Raven gripped the edge of the ice shelf, her nails biting into the frost. The entire ridge beneath her had sunk half a man's height, as if the world had exhaled in exhaustion. Jagged spires that once loomed like cathedral steeples were now snapped stumps, their shattered crowns buried beneath landslides of snow.
Several mist drifted upward from the different craters, curling into the sky and smothering the pale light above. She could taste the ice in the air—sharp, metallic—and beneath it, faint yet unmistakable, the char of something burnt.
She frowned at the destruction below. The flattened ground breathed in strange rhythms—cold smoke in some places, hot smoke in others.
Eli and Thalen were far higher up. During the attack, the entire landscape had been battered by such vicious force that staying on the ground was suicide. A single touch from those shockwaves, born from Northern skidding across the ice mountains, would have torn them apart.
