The river road east of Fallcrest was quieter than the tracks around town. Farms thinned to hedgerows, then open grass, then wild country where the trees grew thicker and the wind carried the smell of wet stone from far hills. Thorn had the Ethium Stone wrapped in cloth at his belt, the manor mage’s letter folded in his pack, and Tobbs’s map copied onto oiled paper where he could reach it without stopping.

They made good time on the first day. Loki ranged ahead through the long grass. Dave asked questions about the plateau every twenty minutes. Nibbles complained that no one had yet invented a horse that didn’t smell. Derek walked at the centre with the calm patience of someone who’d learned that roads were where trouble usually appeared.

By evening they camped in a hollow above the river, the water heard but not seen through a screen of willows. Thorn took first watch, then Dave, who kept starting at every owl and apologising to the darkness.

The wolves came in the deep hours before dawn, when Derek was on watch.

He saw them first as movement at the edge of the firelight — low shapes, too coordinated for stray dogs, three or four of them, circling with the hunger of animals that had learned travellers meant food.

“Derek?” Thorn was awake before the second shout was needed.

The wolves charged.

It was not a long fight, but it was ugly. Thorn drove the first back yelping into the dark. Loki seized another by the scruff and shook it until it gave up being brave. Dave, half out of his bedroll, hurled a potato at the third with such surprising force that it fled outright. The last lunged at Nibbles, who was busy critiquing its life choices; Derek’s hammer caught it across the ribs and it too ran.

Silence returned by degrees, the fire popping. Somewhere far off, a wolf howled once, as if making a note for later.

“Well,” Nibbles said, sheathing his daggers. “I’m definitely awake.”

They did not sleep soundly after that.

---

The second day brought older country.

Burial mounds rose from the grass like green-backed whales — ancient, turf-covered, marked here and there with stones worn smooth by rain. The track wound between them, and for a long while nothing happened except birdsong and the creak of packs.

Then Loki stopped.

His hackles rose. A harsh, carrying cry came from beyond the nearest mound, then another, and then the thunder of many feet.

“Axe beaks,” Derek said quietly.

They came over the rise in a rush — tall flightless birds with legs like stilts and beaks like hatchets, six or seven of them, faster than anything that size had a right to be, necks stretched and beaks snapping.

Thorn planted himself in their path. Derek raised his shield. Dave shouted the Sleep spell he’d copied in the manor cellar — and for a wonderful, improbable moment, the two leading axe beaks folded up in the grass as though someone had cut their strings.

The others did not sleep.

The fight became a scramble of wings, dust and shouting. Nibbles darted between the birds’ legs, stabbing at soft places. Thorn’s axe rang off bone. An axe beak knocked Dave into a mound; he sat up, blinked, and produced a potato with the grim determination of a wizard out of better ideas. Loki barked and snapped, altogether too brave for his own good, until Thorn hauled him back by the collar.

When it was over, three axe beaks fled limping and the rest did not get up.

Nibbles looked from one fallen bird to another, then down at their legs.

“Those,” he said, “are drumsticks.”

No one argued. Each leg was nearly as long as Dave’s forearm — far too much meat to leave behind. Thorn and Derek set to with axe and belt knife while Loki watched every cut with professional interest. They packed what they could carry.

“Note to self,” Nibbles said, leaning on his knee and breathing hard. “Avoid large angry birds.”

“Note to self,” Dave echoed. “Sleep works on birds.”

“Sometimes,” Derek said.

---

They camped that night among the burial mounds, the old stones catching the last of the sunset. Nibbles roasted an axe beak leg until it crackled — a drumstick the size of a small ham — and divided it with the seriousness of a quartermaster. Derek volunteered for the middle watch, and sat with his back to a mound, hammer across his knees, watching the fire settle to embers.

At first he thought the shape near the eastern stones was another mound. Then it moved — a shift of weight, a hooded head turning slowly towards the camp, as though counting sleeping bodies.

