. They'd have killed him the moment he stopped being useful, sooner or later."
"I know that."
"Then why do you look like you've left part of yourself behind somewhere?"
"My aunt always said I was too soft for this life. Not built for the jianghu."
"That's a lazy thing to say about a person."
"It isn't, though. I've always been like this. When old Sand Pot next door sold his shop and went back to the country, I didn't touch wonton for a month."
"Did the new place's wontons taste worse?"
"No. They were good, even better, pork bone and shrimp powder in the broth. I was still sad. It felt like proof that nothing stays, that the world doesn't keep anything beautiful for long. New things can be wonderful and still not be the same as what they replaced."
Cai Zhao had always wanted nothing more than a quiet life: clear water, a busy little street market, the ordinary rhythm of days.
She and her aunt had never been cut from the same cloth.
Mu Qingyan turned to study her. "How old were you when you found out Lady Cai wouldn't live long?"
"Seven, eight. Five, six. I don't really remember," she said, shaking her head. "Nobody in my family hid it from me. They told me my aunt was sick, that no one knew how much time she had. They couldn't have hidden it even if they'd tried. She was always drinking some bitter decoction, soaking in herbal baths, taking needles. I wasn't blind to what that meant."
Mu Qingyan leaned back against the ice. "Your family wanted to prepare you early, so the loss wouldn't break you when it came. I don't think they considered what it does to a small child, growing up with that thought always sitting in the room."
"My aunt said the same. She never agreed with telling me so young, either." Cai Zhao shrugged, the gesture flat. "But my mother said every child of the jianghu needs a little tragedy to grow into, or they don't belong."
"My mother used to dread it too, when she was small. Being shaved bald, never tasting meat again. She and my father both lost their parents young. And look how they turned out, righteous, fierce, fighting on the side that mattered, miles better than soft children like the Songs or the Yangs who never lost anything at all."
Mu Qingyan let out a low laugh. "Your mother sounds formidable."
"She is. When I was little I used to wish flowers would never wilt, that the moon would stay full forever, that happiness would just stay. My mother told me to go to sleep and stop turning it over in my head. She said: if flowers never withered, how would we know to treasure the bloom? If the moon never waned, how would fullness mean anything? If sorrow never touched us, how would we recognize joy when it came?"
As a child, Cai Zhao had been terrified of all of it: loss, death, anything that threatened to disturb a happiness she wanted frozen in place.
"Do you understand it now?" Mu Qingyan asked.
"I'm still working it out. I think one day it'll just make sense." She had no choice but to face it now, whether it made sense or not.
Something in her expression carried both understanding and helplessness at once. It moved him, and he pulled her closer without thinking.
"Brother," she said after a silence, the word fitting comfortably in her mouth now.
"Yes?"
"What kind of man was Nie Hengcheng?"
He blinked, caught off guard. "Why ask about him, of all people, right now?"
"When I was small I used to play along the Qingluo River. Boats passed, but I never saw fishermen there. Later I learned why, that after the great battle at Qingluo, the men loyal to Nie Hengcheng died in such numbers their bodies choked the river. The fishermen swore off eating anything caught from those waters, ever since."
"My father told me that night, Zhao Tianba, Han Yisu, and the rest realized too late they'd walked into a trap, surrounded on every side. They didn't retreat. They chose to die avenging him instead. My father always said that whatever else they were, demon cult or not, their loyalty to that one man was something worth admiring."
Mu Qingyan went quiet for a moment before he answered. "Across our sect's history, plenty of leaders, Patriarchs, Law Kings, Elders, even the Four Altar Masters, have kept their people in line with drugs. Nie Hengcheng never did. He wouldn't touch it himself, and he despised it in others. My father always said his talent, his strategic mind, came once in a generation. Young, he fought at the front of every battle. Older, he turned hard and exacting. To your Northern Chen sects he was a demon. To us, he was the thing that held everything together when the storm came."
"He sounds like he was a good man, then. Why did he turn so cruel later, so hungry for blood?"
"Because he stumbled into a martial art too powerful for any one man to hold."
"The same one Elder Yin Dai wanted so badly?"
