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"We have to cross...that?"

Lhara looked away from the ramshackle swinging bridge stretching in front of her to where Jath hung back on the ridgeline trail. He was staring at the bridge as though it were a living creature poised to strike. Lhara had to admit that the half-rotten boards inward toward the middle didn't look good. Still she had been expecting the thing to be gone altogether, so it was better than nothing.

"There's no other way south from here. I thought you said you wanted to reach Falerik in a hurry?" Lhara knew she sounded less concerned than she was. In truth, they were pushing the furthest boundaries of her knowledge of The Teeth. Only once before had Lhara ever been this far away from Trosk.

The old wood and rope bridge swayed precariously, hanging nearly half a league in the air above the valley floor far below. There was only one channel cut east to west through The Teeth that the mountain folk knew of. It was along the bottom of this very channel that The Old Mountain Road ran. To continue on their journey south following the spine of the world, Lhara and Jath would have to cross the chasm in front of them.

Thank the stars the wind was low that day. Even so, the ancient ropes, nearly as thick around as Lhara's knees, creaked ominously as they moved. If it weren't for the sturdy workmanship of the bridge in the first place, Lhara doubted it would it held together this long. Not even her ma's ma could have told them the names of the folk who first built the bridge across The Old Mountain Road.

As queasy as the swaying expanse of twine and planking made Lhara feel, it clearly had an even stronger effect on Jath. Whether his head had been troubling him today or no, the Factionist had somehow managed to go even whiter than usual. He lingered further up the trail, boots planted so firmly on the grey stone underfoot that he brought to mind a fencepost freshly rooted in place.

"Well?" Lhara prodded. "You have three gold Sols in Falerik with my name on them, and I intend to have them whether you're still frozen here or not." As an afterthought she added; "And your friend probably has no idea about the Obad running around with the army even now."

Neither thought apparently put much gusto in Jath's stride as he drew nearer to the bridge. Brow ever-so-slightly dewed with nervous sweat, Jath nevertheless did come to stand just off Lhara's shoulder.

"Would it make you feel better if I went first?" Lhara asked just a tad sourly.

"Actually no, it wouldn't."

"Then you'd rather be first, eh?"

Jath's eyes remained fixed on the slowly swaying bridge, or rather on the vast expanse of shadow-cast emptiness across which it spanned. The Old Mountain Road slithered along beneath like a thin, winding garter snake. The distance from where they stood to the valley floor was staggering for how abruptly it cut into the mountains.

Lhara sighed. Shouldering off her pack, she put Jath out of his misery and showed him the thick loop of rope coiled inside. "Only a fool would cross this rotting thing un-tied anyways. Here, take that end, and wrap it 'round one of the anchor posts twice before you grip it."

While Jath braced his end of the rope as she'd said, Lhara took the free end and tied it across her chest, securing it beneath the arms and at the waist so that, if she were to fall, it wouldn't slip and accidentally strangle her. She secured the makeshift harness with a knot and tugged it sharply to her satisfaction.

Gooseflesh on the back of her neck reminded Lhara that she wasn't alone. So used to wandering alone up in The Teeth, Jath's presence somehow almost succeeded in startling her before she remembered. She supposed she ought to make sure he was clear on just what they were doing, master outdoorsman as Jath clearly was.

"Right then. You hold on to that end while I'm out there. If I should happen to lose my footing for some reason, you brace yourself against that rocks and don't let go, whatever you do."

Jath actually had the audacity to look a bit wounded at the admonishment. "I won't. I swear."

"I'll hold you to that," said Lhara. "When I get to the far side, I'll brace my end, and you tie yours around you like I've done. See?" Jath nodded, waxen eyes traveling along the knots cradling Lhara's frame. "Then you come across, slow and smooth with flat footfalls. No extra weight on the balls or heels of your feet, understand?"

"I understand."

Satisfied that due care had been taken, Lhara spared a moment to paw her half-disintegrated braid out of her face before approaching the bridge. A call from Jath stole her attention back though.

"Lhara? Be careful."

Lhara would have been either amused or insulted at an outsider telling her of all people to be careful in the mountains if it weren't for the sincere concern plain upon his face. Instead she let a tiny, half-smirked smile escape the corner of her mouth, not unlike how Tarun used to smile.

"I can't fall if you don't let me," she quipped.

