The Coreless Vanguard - Silver and Stone
A month in the
Cloud-Hidden
Valley didn’22:
A month in the
Cloud-Hidden
Valley didn’t make the mountain softer.
It just made the bruises on
Silas’s ribs turn from purple to a mottled, sickly yellow before fresh ones took their place.By early
November, the damp grass in the clearing froze into stiff, white needles every midnight.Silas sat cross-legged on a flat slab of gray basalt, his bare knees blue from the frost.
At his feet lay a pile of ruined metal—at least two hundred silver needles, thin as horsehair, bent into tiny, useless accordions.
His right thumb and forefinger were raw, the skin split near the nails and crusted with dark, dried blood that no amount of grease could soothe.Five paces away sat
Scar.The old man didn’t wear a robe.
He wore a greasy vest of boiled boar-hide that exposed his thick, hairy arms, and his throat was marred by a jagged, ropey scar that ran from behind his left ear down into his collarbone—a gift from an iron-tipped pike thirty years ago.
He was sitting on a low wooden tub, methodically picking his yellowed teeth with a splinter of pine.