The mountains didn't build up gradually the way terrain usually did.
They just appeared.
One moment the road was climbing through ordinary foothills, scrub grass and loose stone and the kind of unremarkable landscape that stops looking the same after enough days of walking through it.
Then the road crested a ridge and the Stormbreak range was simply there, filling the entire northern skyline like it had always been there and the world had just been hiding it until now.
Lucius stopped walking, and he wasn't the only one.
The peaks were enormous in the specific way that makes the word enormous feel like an understatement, dark grey stone driven upward at angles that had nothing gentle about them, sheer faces dropping hundreds of meters into the foothills below.