With that, Lhara turned her attention back to the task at hand. The hand-hewn planks looked whole, but also sun-bleached and soft from years out in the elements. Lhara knew how easily water could find the cracks in wooden boards and split them open like wedges when turned to ice in the winter. Holding onto the ropes spanning either side of the bridge, she cautiously prodded the first board with her foot.

When it sagged slightly but made no warning snaps or pops, Lhara trusted to put her whole weight on it. The moment her back foot left the ground, a sense of swinging in midair seized her stomach and threatened vertigo. The bridge held beneath her boots though.

Careful but unafraid now, Lhara went to continue to the next plank. Tension at the back of her waist brought her up short and she sighed.

"Jath, let out some of the slack," she called.

Almost immediately the rope connecting her to the Factionist sagged. Each step after that came easier, although Lhara never let herself relax until her first step onto the far side. The shale that crumbled beneath her boot was unfamiliar; this was officially the furthest Lhara had even ventured from Trosk. There was no need for Jath to know that though. Even this far from home, Lhara was still one of the mountain folk.

Meanwhile on the northern side, Jath was readying himself to make the crossing. Lhara couldn't see him as more than a black and brown clad figure topped with white. He brought to mind a snow-capped mountain in the summer. A tug on the rope as he worked reminded Lhara to untie her own side from around herself and grip it tight. As an added precaution she dug her foot into a nook in the rocks and braced.

"Are you ready?" Lhara called over the wind. Her voice echoed slightly across the chasm between them.

"If I must be," came the reply, with a note of dry sarcasm attached to it. Lhara took that as a 'yes', and squinted to watch Jath as he set out on his own crossing.

He moved even slower than Lhara had, testing each board before settling his weight on it. Lhara's success seemed to have emboldened the Factionist at least somewhat though. Jath required no coaxing to reach the halfway point. That was when trouble struck.

A sudden gust of wind came sweeping down The Old Mountain Road from the west. Lhara heard it howl only seconds before it reached the bridge. Suspended across The Teeth like a banner, the bridge caught the blast and swung sharply to one side.

Jath swayed, staggered and fell heavily against the hand rope. Alarmed, Lhara sucked in a breath and tightened her grip on the safety rope between them. If Jath were to fall, when the rope drew taught between them it would be abrupt and brutal.

For one death-defying moment, it seemed Jath would flip head-over-heels over the side of the bridge as it swung. He dropped low though, flattening himself to the boards even as the spaces between presented him with what was no doubt a terrifying view of drop below.

"Don't move!" Lhara shouted above the wind. The unasked for gale seemed inclined to die down just as quickly as it had arrived. In the meantime, Jath could do little else besides hold on for dear life. Lhara's knuckles creaked as they held tight to the rope, her cloak whipping around her.

In minutes the wind dropped enough that the bridge was able to settle. Jath remained plastered to the bottom of it, whether petrified with fear or caution remained to be seen. The sound of dry-heaving at a distance told Lhara otherwise. With his head still mending, Lhara imagined that sudden scare must have set it spinning.

"Can you move?" she called out. If the wind picked up again, the last place either of them needed to be was out on that rickety old bridge.

"...Half a minute."

"You can have more than that once you get over here. Now come on, get up, before another wind comes through!"

At last Lhara appeared to have hit upon a strong enough motivation to make Jath rush across the bridge. On his hands and knees, the Factionist crawled the remainder of the way to safety. When he came within reach Lhara was waiting to grab him by the arm and pull him onto solid ground.

True to her word, Lhara made no move to interrupt Jath when he groaned and sat with his head in his hands. Instead she took a minute to calm her own racing heart. The bridge swayed innocently behind them, whole and inviting as if it had not just nearly succeeded in killing a man. Another pained noise from Jath drew Lhara to his side.

"Is it your head?"

Taking care not to nod too quickly, Jath confirmed as much. "And my stomach...much worse than it has been," he managed to say.

Remembering an old remedy for queasiness she had picked up from Magda even before becoming the Wise Woman's apprentice, Lhara crouched next to Jath and reached for his wrist. When he was slow to give it to her, she persisted.

"Come on, I can ease the sick feeling if you let me."

Lhara stretched out Jath's now-pliant arm and rolled back his sleeve. The wrist tendons stood out prominently beneath his ashy skin. Lining up her thumb in the middle of the two lines below the wrist, Lhara pressed firmly but not too hard. Slowly she rubbed circles into the inside of Jath's wrist as they sat there atop the world.

