*COMPLETE* Allayria promised to do what it takes to stop the Jarles, to make the ugly decision. She thinks, at last, she understands what the dynast meant. The lesson earned from the top of that lonely cliff and given the dark murky water below.
It...
The strange man nods at the girl over the tangle of his fingers. He looks to her like he's praying or making one of those imaginary houses she and the neighborhood children used to make out of their hands, their fingers bending to make windows, their thumbs moving back and forth to swing open the front doors, pinkies curling in to represent the people inside. But he doesn't knit and unfurl them, doesn't twist them into caricatures from a scene, and she thinks he's probably too old to know how to do any of that anyway, even if he knew how to fix Polly's straw arm.
"That was very brave of him," the young man says, but there's still a frown on his face and she just knows that he doesn't mean it, that he doesn't really understand.
"I'm not done yet," she insists. "That was only the first time Granpapi saw the Bloody Man. He saw him six times after that. He told me about the second time and the third time and the–"
She counts on her fingers, brow furrowing.
"Fifth but he wouldn't tell me much about the fourth or the sixth because Momma says it's not stuff that really should be told around the dinner table and Granpapi says she makes the rules so..."
She fiddles with Polly in her lap.
"And what about the seventh time?" the man asks. "The last time he saw the Bloody Man?"
The girl's eyes dart around the room.
"Momma said it wasn't dinner talk either," she admits, "but Granpapi told me after."
Polly twists in her lap again, and then:
"You can't start a story and not finish it," she insists.
The man smiles.
"I agree," he answers, and his hands twist apart and the girl spies a thin bit of red yard stretched taut between them.
"So, how does it end?"
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It ends in sundown, amongst dying leaves and grasping frost. It ends at the culmination of a chase, at the catch of a bitter wind and the cold, dead embrace of snow, snow on the ground, snow in the air, snow sitting heavy and wet on the kneeling, bowed statues of Ölüm's Pass.
The pillars stand like soldiers, and maybe they once were, but their stone heads and backs are now bent by squalls and time, bowing over the blunt cliff and out, across the glittering Halften skyline, toward the low stretch of Keesark and, beyond it, the shimmering southern sea.
Ölüm's Pass sits just between the Varsdar and Volkaqar peaks, on the narrow, jagged ledge that interconnects the weaving North Mountain range. It sits up high, where the air grows thin, and flesh fails, where the rasps of lungs never quite take in their fill and the feet that slide, slick on frozen rock and squelching mud, fly out, over the harsh drop and topple bodies over the mountain's unforgiving side, never to be found again.
