Above the polar region, ribbons of aurora drifted across a sky thick with stars, their pale light washing the world in an eerie glow. From a distance, everything looked still, frozen into silence. But at the very crown of the world, where the wind howled without restraint, two figures dragged themselves over the final ridge and stood upright against the gale.
Ethan and Blackie.
The climb had been brutal. Even for them.
Ethan stepped forward to the very edge of the summit and looked down. A dense layer of clouds stretched beneath his boots like a silver sea. Above him, the sky felt impossibly close, vast and intimate all at once. For a strange moment, he felt detached from Earth entirely, as if he had climbed beyond the world itself and now stood suspended between earth and void. The constellations glittered so vividly it seemed he could reach up and brush them with his fingertips.
"Boss," Blackie called out over the wind, "we going down now?"
