Two hundred. Four hundred. Six. The higher they went, the harder each step came, the body resisting, the essence needing more work to fold in. But eleven people who had killed a Skyward king together did not much care about hard.
Eight hundred. Nine.
Peak Drifter. The last rung before the rank above.
On the thirty-first morning, Erix sat on his summit in the grey-gold light with the last of his cores turning slow around him, and he felt it, the ceiling. He was close. They all were. Perhaps a hundred points of essence short, each of them, and then the door.
He was thinking about exactly that when the sky turned dark.
It came out of the north, a stain spreading across the haze, and resolved into wings. Hundreds of them. A flock of flying monsters, lean and grey and screaming, their long beaks lined with backward teeth, pouring down the spine of the mountain range in a bloodthirsty tide.