For a while Jath said nothing, keeping his face buried in his other gloved hand. Deep, ragged breaths escaped him occasionally, but no more heaving or retching. Then he shifted, and a single white eye cracked open to look sideways at Lhara.

"That...actually feels much better," he said.

Lhara took that as her cue to stop, and released Jath's arm. "Good, I'm glad. You've eaten little enough; you can't afford to go losing what you have in you." A weak grimace of agreement from Jath nearly made Lhara roll her eyes, and she couldn't hold back the next thought to reach her tongue. "I'm surprised you knew to drop, out on the bridge like that."

"In physics, the lower the center of gravity the better the stability," said Jath. He flexed his hand a few times before rolling the cuff of his sleeve down once again, seemingly unaware of Lhara's perplexed stare.

"You said?"

"Hmm?"

Lhara pressed him. "I've never heard it said like that before. What is gravity?"

"Oh!" Surprise, followed by chagrin crawled across Jath's face. "I beg your pardon. That was rude of me to start quoting out of natural science books like that."

"But what is gravity?"

"Well...gravity is the unseen force that pulls all objects down toward the surface of the world. It's what keeps us drawn to the earth, rather than floating up amongst the clouds. The closer a person or thing is to the earth, where gravity wishes them to be, the more sturdy they are."

Lhara was immediately both intrigued by and alert to the implications of what Jath was telling her. Rocking back on her heels, she sized up the Factionist anew, this time with less eye toward his apparently frail body and more toward the mind it carried.

"You've been educated," she said, less a question than stating a fact.

Jath shrugged, still looking embarrassed. "I have, to a point."

"At the Academy?"

Now it was Jath's turn to be surprised. "You know of the Academy?" When Lhara nodded vigorously, Jath hesitated. "I'm sorry if it disappoints you, but no, I never attended the Academy. I was tutored privately in my family home."

"Oh..." Lhara deflated. "I just wondered if you knew what it was like there, and who might or might not be accepted to learn."

"I know a bit about the Academy," offered Jath. He seemed eager to assuage Lhara's disappointment. "Mostly through what I've heard from people who have studied within its halls." He paused, something seemingly just on the tip of his tongue. When Lhara stayed silent, watching him expectantly, Jath asked "Do you want to know because of your brother, Tarun?"

Looking away, Lhara decided to find a stray wisp of cloud haloing one of The Teeth intensely fascinating. "Yes," she murmured.

"I can't say with any certainty, but I think I heard once that Amenthere offers one seat in each of the five masteries to a member of the common folk each year. Hundreds vie for the chance, but the Academy is very exacting in its standards. There are different requirements for members of the nobility and ranking officers in the Gorian army, of course."

"Of course..." Lhara said absently.

It sounded difficult, but more importantly, not impossible for Tarun's ambitions of becoming educated to be realized after all. If she could only find him and somehow secure his freedom, maybe Tarun could win a coveted place at the Academy after all. Then Lhara could return to Trosk and take up her apprenticeship with Magda again. Marden, Yelaina, and so many others were still gone, and nothing could change that. There remained a tiny glimmer of hope that perhaps some of her family's dreams and plans for the future could be salvaged yet.

OoOoO

The next few days passed without further incident as they slowly made their way south along The Teeth. The ridgeline path grew faint this far from civilization, occasionally fading away altogether and leaving Lhara and Jath to pick their way across dangerously uncertain rocks. The Teeth were less dramatically sharp here, with more rounded tops as if they had been worn down in a constantly grinding jaw. The exception was Hollowtop Mountain. Spearing upward toward the sky, Hollowtop loomed over its rocky neighbors, casting peaks formidable even by Lhara's standards into shade. Rather than a rounded tip or even a needle-sharp spire like its cousins to the north, the mountain earned its name with a most unusual appearance. Hollowtop's smooth, conical sides ended without warning in a flat, abrupt rim, as if a carpenter's saw had come along and sliced the tip straight off.

As she and Jath drew closer and closer to Hollowtop, Lhara worried that the ridgeline might be interrupted or even lost by the mountain. Her fears proved unfounded; when the mountain spire loomed up before them, the path ran straight into its side. It seemed impossible that a tunnel for the ridgeline should be carved so perfectly into the side of Hollowtop, but there it was. A hole in the mountainside yawned open, inviting them inside the very peak itself. Even more unexpected, there was light at the end of the tunnel, bright light, and much closer to where they stood than the far side of Hollowtop could possibly be.

