The path that opened beyond the ruins was not a road, but a betrayal carved in stone. It zigzagged up the mountainside, so steep that at times they had to climb with hands and feet, gripping frozen cracks and twisted roots that looked like bony fingers emerging from the rock. The wind, which had once whistled, now howled with the voice of a wounded wolf, driving ice crystals that cut like knives.
Azrael led the way, his breath forming white clouds that the wind shredded instantly. The determination that had driven him in the ruins was now tempered against the physical cold, a different but equally implacable enemy. Each step was a battle, not against shadows, but against the body's own weakness.
"I can't feel my fingers!" shouted James, trying to rub his hands without letting go of the rope that bound them together. "My anti-freeze potions weren't made for this!"
"Focus the mana in your core!" Sara instructed him, her cheeks flushed from the cold, but her eyes sharp with concentration. "Don't use it to warm the outside, make it circulate inside!"
Azrael remembered Ethan's brutal teachings: 'The body is a forge. The cold, the pain, the exhaustion… are just the fire. What matters is what you forge inside.' He was forging will. He was forging memory. The memory of his parents' embrace the night he returned wounded from the forest was a warmth the wind could not freeze.
After hours of ascent, they found a ledge, a shelf barely protected by an overhang of rock. It was a meager respite, but they took it. They huddled together, sharing body heat and a sip of the least frozen energy potion from James's stash.
It was Antoni who broke the silence of exhaustion. He was sitting at the edge, looking not at the valley, but at the stone walls.
"The mountains… they also weep," he murmured.
The others looked at him. It was not a metaphor.
"What do you see, Antoni?" asked Sara, her voice soft.
He extended a trembling hand, not touching the rock, but feeling the air in front of it.
"They're not echoes like the ones in the ruins. They're more… ancient. Slower. It's not the pain of souls, it's the pain of the land." He paused, frowning. "When the gods began to war, they didn't just break pacts. They broke places. Wounds in the world. This crack we're climbing… it's not natural. It was torn open by a blow from the sky, centuries ago. The mountain still remembers the rending."
A feeling of profound reverence, mixed with horror, seized the group. They were climbing a cosmic scar.
"Kael said 'where the two peaks weep'," Azrael reflected aloud, observing the twin summits now clearer above, their tops hidden by clouds in perpetual motion, like mourning veils. "Do you think it's literal? That the peaks are… conscious?"
Antoni shook his head slowly.
"Not conscious like us. But… impregnated. The divine magic spilled here was so dense it fused with the earth. The 'weeping' must be a phenomenon, an emanation of that trapped pain. It's probably what attracts and concentrates the energy for 'The Threshold'."
"A place of power born from a wound," James muttered, with the professional awe of an alchemist. "That would explain the madness of building something there. The residual energy of the gods would be like a raging river, impossible for a human to control… but perfect for channeling large-scale invocations."
The revelation left them in silence. They weren't heading to a fortress or a temple, but to an open wound in the world, exploited as a cosmic crossroads.
"So, the other summoned ones…" Sara began.
"Are being drawn to a place that is, in essence, a field of frozen pain," Azrael finished, with a knot of cold in his stomach that had nothing to do with the temperature. "Dam sent me to save humans. But how do you save someone who is being manipulated inside a wound of the world?"
No one had an answer.
They resumed their march with renewed urgency. The landscape changed. The grey rock gave way to veins of a pale blue mineral that emitted a ghostly glow. The air, already cold, acquired a static quality, as if sound died a few meters from its source. They began to see strange formations: pillars of ice that did not melt, streams of water so still and clear they seemed not to be there, and, from time to time, flashes in the corner of their eyes, like reflections of something large moving among the peaks above.
Suddenly, Antoni stopped dead, clutching his hands to his ears.
"Stop!"
Everyone froze. They heard nothing but the wind.
"It's not a sound," Antoni gasped, his eyes full of panic. "It's a void of sound. Something is absorbing everything. Above!"
They looked where he pointed. Among the clouds swirling around the left peak, the silhouette of something huge and winged was outlined for an instant. It was not a bird, nor a dragon. It had a shape that hurt to look at, too many angles, joints where there shouldn't be any. It emitted no cry, but in its wake, the howling of the wind died, creating an unnatural, oppressive silence.
"A sentinel," whispered Sara, terrified. "Not of the gods… made of the gods. A piece of their power, left behind, that has gone… feral."
The creature—the winged void—soared in circles, blind to them or simply uninterested. It was a force of nature, a living reminder that they were entering a territory where normal rules were suspended.
"Don't fight it," ordered Azrael, his voice tense but clear. "It's not our enemy. It's just… a symptom. Like a fever in an infected wound. Let's go. Carefully. Let's not draw its attention."
They advanced like ghosts, holding their breath every time the grotesque silhouette crossed above them. The feeling of being insignificant, of being insects crawling over the scab of a celestial wound, was overwhelming.
Finally, at dusk, they reached a high plateau just below the junction of the two peaks. And there, seeing it, they understood the name.
From the twin summits, no snow fell. Water fell. Two thin threads of crystalline water descended constantly down the black rock, glimmering with the last light of day. But the water never reached the ground. It evaporated halfway, transforming into a perpetual mist that shrouded the base of the peaks. The sound was not that of a waterfall, but a deep, sad whisper, a lament of two voices intertwining in the mist.
It was the weeping of the peaks. And right where the mist was densest, where the air vibrated with the potency of residual magic and geological pain, there was a crack in reality itself: an arch of unstable, shimmering energy that showed glimpses of an architectural interior, of hallways and unnatural lights.
The Threshold. Not a door, but an open wound in the world.
Azrael watched the place, his heart pounding hard against his ribs. This was where the lies of the gods converged. This was where his second life, his life with weight and love, would face its ultimate test. He did not look at his friends with worry, but with a deep recognition.
"They are in there," he said, his voice firm over the whisper of the mountains. "Our task is not to force our way in. It is to wait. To observe. And when one of them comes out, or when we can approach without being destroyed by that place… we will offer them the truth. We will offer them a path home, even if that home is here, in this broken world, and not in the one they promised."
They hid among the rocks, within sight of the shimmering Threshold, four shadows against the world's wound, preparing to change the rules of a divine war with the simple, revolutionary power of a human choice.