"That one." His voice dropped. "I don't know its details, even now. My father only ever called it an ancient, almost divine technique, something that should have vanished from the world a long time ago."
Cai Zhao took that in. "I see."
"There's a kind of restraint that comes from knowing your own limits," he went on. "Once a man finds he can move mountains and part seas, that restraint disappears with it. My father grieved for what happened to him, more than he ever said outright."
She gave a bitter half smile. "That tracks. Though if we had the power to move mountains and seas right now, we'd already be out of here, and Qian Xueshen would still be breathing."
Mu Qingyan's brow drew tight, some answer forming, when Jin Baohui's voice tore through the tunnel ahead, shrill with excitement. "Come quick! Hurry, get over here!"
They scrambled up and ran toward him. Jin Baohui was on his knees, stabbing a dagger frantically into the ice wall. "Help me dig!"
Mu Qingyan caught his shoulder. "Slow down. Tell us what's happening first." Behind him, he heard the girl's breath catch, and turned.
They had reached a junction where several tunnels met, ice walls all around opening onto paths that vanished into the dark. The recent tremor had cracked the surface open here and there, exposing bodies that had been sealed inside for who knew how long. Near Cai Zhao's feet, a stiffened, purple hand jutted from the wall, fingers splayed at an unnatural angle. Behind Mu Qingyan, half a bluish face stared out, features twisted, eyes bulging, something out of a nightmare. The wall Jin Baohui was attacking had given up half a shoulder.
"Help me get the body out!" Jin babbled, barely coherent. "I'll reward you, handsomely, I mean, I'll repay the favor however I can, Young Master Yan, please."
"Not until you explain," Mu Qingyan said flatly.
Jin Baohui fought with himself for a moment, clearly realizing his own strength wasn't going to crack ice this hard. He broke first. "Fine, fine, I'll tell you. Look, in the corpse's right hand, there's a little bottle. I need that bottle."
Cai Zhao leaned in. Sure enough, frozen in the dead hand was a small jade bottle, apricot yellow, three or four inches long, its mouth bound in dull copper wire. "What's special about a bottle? Something valuable inside it?"
She caught the flicker in his eyes, the calculation of whether to lie. "Elder Jin," she said, almost gently, "tell the truth. If it really doesn't concern us, we'll help without a fight. But if you're playing us for fools, well, my brother doesn't have much patience, and we owe you nothing."
Mu Qingyan obliged her with a cold snort on cue.
Jin Baohui caved instantly. "All right, all right! I'm not lying, it really won't matter to you. It's saliva, from a rare beast. Have you ever heard of the Snow Scale Dragon Beast?"
Both of them went still at the name, traded a glance, and shook their heads with carefully blank faces.
Oblivious, Jin pressed on, eyes shining. "A legend. Full grown, bigger than a small courtyard, wings folded along its ribs, claws like blades. It could go anywhere but the sea, sky or land, didn't matter. They called it the Celestial Martial God, the Dragon King of solid ground. The old Northern Chen ancestors supposedly kept a handful, and they turned the tide more than once in the war against the demon cult."
Longing burned plainly in his face as he spoke.
"Even if it is the saliva," Cai Zhao said, unconvinced, "how could you possibly know that through solid ice?"
"You don't smell that?" Jin said, urgent. "Spicy, sweet, a thread of green underneath. It must have spilled while he was running, before he froze or starved right here in this tunnel."
Once he said it, they both caught it too, faint and strange beneath the cold. Cai Zhao still wasn't sold. "This body has to be centuries old. How would any scent survive that long?"
"Because it doesn't freeze," Jin said, swallowing hard. "Snow Scale Dragon saliva only melts under heat, never cold. A mountain like this would keep that scent locked in forever."
Mu Qingyan made a noncommittal sound, then pressed his palm flat against the ice and pushed his strength into it. The wall cracked along several seams at once, fragments sloughing away to expose the body trapped within.
Cai Zhao noticed something, a half second where his hand had hesitated against the ice before he struck.