"Lhara?" Jath asked, and Lhara realized that she had stopped walking to stare.

"Erm...this way." Still trying to keep up appearances that she knew this part of The Teeth, Lhara beckoned Jath onward into the mouth of the passage.

The first thing she noticed was how the wind immediately vanished as soon as they were inside. Wrapped up in solid granite as they were, it was hard not to be reminded of the crypts back at Trosk. This tunnel did not glitter with crystals though. Instead, its walls seemed oddly smooth. Drawing closer to one side, Lhara was astonished to see herself fully and completely reflected back in her entirety. Mirrors were a rare commodity in Trosk, and none owned even by Magda were larger than a small dish. For the first time in her nearly twenty years life Lhara really saw herself.

She was struck by how unlike her ma she looked. Lhara had always imagined, based on glimpses in the surface of rain barrels or in sheets of polished metal, that she favored Mira. Instead she was stunned to see a fairer, smoother version of Marden's face blinking wide-eyed back at her. Lhara had her ma's coloring alright; all the ash-browns, stone-blue eyes and tanned hues of a mountain born woman. Everything from thickness of her nose to the set of her chin was pure plainsfolk though. She was rough and travel worn, looking half wild and swallowed by a thick mane of wavy hair. Lhara thought she could be a giant's child from the old legends, given a few handfuls of mud and some moss to wear.

Marveling at the near perfect smoothness of the tunnel wall and at the strangeness of meeting herself face-to-face, Lhara spared a glance toward Jath to see if he found this wonder just as amazing. To her surprise, she found him standing toward the center of the passage, looking down at the gravel beneath his boots instead of the walls.

"Have you ever seen something like this before?" she asked, unbelieving that he could be so unimpressed.

"Not quite like this, no."

"Well, come on then! Have a look!"

Unwilling to let Jath's apparently typical moodiness spoil the thrill of discovery, Lhara once again met her own gaze in the stone. She could also see Jath's reflection resolutely avoiding its owner.

Does he not like what he sees in the mirror? Lhara wondered. She couldn't fathom why. Strange though Jath may look, he was also incredibly unique; the only one of his kind so far as Lhara knew in her admittedly limited knowledge of the wider world. Lhara traced her riot of ash brown hair with her fingers and imagined how she herself would look if it were all white as snow, like Magda or Jath's. She realized that she would find out anyways, assuming she lived to be Magda's age; yet another aspect of growing old besides the Croning to look forward to.

"Come on," Lhara said at last, loathe to leave behind the tunnel with glassy walls but knowing they had already lingered too long.

Jath for his part fell into step gratefully behind Lhara. The two of them plodded on in silence through the ever-widening passageway. The brightness at the end grew less opaque the closer they came. They were just about out when Lhara was at last able to make out what awaited them.

"By thunder!" she exclaimed, no longer caring if Jath knew she hadn't been here before.

The tunnel opened out onto a vast space, gravel floored and ringed on all sides by sheer, towering faces. Mouths of smaller caves pockmarked the walls nearly all the way up, opening out into the inside of Hollowtop like cells in a honeycomb. Sunlight shone down from overhead into the belly of the mountain, illuminating the glazed smoothness of the rocks and reflecting upon them. It was the largest flat space that Lhara had ever stood upon. If she wished to, she could run straight and true the length of Trosk three times over without stopping from wall to wall.

As breathtaking as the inside of Hollowtop was, it was not the mountain itself that truly brought Lhara to a stumbling halt...it was what covered the bottom of it. Strewn across the uneven ground in clusters or occasionally off by themselves were skeletons. Bare bones gleamed white in the sun where it reached the bottom of Hollowtop's belly. Enormous skulls grinned morbidly at them, some of their teeth as long as Lhara's arm. The wing bones were even longer, but in some places so thin that the light passed straight through them.

"Jath...these are..." Lhara gasped weakly, rooted to the spot.

"They can't be..." Jath sounded just as breathless.

"They must. Look at their wings!"

"But...dragons...the old stories, they're real?! I thought they were more myths than truth!"

"Dragons! They really are dragons!"

In that moment, Jath and Lhara were two children discovering that their bedtime stories weren't just stories. They stood there, surrounded by skeletons as big as barns, contorted in ancient death throes. Lhara's need to see more quickly overturned any fear she might have felt. Venturing forward, she began to cautiously weave her way through the sun-bleached necropolis.

