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 thick and the wind carried the smell of wet stone from the far hills. Thorn had the Ethium Stone wrapped in cloth at his belt, the mage’s letter folded in his pack, and Tobbs’ map copied onto oiled paper where he could reach it without stopping.

They made good time on the first day, apart from the stops.

Dave needed to stop every twenty minutes to ask whether this was the plateau yet.

“Is that it?”

“That’s a hill, Dave.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s a cow.”

Nibbles stopped to tell a passing farmer that his ox was badly undervalued and that he would happily take it off his hands as a favour. Thorn stopped them both and gave a short speech about the importance of the quest, the waking of the stones and the danger to Fallcrest, which nobody heard because Loki had found a badger. Derek, at the back, counted them all twice and said nothing, in the way that fathers say nothing.

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

---

The wolves came in the deep hours before dawn, on Derek’s watch.

He saw them first as movement at the very edge of the firelight: low shapes, too careful for stray dogs, three or four of them, circling slowly with the patience of animals that had learned travellers meant food.

“Thorn,” said Derek, without raising his voice.

Thorn was awake before the second word. The others were not. The wolves charged.

It was not a long fight, but it was an ugly one, mostly because it is very hard to be heroic while half inside a bedroll. Thorn drove the first wolf yelping back into the dark. Loki seized another by the scruff and shook it until it lost interest in being brave. Dave, still wrapped to the waist in his blanket and hopping, flung a potato at the third with such force that it simply turned round and left. The last lunged at Nibbles, who was busy explaining to it, at length, that it had made poor life choices. Derek’s hammer caught it across the ribs, and it too ran.

Silence returned slowly. The fire popped. Somewhere far away a wolf howled once, as if making a note for later.

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

“I’m not,” said Dave, and was asleep again within a minute, still holding a potato.

Nobody else slept well after that.

---

The second day brought older country.

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

“Are these graves?” asked Dave.

“Very old ones,” said Derek.

“Is there treasure in them?” asked Nibbles.

“Nibbles,” said Thorn.

“I’m only asking. For information. In case somebody else wants to know.”

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,” said Derek 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, much faster than anything that size had any right to be, necks stretched and beaks snapping.

Thorn planted himself in their path. Derek raised his shield. And Dave, who had been waiting for two whole days for a chance, stepped forward, flung out his hands and shouted the Sleep spell he had copied in the manor cellar. For a wonderful, impossible moment, the two leading axe beaks folded up in the grass as though someone had cut their strings.

Dave stared at them. “It works,” he whispered. “It works on birds.”

The others did not go to sleep.

The fight became a scramble of feathers, dust and shouting. Nibbles darted between the birds’ long legs, stabbing at soft places. Thorn’s axe rang off bone. An axe beak knocked Dave clean off his feet and into the side of a mound. He sat up, blinked, and produced a potato with the grim determination of a wizard who had run out of better ideas. Loki barked and snapped, much braver than was good for him, 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, and then down at their legs. Something in his eyes changed.

“Those,” he said slowly, “are drumsticks.”

Nobody argued. Each leg was nearly as long as Dave’s arm: far too much meat to leave behind. Thorn and Derek set to work with axe and knife, while Loki watched every cut with deep professional interest and Nibbles worked out what the leftovers would fetch at a market.

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

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

“Sometimes,” said Derek.

---

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, giving himself the slightly larger piece on the grounds that he had done the cooking. Loki got the bone, and the sort of happiness only a dog with a bone the size of a dog can feel.

Derek took the middle watch and sat with his back against a mound, hammer across his knees, watching the fire settle into 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 if it were counting the sleepers.

Derek stood. “Who’s there?”

The shape rose. It was taller than he had thought, cloaked from head to foot, and for one heartbeat the two of them regarded each other across the firelit grass. Then it stepped back into the shadow of the stones and was gone, so completely that Derek might have doubted his own eyes, if Loki had not already been growling low in his throat.

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

“A watcher,” said Derek. “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 grey dawn broke 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, just as Tobbs had promised, and the land began to climb.

The track left the valley for broken hills where trees clung to steep 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 high above the treeline, far too level to be natural. Below it, where the river threw itself from cliff to cliff in a long white sheet, was the waterfall.

“That’s the way up,” said Thorn, studying Tobbs’ map. Even from a distance it looked like a bad place to climb.

“Of course it is,” said Nibbles.

“Is it the plateau?” asked Dave.

“It’s the plateau, Dave.”

Dave was silent for a moment, overcome. “We’re nearly there.”

The path to the falls was narrow, wet and partly hidden behind the cascade, with the river throwing up a constant cold mist. At the foot of the falls, a ring of old standing stones leaned together in the spray like gossiping giants. Beyond them, ancient cracked stone steps threaded up beside the thundering water. Goblins had been using it. That much was obvious from the scrape marks, the smell of smoke and the crude handholds hacked where the builders had never meant anyone to climb.

“They’ll be above us,” said Derek.

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

The path forked a third of the way up: a longer ledge with more handholds but no cover, and a steeper scramble where the rock was slick and the spray fell in sheets. Thorn took the long route, with Dave and Loki. Nibbles looked at the steep way, looked at Thorn, and said, “I’ll take the interesting one.” Derek sighed, and went with him, because someone had to.

---

Arrows came hissing out of the spray almost at once.

Goblins crouched on ledges above, small shapes with bows, shrieking to each other in voices the roar 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 gently off their perches. A third dropped its bow in astonishment.

