Chapter 74 - MARCH INTO THE HOLLOW PASS.

The world ahead was a spine of jagged stone, its silhouette cutting a black line against the bruised-purple sky. The Hollow Pass was no gentle mountain crossing—it was a wound carved through the bones of the earth, a narrow, twisting throat where armies were swallowed whole and spat out broken, if they were spat out at all. Ryon walked at the head of the column, boots striking the frost-hardened soil in a steady rhythm that echoed the thudding of his own heart. Behind him stretched the great train of the Ashen Host: ranks of armored soldiers, banners snapping in the thin wind, the glint of steel like a thousand eyes watching the horizon. They marched in silence, not because they lacked courage, but because every man and woman there knew the Pass had earned its name with blood older than any of them.