Derek stood. “Who’s there?”

The shape rose — taller than he’d thought, cloaked head to foot — and for one heartbeat they regarded each other across the firelit grass. Then it stepped back, melted into the shadow beyond the stones, and was gone so completely Derek might have doubted his own eyes, except that Loki was already growling low in his throat.

Thorn joined him a moment later, axe in hand. “What is it?”

“Watcher,” Derek said. “Cloaked. Didn’t want a fight.”

“Didn’t want us to know they were there, either.”

They doubled the watch. Nothing else came out of the dark. But when dawn broke grey and cold over the mounds, they all felt the same thing: they were not the only people on this road.

---

On the third morning the river turned east as Tobbs had promised, and the land began to climb.

The track left the valley into broken hills where trees clung to slopes and the sound of water grew from a murmur to a roar. By midday they could see the plateau — a vast shelf of land above the treeline, too level to be natural — and below it, where the river fell in a white sheet from cliff to cliff, the waterfall.

“That’s the way up,” Thorn said, studying Tobbs’s map — even from a distance, a bad place to climb.

“Of course it is,” Nibbles said.

The path to the falls was narrow, wet, and partly hidden behind the cascade, the river throwing up a constant cold mist. Stone steps, ancient and cracked, threaded beside the thundering water. Goblins had been using it — obvious from the scrap marks, the smell of smoke, and crude handholds chipped where the builders never intended anyone to climb.

“They’ll be above us,” Derek said.

“They’ll be expecting us,” Thorn agreed. “So we don’t give them what they expect.”

They split where the path forked — a longer ledge with more handholds but less cover, and a steeper scramble where the rock was slick and spray fell in sheets. Thorn took the longer route with Dave and Loki. Nibbles looked at the steep way, looked at Thorn, and said, “I’ll take the interesting one.” Derek went with him.

---

Arrows hissed out of the spray almost at once.

Goblins crouched on ledges above — small shapes with bows, shouting to each other in high voices the waterfall almost swallowed. One arrow skittered off Thorn’s shield; another vanished into the mist by Dave’s foot.

Dave shouted the Sleep spell with everything he had. Two archers went limp and slid off their perches; a third dropped his bow in astonishment. Loki barked triumphantly.

“Again!” Thorn yelled.

“I can’t — not yet —”

“Then duck!”

A bugbear came down the path like a landslide, morningstar swinging. Thorn met it on the narrow ledge, axe in hand, cliff at his back, spray so thick he could barely see its face. He blocked, gave ground, blocked again — the ledge slick, the roar too loud to hear his own breath. Loki snapped at its ankle; it kicked, missed, and Thorn drove his shoulder into its chest, shoving it towards the torrent. It slipped, swore in a language Thorn didn’t know, and gave him room for one clean swing that finished it.

Behind the falls — Thorn traded blows with a bugbear while Dave’s spell reached for the archers above, and their arrows answered.

Above on the steep route, Nibbles had his own problems. The second bugbear had come down the scramble the goblins hadn’t bothered guarding, because nobody sensible would climb there — Nibbles had climbed there anyway, sensible being a word he reserved for people who missed treasure.

He fought quick and vicious. The bugbear fought better, catching him a blow that sent him skidding on wet rock. Derek healed him; Nibbles got up, swore, and went back in. It hit him again. Derek healed him again, jaw tight.

“Stay down this time,” Derek said.

“I am not staying down.” Nibbles wiped blood from his mouth. “I am going to kill that thing.”

He did, on the third rush — a lucky strike under its arm while Derek’s hammer took it from the other side.

At the top, a goblin tried to run. Dave, still shaking, pointed one finger and spoke a spell he’d practised a hundred times in his head and only now tried in anger. Fire leapt from his hand and struck the goblin square between the shoulders. It did not move again.

Dave stared at his own hand. ”…That worked too.”

Thorn clapped him on the arm hard enough to hurt. “Come on. Up.”