In that gap, Jin Baohui lunged forward with his dagger, hacking at the frozen fingers until the bottle came free. He shook it, listening to the slow shift of liquid inside, pulled the stopper, and tipped a drop onto his palm. He sniffed it, tasted it, and his whole face lit with something close to madness. "This is it. This is really it."
Cai Zhao looked away. "That's hundreds of years old, Elder Jin. Mind your stomach. Are you certain it's what you think it is? Don't get this wrong."
"It's real!" Jin was nearly giddy. "In the old days there were Snow Scale Dragons everywhere, you'd cross paths with one during ordinary training. They thinned out over the generations and went extinct roughly a hundred and sixty years back. Plenty of sects kept stores of the saliva for its restorative properties. My family bred beasts once, we had some too. I saw the last bottle as a boy, smelled it, tasted it. I know exactly what this is."
He clutched the bottle like he might float away with happiness, right up until Mu Qingyan plucked it from his hands without effort.
"Hey! Give that back!" Jin lunged, furious.
Mu Qingyan brushed him off with one palm, smiling. "Mind your tone. You'll frighten my sister, and you really can't afford to do that."
Jin sailed back two zhang and peeled himself off the ice, sore everywhere but too cowed to argue.
Mu Qingyan turned the bottle slowly between his fingers. "So this is what brought you up this mountain. Dragon saliva."
"That's right," Jin said carefully.
"If it's worth this much trouble, why would I hand it over?"
Panic flared. "No, no, it's not precious, not like that! I mean, it has value, but not, not that kind! Ah, let me explain properly." He gathered himself. "The saliva does have restorative qualities, sure, but nothing unique to it. Plenty of other remedies do the same. Snow ginseng from this very mountain works better for healing cultivators than this stuff ever did. Think about it: if it were truly so rare and powerful, how could the old sects have burned through their stores so easily? My family had plenty when I was a boy, that's how I got to see it firsthand. We didn't think much of it back then. When my grandfather was hurt once and we ran out of fresh bear gall, we used a whole bottle of this as a stopgap, no hesitation."
He sighed with real regret. "If I'd known I'd need it someday, I'd have kept that bottle instead of wasting it."
Cai Zhao and Mu Qingyan exchanged a look.
Whatever the saliva actually did, neither intended to give it up. They still had an impostor to expose within the Qingque Sect. But there was more to learn here first.
Reading their silence as hesitation, Jin pushed harder. "I'm telling the truth, ask any elder once you're home. This isn't some miracle cure that brings back the dead or regrows bone. It's an ordinary tonic, nothing more. The real prize from a Snow Scale Dragon is its heart, its liver, its horn. Those, they say, can multiply a cultivator's power several times over."
Watching the greed twist his face, Cai Zhao felt nothing but revulsion.
"You haven't given us a shred of proof," Mu Qingyan said evenly. "You're betting on our youth to make us careless. For all we know, this bottle holds something priceless. If you want me to believe a word of this, it's simple: if the saliva really means nothing, tell us what you actually want it for."
Something shifted behind Jin's eyes, but he wouldn't give ground. "Everyone in the jianghu keeps secrets, Young Master Yan. Don't push me on this one. Tell you what, hand over the bottle and pick anything from my family's three heirlooms in trade: the Eye of the Fire Qilin, the venom sac of the Blood Swamp Lizard, or a Seven Zhenzhu Lotus from Penglai. I'll bite my finger and swear to it right now."
That landed harder than anything before it. Treasures like those, offered without hesitation, told them exactly how badly he wanted this bottle. Mu Qingyan had no intention of letting it go now, and kept needling at him, trying to draw out the truth.
Jin was close to breaking when a voice, achingly familiar, drifted in from the direction the air was moving.
"Hold on, old Lan! Guide us out first, then you can die if you must. I'll see your mother's taken care of."
A weaker, equally familiar voice answered. "Don't trouble yourself over my mother. I've left her land and money enough. The girl she took in recently is loyal, and she has spirit. She'll do right by her."
Hu Tianwei and Lan Tianyu. There was no mistaking either voice.
Jin Baohui's face transformed with relief. He scrambled toward the sound without a backward glance, shouting, "Hu Zi! Hu Tianwei, I'm here, I'm—" and promptly tripped into a heap of ice debris, sinking to the waist with his legs kicking uselessly.
