"Fourteen days to Hearthome," he muttered, glancing at the ashen sky that stretched endlessly above them like a worn blanket. "If we're lucky."
Naomi guided Ember alongside him, her cheeks already flushed from the cold, the golden-bronze skin taking on a rosy hue that contrasted with her thigh-length black hair. "You don't sound convinced."
"Let's just say I've learned not to count on things going smoothly." Xavier shifted uncomfortably in his saddle, wincing as his persistent headache throbbed behind his eyes, a dull hammer pounding against his skull with each heartbeat.
As the caravan left the city's protection, the landscape transformed into a vast expanse of pristine white broken only by the sentinel-like dark pines and the jagged, knife-edged teeth of distant mountains that seemed to tear at the very fabric of the horizon.