"There're so many of them...so many, and all so different!" she exclaimed as she passed by a long-dead dragon curled up like a hound with its snout nearly touching the last bone of its tail. "Look, that big one has a frill! Do you think they really breathed fire too?"

"They must have. Only the heat of their breath could have melted the rocks into glass like this. Ordinarily only sand can do that."

This latest gem of knowledge from the learned Factionist only heightened Lhara's awe. A sudden urge to touch the shoulder blade of a nearby skeleton seized her, but she fought it down. The teachings of the Wise Women forbade irreverent handling of the dead, and Lhara imagined such laws would extend to mighty creatures such as dragons. Instead Lhara chased her curiosity from one end of Hollowtop mountain to the other. On the far side, she was relieved to find another passage, this one exiting the inside of the mountain to continue on south along the ridgeline.

Lhara found Jath standing slightly off-center amidst the dragon bones. He was staring up toward the walls, or more precisely toward the mouths of the caves ringing the walls.

"Do you suppose those were their dens?" he asked when Lhara approached.

"They could be," said Lhara, following his gaze although she lacked much of the detail at this distance. "Are you thinking to try having a look?"

"I was just wondering if the young died up there, or down here. It's hard to tell, since the bones are all such different sizes and shapes."

A thought came to Lhara, and she stiffened. "You don't think there could be any still alive in here, do you?"

To her surprise, yet another thing happened that she had never seen before; Jath started to laugh. It wasn't a loud, throaty laugh straight from the belly like Marden or Gerdiom would have done. Jath's laugh was soft, brief, but still definitely laughter. He huffed in amusement, shaking his head but still smiling a little.

"If any dragons did survive whatever happened here, they would be either long grown or long dead by now. And I very much doubt that your people could have lived in The Teeth this long without noticing a fully matured drake hunting the hillsides."

The sheer obviousness of it was not lost on Lhara, and she too found herself laughing. After everything that they had just discovered, her mouth had gone racing ahead of her mind in the silliest of ways. Even so, it felt good to laugh again, even after everything she had lost at Trosk. It felt good to go wandering and find new and amazing things.

They agreed that Hollowtop was a good place to camp for the night given how sheltered the inside was from the elements. Lhara managed to get a good, strong campfire going, and afterwards found a den of marmots outside on the mountainside. Managing to snare one took nearly until sundown, but the furry creature made for a decent supper once roasted. Jath was still flimsy after his scare on the rope bridge, but did a good job of cooking the marmot and cleaning up after they were done eating. He even managed to get enough meat down to bring some color into his face, although it could have just been the glow of the firelight.

As night fell high above the mouth of Hollowtop, shadows lengthened everywhere. The fire played across the dragons' bones, making strange shapes dance on the rounded walls. It could have been a frightening sight if it weren't still so fascinating to Lhara. She lay on her side with her back to the fire, warming herself and watching the skeletons as darkness moved to swallow them.

"I wonder if Hollowtop was once a volcano," said Jath out of the blue.

"What makes you think that?"

"Just a thought. If it had been, perhaps the dragons were drawn to its heat, and that's why they chose to make their lair here."

Lhara rolled back toward the firelight to speak properly. "We can't know...even if the dragons could speak, I doubt they'd be interested in explaining such things to us after finding us camping in their midst."

"You think they'd try to make a meal of us?" Jath sounded amused, as if the notion of hungry dragons was at all a funny one.

"Look at those teeth! You think they wouldn't?"

Jath propped up his pack for a pillow and lay down, facing Lhara across the fire as sleep began to pull at their eyelids. "I don't know. I was told many things about First King Amenthis, Goran, and myself as I grew up. Now I question the truth of everything."

"I think..." Lhara began.

"Yes?"
"...I think that you and Tarun would get along well. He's always questioning everything too."

Jath sighed, and somehow the sound traveled out into the darkened dragon graveyard. "I pity your brother then. Sometimes it can be nice to feel secure in what you know, like you are, Lhara."

"Secure in what I know? Are you calling me a lack-wit then?!"

"I...no! Not at all! I just meant-"

Leering evilly, Lhara picked up a leftover marmot bone and chucked it across the fire at Jath. It hit him squarely on the chin. With a startled yelp Jath pitched backward off his makeshift pillow onto the rocks.

"Sleep well, Factionist. May your dreams be filled with hungry dragons!" Lhara rolled over with a snicker and closed her eyes, leaving Jath awake surrounded by fire-lit maws.

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