The city transitioned to fields and farms, far more abruptly than it had in East Saffron— one second they were driving through Chongtian, and another, they were making their way through snow-clad fields of winter wheat, green stalks shifting and flowing with the faint, chill breeze that whispered around them. Occasionally, spars of rock would interrupt the fields of white and growth, arrested, dark jagged Dragonspine-stone pushing out of the earth; each of them they passed unable to but remind her of the inhospitable mountains they drove towards.

Of course, too, it was impossible to forget the towering walls of stone that rise from either side of the valley, the peaks of those cliffs covered in glacial cold. Even more than the train— which had at least been decked out with all the luxurious amenities of a room isolated from the world around it, on the back of that truck climbing the winding road to heaven, they were intrinsically and inextricably part of the world around them.

She wondered what it must have felt like, to be a cultivator here, where heaven met earth and sky came to ground, and everything between livid skies and fields of livid snow, fallow, seemed to combine into a single wheeling unity…

Twenty minutes after leaving Chongtian itself, they passed beneath a gate. It stuck out starkly from the snow around it— its swooping eaves and red pillars and decoration utterly at odds with the desolation around it. Yet, that only added to the sense of importance it had— only adding to the two characters scoured into a plack hung at the center of it— final barrier.

Beyond this, they were truly entering the wilds of the world.

Also, the way the road transformed from asphalt to gravel might have had to do with the sudden, jarring feeling of it all. She was really glad that they had those sacks to sit on, else they’d probably be too sore to walk by the time they actually got where they were going…

With the final barrier behind them, the road only seemed to get nastier and nastier by the moment. It’d already been a winding, snaking thing, but they left Chongtian valley and ascended into the pass— into the Dragonspine proper— it turned into something downright diabolical. Their driver at least seemed utterly confident in taking the twists and turns and switchbacks at speed, but everything else…

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Bumpy, of course, but more than that— the landscape around them changed utterly as they ascended. The fields were no more— instead, a dark and gnarled forest sprung up around them, boughs weighed down with the heavy stillness of snow. Even as they reached the pass and the road evened out somewhat, that untamed wilderness was all that surrounded them, filled with the Dragonspine gloam.

It was like nothing else she’d ever seen before.

She leaned back against Avyr, shivering slightly— and knowing that, not wearing a jacket like he was, he was probably suffering even more than her

. “Are you alright?” Her voice lacked its usual boisterousness— sucked away by the pressing unfamiliarity of the world around them, caught up by the wind and cast out of the whole of the world, and smeared so thin it became nothing at all. “Keeping warm? Nothing…”

Avyr chuffed softly, a faint bit of laughter— familiar. Warmer than any fire could’ve been… though, she would’ve appreciated some actual warmth at the moment. “I’m fine. It’s… not what I expected.”

“Not like your wilderness?”

“Not like anything I’ve ever seen before in my life.” Not even on the train— they’d gone through the valleys, and while a few of them had been forested, none of them had been so… profoundly, heavily empty. “The qi here… it feels like the whole world froze over. It feels like… the essence of ice itself, or moonlight, or nature before growth was even thought of. The jungle was hot and alive and vibrantly verdant, and even the plains have a fecundity to their qi that is lacking here. Here…”

“Well,” she managed to inject a bit of energy back into her voice— “we’re going to have to get used to it. We’re going to be spending the next few weeks out in that wilderness.”

Avyr groaned. “I think I’m going to start hating the snow, soon…” and Lily just laughed, and— suddenly, it didn’t quite feel so dark anymore.

She leaned against him as the road continued onwards into its interminable distance, his fur luxuriously soft beneath her, shifting in tune to his breath… the best pillow a girl could ask for, really. And despite the threatening gloom of the forest around them, despite the silence at the top of the world, or even the harsh mountain winds and the cold itself—

It wasn’t long before she slipped off to sleep.