Mu Qingyan hauled him out by the ankles. Jin came up coughing, clutching his throat, his face purpling, having apparently swallowed a chunk of ice somewhere in the fall.
Cai Zhao thumped his back. "Spit it out, or make yourself sick if you have to. That ice has bodies frozen through it. Don't swallow anything that isn't ice." Even saying it made her stomach turn.
Against expectation, Jin clamped his jaw shut, stiffened his neck, dragged in a few forced breaths, and kept running.
She stared after him, baffled.
When they finally reached the open chamber, it took her breath away. A wide circular space, roughly ten zhang across and seven or eight high, bright with daylight filtering down through ice thin enough to glow gold overhead.
After so long crawling through black, narrow passages, the sight of real sunlight nearly undid her. "We can get out from here?"
Lan Tianyu sat slumped against the wall, breathing hard. "We've reached the upper crevice. No more searching needed. The ice above is less than two chi thick. Someone with real strength could break straight through."
He meant Hu Tianwei. He meant Mu Qingyan.
Looking around, Cai Zhao counted only Hu Tianwei, Lan Tianyu, and the mute servant beside Jin Baohui, herself, and Mu Qingyan. And one more thing: the massive carcass of a woolly rhino, its fur matted with blood, one eye ruined. The smaller of the pair they'd encountered.
"How did this happen?" she asked.
Hu Tianwei answered with obvious pride. "It tried to ambush me. I finished it. Wounded the other one too."
A man who'd killed a woolly rhino alone earned a different kind of respect. "Hu Zi, that's impressive."
Lan Tianyu laughed, cold and short. "The impressive one is the old servant there. His skill runs deep, his methods are vicious, and his aim with poison darts doesn't miss. Even the demon cult breeds talent like that, it seems. I'll give him that much."
Cai Zhao glanced twice at the silent old man while Mu Qingyan crouched beside the rhino's body, examining the black blood crusted around its nose and mouth. Hu Tianwei snorted and turned away, done with them for now.
She moved closer to Lan Tianyu. "Senior, where's Hero Zhou? Miss Qinong, the others?"
"We lost each other when the cave gave way," he said, shaking his head. "Don't worry for them, they've got supplies. If they avoid that blue eyed python and follow the air the way we did, they'll find their way out eventually."
A little of the tightness in her chest eased. She knelt beside him. "Senior Lan, let me carry you up once we're through. My qinggong is solid. Once we're off this mountain you can get proper treatment."
He shook his head, a bitter edge to his smile. "Doesn't matter whether I go up or stay here. Save your strength. I know what this is."
His face had gone paper white, his breath thin, his eyes drifting unfocused now and then. She understood then how far past saving he was, how long his injuries had been left untreated.
"I haven't lived a life worth much praise," he said, the words coming slow. "More bad than good, if I'm honest. Dying now isn't a tragedy. You've got a good heart, girl. Don't waste it here. Get down this mountain."
"That's right," Hu Tianwei said, strolling closer with a smile. "Hand over the bottle and go. No reason to linger." Beside him, Jin Baohui wore a look of smug malice, having clearly told them everything about the bottle already.
Cai Zhao let out a short, scornful laugh, certain that she and Mu Qingyan together could handle him without much trouble. But when she turned, she found Mu Qingyan rigid, his expression gone cold, already shifting his body to stand between her and Hu Tianwei.
She didn't understand the shift, not yet.
Hu Tianwei advanced, slow and deliberate, a thin smile twisting his mouth. "Young Yan. Be smart. Hand the bottle over, it's worthless to you. Why hold onto something that means nothing to your side? Cooperate with us and you'll find—"
He never finished. Jin Baohui's scream cut him off, raw and agonized. He doubled over, clutching his stomach, writhing on the ice. "It hurts, it hurts! Something's inside me, someone help, please—"
The room froze in shock.
For one breath Cai Zhao thought it a trick, until she saw the color draining from his face, the sweat pouring off him in sheets. This was real. She had no idea what could possibly be causing it.
Jin tore his own robe open with shaking hands, baring his round stomach to the cold air.