“Again!” yelled Thorn.

“I can’t, not yet, I’ve only got so many—”

“Then duck!”

A bugbear came down the path like a landslide, huge and shaggy, swinging a morningstar. Thorn met it on the narrow ledge with his axe in hand and the cliff at his back, the spray so thick he could hardly see its face. He blocked, gave ground, blocked again. The ledge was slick and the roar was too loud even to hear himself breathe. Loki snapped at the bugbear’s ankle. It kicked at him and missed, and in that moment Thorn drove his shoulder into its chest and shoved 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.

Up on the steep route, Nibbles had problems of his own. The second bugbear had come down the scramble that the goblins hadn’t bothered to guard, because nobody sensible would climb there. Nibbles had climbed there anyway. Sensible was a word Nibbles kept for people who missed out on treasure.

He fought quick and vicious. The bugbear fought better, and caught him with a blow that sent him skidding across the wet rock. Derek healed him. Nibbles got up, swore, and went straight back in. It hit him again. Derek healed him again, his jaw getting tighter.

“Stay down this time,” said Derek.

“I am not staying down.” Nibbles wiped his mouth. “I’m going to kill that thing, and then I’m going to search it, and it had better have something on it.”

He did, on the third rush: a lucky strike under its arm just as Derek’s hammer came in from the other side. Then he searched it, at length. It had four copper pieces and a piece of string. Nibbles looked at the string for a long moment, then pocketed it, on principle.

At the top, a goblin tried to run. Dave, still shaking, pointed one finger and spoke a spell he had practised a hundred times in his head and never once used in anger. Fire leapt from his claw and caught the goblin square between the shoulders. It did not get up again.

Dave stared at his own hand. ”…That worked too,” he said. Then, a moment later, a little more quietly: “I didn’t know it would do that.”

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

They gathered at the top of the cliff, the plateau opening in front of them and the waterfall thundering behind. Everyone was bruised, soaked and breathing hard. Nibbles sat down and announced that he was never climbing anything again. Loki shook himself thoroughly and sprayed everyone. Derek counted them all, found them all there, and sat down too.

But they were up.

---

The Ethium plateau was nothing like the forests below.

Stone foundations stretched away across the high ground under creeping vines and wind-bent grass. Roads led to walls that had fallen centuries ago. Tobbs had called the whole plateau Ethium, and walking it now, Thorn believed him. This was not one ruined town. It was the bones of a city so vast that there was rubble in every direction, as far as the eye could see. Whatever had stood here had died long before Fallcrest was built, and the silence was the silence of a place that remembered being important.

They walked the rest of the afternoon without saying much. The air was thinner and the light strangely clear, as though the plateau sharpened everything it touched. Once, far to the east, Nibbles thought he saw goblins riding wolves along a distant ridge, hunting something that wasn’t them. He pointed. The riders vanished behind a fold of land.

“Not our problem,” said Thorn.

“Yet,” murmured Derek.

---

Dave was the first to see the dragon.

He stopped walking so suddenly that Nibbles walked into the back of his legs. “What—”

“Look.”

A shape crossed the clouds far above the plateau. At first it was no bigger than a bird. Then, impossibly, it was much bigger: wings like torn shadows, a long tail trailing behind, black against the evening sky. It circled once, slowly and terribly, as though looking over ground it already owned.

Nobody spoke.

The dragon banked away to the east. Something slipped from its jaws: a dark shape, small against the sky, which 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. Back on the North Road, he had complained that there weren’t enough dragons. He was now reconsidering his position.

“I always said adventures should have more dragons,” he said, in a small voice.

“I don’t think you meant one that big,” said Nibbles quietly.

“No,” said Dave. “I think I meant a small one.”

They watched the sky for a long time after it had gone. Nothing else moved. But the picture stayed with them: vast, casual, and not even slightly interested in anything walking around below.

---

Tobbs had marked a collapsed shrine on the map, north of the waterfall path. A safe place, he had written beside it, if the stones on the plateau are waking. They set out for it as the light failed, picking their way through scrub and fallen stone, and found it beyond a low rise: a small stone building half sunk into the earth, its roof fallen in, its walls cracked and overgrown with ivy, but standing. Pale, almost white blocks of Ethium stonework, smooth as marble, framed an altar in the middle, where smaller worked stones sat in a ring, faintly warm to the touch.

Derek rested his palm on one and felt a pulse, slow as a sleeping heartbeat.

“Ethium work,” he said.

“Good work or bad work?” asked Nibbles.

“Old work.”

“How old? Old enough to be valuable?”

“Nibbles.”

They made camp inside the shrine walls, out of the wind, and the night felt strangely sheltered, as though the place remembered being a refuge. When they woke, their bruises had faded, their breathing came easily, and even Nibbles admitted that his ribs hurt less than they had any right to.

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

They ate, packed and walked on. The plateau opened up 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. And on top of it stood the ruins of a castle. Blackened walls. Broken battlements. The jagged outline of something that had once been a palace. Nobody in Fallcrest could ever have seen this. You had to be walking on Ethium’s bones to know it was there.

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

“And not where we’re going,” said Thorn, checking the map. The castle crowned the greatest hill on the plateau, older and grander than anything they had passed, though none of them could say who had 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 that nobody had warned him Ethium would be so big. Dave asked if they were nearly there, and was told, for the first time in four days, that yes, actually, they were. 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’ blue mark promised. They had come too far to turn back now.