Ashwick appeared on the horizon in the early afternoon.
A small village of maybe three hundred people, built around a central square with a stone well and a single inn. Modest houses clustered along unpaved roads. Fields stretched to the south, green and orderly. Hills rolled to the north, dotted with grazing livestock. It was, by any measure, an ordinary frontier settlement.
And to the east, visible from every point in the village, the High-class Tower of Ash rose against the sky.
A towering black spire wreathed in drifting grey ash and faint crimson embers. Its surface resembled scorched stone cracked by glowing red mana veins, pulsing like a heartbeat beneath the rock. Clouds of soot swirled constantly around its upper reaches, blotting out the sky in a permanent twilight of smoke and cinder. Even from a mile away, it radiated an oppressive heat, a dry warmth that pressed against Nathan's skin even through the Winterhart cloak.
