me doing something dangerous. Going lone wolf in a dark cave was the last thing we needed in the middle of a rescue mission. I had promised Daniel I wouldn’t do that anymore. I had promised him to think before I acted. Too, I feared the utter the darkness more than I would have admitted to anyone.
Walking through the wall was no different from walking through an open door. There was no resistance, nothing to impede us from stepping out of the inside of the cave to the outside. The illusion was nothing more than a trick of the eye.
The outside of the cave was much more dramatic than the inside. Steep mountains, covered in a mantle of snow, reached up around us like a steeple. We were up high – higher than the valley floor – but the mountains still loomed over us. They were never-ending. The mountains had a sense of time, of place. They were majestic…and terrifying. It was obvious they cared little for the humans crawling along its surface. We were nothing more than a blip on its timeline; they would outlast us by generations. It was comforting to know something would, but also strange to feel the sense of time in such a dramatic way. It was as if the mountains were looking down on us and saying, ‘See? Even you won’t last as long as me.’
Above us and shimmering like a mirage in the desert was a wall of rock; Preacher’s attempt to keep us from prying eyes. The illusion was not very tall – it was a half inch from the top of my head – and it did nothing to stop the falling snow from collecting in our hair and on our faces. The snow had changed. It was no longer lace gently falling to the earth, rather wet stones cast to the ground with a vengeance. It obscured the mountainside, though it did not stop us from seeing down to the valley below. A cold wind chilled me to the bone; any skin I had left exposed to the elements immediately started to hurt. Dark clouds moved over our heads, closing us in even more. It was as claustrophobic as the cave, despite the sense of space. It was Margaret’s doing, though I wished for a warmer attempt to keep us from being seen.
Daniel and the others were crouched down near a row of heavy rocks along the edge of the mountain. A short trail separated them from the cave. There was even less space separating them from a fall straight down the mountain. Daniel gestured for us to crouch down as soon as I was outside. Alex and I both knelt down and waddled like ducks until we were close to the rocks. There wasn’t a lot of room along the edge of the cliff, but we found a place next to Daniel. His green eyes were busy surveying the valley below. I tried to see what he saw. My eyes strained against the cold and the bitter wind to see so far.
I saw the tiny specks of people as they roamed the icy landscape. There was nothing to differentiate between one person and the next, no hint of a weakness. At least, not to me. The fortress was easier to see. It was large and as solid as the mountain. There was no escaping it. It was carved out of the rock, like Jackson had said. It was not an elegant carving. Blocky and purposeful, it had been carved with the word, ‘fortress,’ in mind. Towers rose at regular intervals from the blocky structure. Windows were minimal. There were more windows the higher the structure was from the ground, but even those were narrow and looked as if they held some defensive purpose. The rock above the structure had been blown away, so that there wasn’t an easy way to crawl down to the roof. The landscape in front of the fortress was flat and icy – it would be easy to tell if an army, or even a single person, was approaching.
The others saw more than just artistic choices in design. Their eyes moved across the mountainous landscape. They catalogued defenses, strategies of the enemy and knew the secrets of the place before I could even catalogue the rocky surface of the structure.
Reaper moved closer to us and got Daniel’s attention with a gesture. He