The climb up the northern mountain trail was less of a march and more of a slow walk through a frozen graveyard.
Behind us, Malva and her group were already down at the village elder's house, holding the defensive line outside the two-foot-thick stone wall Jarek had raised around the ground floor before coming up with us.
Up on the high ridge line, the sky hung heavy with a dense, freezing grey blizzard, biting into our skin with every step.
A jagged tear in space hung above the snow, roughly thirty meters wide.
It pulsed with a deep, sick purple color that bled down the mountainside. The air smelled heavy and wrong, like something rotten. Every gust of wind carried the weight of the rift, making the snow around it melt on contact and freeze into jagged sheets of black ice
Twenty-six of us formed the main attack line along the narrow, snow-covered ridge path. Behind me, the students of Class Ascendant moved in a tight, nervous formation.