What she saw made her skin crawl. Beneath the skin, something was moving, the flesh rippling and bulging as if alive from the inside.
Hu Tianwei pinned one hand to Jin's shoulder, drew his judge's pen with the other. "Hang on, old Jin," he muttered, and the moment the bulge slid toward one spot, he drove the pen tip in.
Jin's scream tore through the chamber as a jet of blood arced from the wound. Mu Qingyan snapped off a shard of ice and hurled it in one motion. A wet, high pitched shriek, and whatever had been inside Jin Baohui burst against the wall in a smear of red.
Forcing herself to look despite the crawling numbness in her skin, Cai Zhao made out the ruin of a small furry mouse, its skull crushed flat, a row of needle teeth still visible in the wreckage of its jaw.
"A nest mouse," Mu Qingyan said, unbothered. "It must have been buried in that ice pile he fell into. He swallowed it without realizing." He kicked a slab of ice over the remains before she had to look any longer.
Jin's voice had dropped to a thin, broken whine. "Save me, please, I don't want to die, I don't want to—"
Hu Tianwei glanced once at the wound and stood, indifferent. "It chewed through your spleen and your gut already. Nothing to be done. Want it quick, or do you want to keep crying about it?"
A fresh wave of despair broke from Jin, though barely a sound came out anymore.
"If only you'd vomited it up the moment it happened," Cai Zhao said, equal parts pity and contempt. "Dying for greed, in the end."
"Spoken well, little girl," Hu Tianwei said, already losing interest in the dying man. "Since you understand that much, persuade your brother to hand the bottle over."
Mu Qingyan stepped fully in front of her.
"Oh?" Hu Tianwei's smile widened. "Young Yan has something to add?"
"As it happens, I do." Mu Qingyan's composed, handsome face cracked into something almost amused. "After all this time, Hu, have you worked out who I am yet?"
Of course he hadn't. He'd never once recognized the techniques Mu Qingyan moved with.
"I thought not," Mu Qingyan said. "But I've worked out who you and your master really are."
Hu Tianwei's face darkened. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Mu Qingyan's voice rose, carrying through the chamber. "Elder Tianji. Duan Jiuxiu. How much longer were you planning to hide that tail of yours? I never expected to find you reduced to this."
The words landed like a blow across the room.
After a long, taut silence, the old man who had played mute this whole time lifted his head at last, a sinister smile spreading across his face. "Sharp eyes, young man, to see through this old face."
Watching the mute speak, watching Hu Tianwei fall respectfully into place behind him, confirmed everything. "You," Cai Zhao said slowly. "I heard Heroine Cai Pingshu put a death sentence on your head years ago. So you never died after all."
Duan Jiuxiu laughed, the sound dry and ugly against his wrinkled face. "That woman thought herself untouchable, and yet she died before I did. Isn't that something. Truly laughable."
Cai Zhao's expression went cold. "No turtle lives as long as you have. Nothing about that's worth a laugh."
"My aunt's life may have been short," Mu Qingyan said icily, "but she lived it in silk and good food, free, on her own terms. That's worth infinitely more than however many decades you've spent cowering in shadows."
Duan Jiuxiu sneered. "Sharp tongues on children who haven't the faintest idea how vast this world really is. When I take the two of you, perhaps I'll grant you a quick death, out of mercy. As for your pretty little sister, I'll see she's well looked after." The thought alone twisted his face into something gleeful and obscene.
"That depends entirely on whether you can manage it," Mu Qingyan said, unmoved. "Try not to end up in our hands instead. I won't soften for the sake of your old title, Elder Tianji, not that the title belongs to you anymore."
Fury broke across Duan's face. "Insolent children, you'll believe it once you're staring at your own coffins!" He turned to his disciple. "Tianwei, move. This Yan boy is tougher than he looks, don't take him lightly."
"Enough talk," Mu Qingyan said, and let out a sharp whistle before launching himself forward.
As master and disciple braced to meet him, he twisted in midair, changing direction entirely, slamming both palms into the surrounding ice walls in quick succession, then driving feint strikes toward the ceiling and floor.