They gathered at the cliff top, the plateau opening before them and the waterfall thundering behind. Everyone was bruised, wet, and breathing hard. Nibbles sat down and declared he was never climbing again. Loki shook himself and sprayed everyone.

But they were up.

---

The Ethium plateau was nothing like the forests below.

Stone foundations stretched across the high ground beneath creeping vines and wind-bent grass, roads leading to walls fallen centuries ago. Tobbs had called the whole plateau Ethium, and walking it now Thorn believed him — not one ruined town but the bones of a city so vast that rubble showed in every direction. Whatever had stood here died long before Fallcrest was rebuilt, and the silence was that of a place that remembered being important.

They walked for the rest of the afternoon without speaking much, the air thinner, the light strangely clear, as though the plateau sharpened everything it touched. Once, far to the east, Nibbles thought he saw goblin shapes on wolfback racing along a distant ridge, hunting something that was not them. He pointed; the riders vanished behind a fold of land.

“Not our problem,” Thorn said.

“Yet,” Derek murmured.

---

They made camp as the sun sank towards the western hills.

Dave was the first to see the dragon. He stopped walking so abruptly that Nibbles walked into the back of his legs. “What —”

“Look.”

A shape cut across the clouds far above the plateau — at first no larger than a bird, then impossibly larger: wings like torn shadows, a long tail trailing behind it, black against the evening sky. It circled once, slow and terrible, as though surveying ground it already owned.

Nobody spoke.

The dragon banked eastward. Something slipped from its jaws — a dark shape, small against the sky — and tumbled down towards the broken hills below.

High above the plateau — the dragon banked away, and something small and grim fell from its jaws.

“Was that—” Dave began.

Nobody wanted to finish the sentence.

The dragon slid away into the haze. Dave swallowed. “I always said adventures should have more dragons.”

“I assume you didn’t mean the sort that’s that big?” Nibbles said quietly.

They watched the sky a long time after it was gone. Nothing else moved. But the image stayed — vast, casual, indifferent to anything walking below.

---

Tobbs had marked a collapsed shrine on their map, north of the waterfall path — a safe place, he’d said, if the stones on the plateau were waking. They set out as the light failed, picking their way through scrub and fallen stone.

They found it beyond a low rise: a small stone building half-sunken into the earth, roof fallen in, walls cracked but standing. Pale near-white blocks — Ethium work, smooth as marble — framed the altar at the centre, where smaller worked stones sat, faintly warm to the touch.

Derek rested his palm on one and felt a pulse like a slow heartbeat.

“Ethium work,” he said.

“Good work or bad work?” Nibbles asked.

“Old work.”

They made camp inside the shrine walls, where the wind couldn’t reach and the night felt oddly sheltered, as though the place remembered being a refuge. When they woke, bruises had faded, breath came easier, and even Nibbles admitted his ribs hurt less than they should.

“Shrine healing,” Derek said. “I’ll take it.”

They ate, packed, and walked on. The plateau opened around them with every mile. Ahead, the land climbed to its highest point — a great hill ringed with cliffs on three sides, too vast and deliberate to be natural. Against that skyline stood the ruins of a castle: blackened walls, broken battlements, the jagged outline of a palace. Nobody in Fallcrest could have seen this; you had to be walking Ethium’s bones to know it was there.

Dave stopped. “That’s the biggest thing left standing.”

“And not where we’re going,” Thorn said, checking Tobbs’s map. The castle crowned the largest hill on the plateau, older and grander than anything they’d passed, though none could say who’d built it or why. Their destination lay elsewhere, on a smaller ridge to the west, where the ruined tower waited. “Not yet.”

They turned west, keeping the great hill at their backs. Nibbles complained that his boots were still damp and nobody had warned him Ethium would be so large. Loki trotted ahead, nose to the wind.

Behind them, the castle hill sank slowly into the haze. Before them, the tower waited — or so Tobbs’s blue mark promised. They had come too far to turn back now.