The light dropped Almond and Lily onto a mountain peak of bare grey stone, and the cold hit a breath before the view did.
Far across an ocean of black treetops, hundreds of kilometers distant, a second peak caught light from nowhere and held it, glowing soft and gold against a sky that had no sun to explain it.
"That's the way out," Lily said, reading the beacon the way she read everything. "And whatever's between us and it isn't decoration."
The forest below was not simply dark. Darkness moved through it, thick and slow, pooling between trunks that seemed to lean away from what little light escaped the peaks on either end.
Three strangers stood a short distance off, and all three had already stopped looking at the forest and started looking at Almond and Lily instead.
The lean one spoke first, twin curved sabers resting easy across his shoulders. "Two of them, working together already." His eyes flicked to his companions. "We'd be fools not to do the same."