He had been watching, all this time, how the chamber responded to impact. Both times the maodun beasts or the blue eyed python had struck the walls, the whole cave had trembled in response.
This room was no different. The four supporting walls split under his blows, and the chamber began coming apart around them.
In the confusion, Mu Qingyan and Cai Zhao shot upward using qinggong, Duan Jiuxiu and Hu Tianwei close on their heels. Mu Qingyan snatched up two shards of ice still slick with the poisoned blood from earlier, ready to hurl them down, when a deafening roar tore through the chamber. The larger maodun beast burst from nowhere, charging past the two of them straight for Duan Jiuxiu.
It slammed into Hu Tianwei first, knocking him flat against the ice, then turned and threw its full weight at Duan Jiuxiu himself.
Sensing the beast meant to avenge its mate even at the cost of its own life, Duan didn't dare underestimate it. He kicked off the wall and struck with both palms at once, every ounce of strength behind the blow.
The beast cried out in pain as it crashed against the ice, but the force of its charge drove Duan back down to the ground as well. Recognizing it couldn't win, the rhino let out one last mournful howl and fled.
By the time that brief, brutal exchange ended, Mu Qingyan and Cai Zhao had nearly reached the opening above. But the ice ceiling had split clean down the middle, two massive slabs falling inward like a wall closing between them.
Beneath their feet, the wall they'd been climbing cracked loose and fell away entirely. Only then did they understand: this chamber had only ever been one small pocket within a far larger cave system, vast hollows stretching beneath every surface around them.
Ice rained down on all sides, snow pouring in through the widening gaps. They had no choice but to leap for whatever openings remained above.
Separated now by what felt like a thousand feet of falling ice, Mu Qingyan shouted across the gap with everything he had. "Once we're out, meet at the foot of the mountain!"
"Promise!" she shouted back.
Just before the opening swallowed her from view, Cai Zhao looked back one last time.
The chamber was collapsing entirely now. Duan Jiuxiu and his disciple, too far below to leap clear in time, ducked instead into a side tunnel, likely searching for another way out.
Jin Baohui lay still on the ice, soaked in blood, almost certainly gone.
Lan Tianyu remained seated against the crumbling wall, waiting for what was coming. His lips moved faintly, and she thought she caught the word retribution repeated, over and over.
She didn't dare linger, afraid the falling snow would bury her where she stood. She kept leaping toward the cave's outer edge, climbing for nearly half an hour before her feet finally met solid stone instead of hollow ice.
She stood, looked around, and found nothing but white in every direction. No smoke, no birds, no sound of any living thing. The silence and the cold together made the world feel like it had ended somewhere just out of sight.
She sank down and reached for her water pouch. As she drank, something shifted against her chest, and she pulled out the small apricot yellow jade bottle, tucked into her robes without her noticing when Mu Qingyan had done it.
"He'll have made it out, right?" she murmured to no one.
His qinggong matched hers, his inner strength surpassed it. If she had survived, there was no reason he wouldn't have too.
They had climbed this mountain three strong and full of nerve. Now she sat here entirely alone, and the thought settled over her like a weight. At least her pack had survived intact, food and clothing both still inside. She could make her way down slowly, and watch for him along the path.
She sat askew in the blinding sun for a long while, and the longer she sat, the more disgusted with herself she became.
Finally she stood, pointed at her own reflection in a frost slicked leaf, and began tearing into herself out loud. "What exactly are you waiting for? You talked so big climbing up here, and now people are dead, the group's scattered, and you're crawling down the mountain like a coward. You've shamed your aunt's name."
"Have you even finished what you came here to do? No, wait, answer that honestly: have you? Can you walk down this mountain with a clear conscience right now? Don't you dare tell anyone your aunt raised you, not like this. She wouldn't be able to stand the shame of it."
The scolding, harsh as it was, left her steadier. Her mind started working again, sharp and clear.
Step one: find somewhere safe to rest and recover, before whatever comes next.
She'd thought it through now. There was no pretending otherwise.
Step two: find the highest ground with the clearest view of everything below.
She cinched her pack tight against her back, lifted her chin, and walked on.