The Wildlands didn’t wear you down with fights. They wore you down with sameness.

  Endless snow. Black stone. Gray sky. Cold slid under clothes, soaked into skin, settled as frost on eyelashes. Harlan’s legs throbbed until every step felt like a small victory.

  Mark wasn’t getting better. He didn’t complain, but his face had turned the color of dirt, and the bandage on his shoulder—despite Garret’s best work—kept soaking through. Still, he walked on his own. He refused the sled, even as his steps grew shorter and less sure by the day.

  They set a temporary camp two marches from Garret’s target. Harlan, trying to loosen his stiff back, drifted a little away from the group toward a scree slope at the foot of a sheer cliff. He kicked at a chunk of rock with his boot, and a strange glint caught his eye.

  A small, dull green stone, no bigger than a fingernail, lay among the gray grit. Not a crystal. Something else.

  Harlan picked it up. In his hand, the stone shifted—its color deepened into emerald.

  “Garret…” he called, his voice rough with frost. “Look. What is this?”

  Garret, checking his map for the hundredth time, took his time coming over. Then he saw what lay on Harlan’s palm, and the exhaustion vanished from his face in an instant.

  He snatched the stone, brought it close, even licked it. Harlan winced.

  “Heraldite,” Garret breathed. His voice trembled. “A mountain’s tear.”

  “Is it worth something?” Harlan asked.

  “By itself—ents.” Garret lifted a wild look to the cliff above them. “But in these mountains, Heraldite is a guide stone. Like mold—it only grows where a crystal vein is pushing up from the deep.”

  He didn’t finish. He turned to the crew and shouted so hard the mountains threw it back as an echo.

  “BOYS! Mr. Furst found Heraldite! Everyone here know what that means?!”

  Thorren dropped his mug of tea. Even Mark seemed to color up a little. Thomas and Thovas narrowed their eyes to slits.

  “Set up!” Garret was already shrugging off his pack. “We camp by that rock face. Better cover from the wind.”

  ?

  Garret chose well. A natural “pocket” in the cliff sheltered their tents on three sides, so unless something came at them from the air, very little could get close.

  They wrapped Mark in sleeping bags and sat him right by the fire. He stared into the flames while Harlan threw together a thick stew from bobel and onion.

  “Like a restaurant,” Mark said with a weak smile, taking the bowl with a shaking hand. “Where’ve you been all these years, Harlan?”

  “Get better,” Harlan muttered, embarrassed, eyes sliding away.

  The next morning, hell started.

  The rock refused to yield its treasure. The crystals were somewhere in there, but the stone was hard as steel. Pickaxes threw sparks, and the vibration ran up arms into shoulders until teeth chattered.

  Harlan worked like a man possessed, glancing at Mark whenever he could. By noon his hands were split and bleeding, but he didn’t stop.

  The day yielded nothing. Just dead rock and a couple of tiny shards.

  “Empty?” Thovas asked that evening, wiping sweat off his brow with a hard look.

  “No,” Garret said, stubborn. “Heraldite never lies. We just have to find it.”

  And on the second day, when the sun was already sliding toward the horizon, Garret’s pick made a different sound. Every prospector knows it: when a dull thunk turns into a bright tick, the world starts to tilt in your favor.

  “FOUND IT!” he roared. “HERE!”

  They rushed to the crack. Garret struck a few more times, and the rock broke inward, opening a natural hollow. A lantern beam cut through the dusk and caught something that stole everyone’s breath.

  Not just a vein.

  A Royal Cluster.

  Deep Blue—the most expensive, the cleanest grade of crystal. The stones grew in clusters like grapes, shining with their own inner light, carving natural pockets into the rock. The little “cave” glowed with soft azure fire.

  “Holy shit…” Thorren whispered. “Look at the size…”

  He shoved a hand into the opening, reaching for a prize almost the size of his fist.

  “DON’T TOUCH THEM!” Garret snapped. “We’ll pull them out and you can dance around them all you want. But look at the size—these can’t just be hacked out. We take them with the surrounding rock. You crack them, the price drops tenfold!”

  Fever took them.

  The work was delicate and brutal at the same time. They had to carve away rock around the crystals without hitting the crystals themselves. They worked until the sun vanished, trading places—there wasn’t room for everyone at the vein. In the cold, sweat ran like rain.

  “Easy, Thomas!” Garret shouted. “You’ll chip an edge—there goes a thousand talers! Gentle!”

  “Go to hell,” Thomas snapped, but he slowed down.

  At one point Harlan looked up and saw Thomas’s face. Thomas held a huge crystal still embedded in a chunk of rock, brushing dust off it with a handkerchief. The stone’s light reflected in his eyes. Thomas stared at it, then looked at his brother. Thovas stood nearby, tired, leaning on a pry bar. They exchanged a look.

  “Thorren,” Thovas asked hoarsely, “what’s a piece like that worth?”

  Thorren, stacking another crate, measured it with his eye.

  “This beauty? Five grand. Maybe seven. Put it on the pile.”

  “Seven thousand,” Thomas repeated. His lips moved silently, counting.

  He looked at Garret. Then back at the crystal, and he let out a heavy breath.

  “WORK!” Garret barked, missing that look entirely. “While we’ve got light!”

  By the third day of hard extraction, a mound of rock lay under a tarp. And the vein… the vein still ran deeper, glowing blue.

  The sleds sagged under what they’d already loaded, and Garret gave the word.

  “That’s enough for this run. We still have to get Mark out. There’s plenty here for all of us. We move tomorrow.”

  “When we drag this back…” Thorren exhaled, wiping his dirty face with snow.

  “Then everything changes,” Garret finished for him. “Everything. For every one of us.”

  ?

  The evening stayed quiet. Sheltered by the cliffs, the camp had no wind—only the fire’s crackle broke the silence. But tension hung in the air, heavier than the stone around them.

  Mark slept, breathing hard. Harlan washed dishes with snow a little off to the side.

  Thomas and Thovas sat by the fire without touching their food. They’d been whispering for half an hour. Finally, Thomas stood. He adjusted the holster on his belt and walked to Garret, who was writing something in a notebook.

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  “Garret. We need to talk.”

  The veteran closed the notebook.

  “Talk.”

  “Things changed,” Thomas began. He tried to keep calm, but hysteria rang beneath his words. “We didn’t sign on for a load like this.”

  “You signed on to escort an expedition,” Garret said evenly. “The load is the point of the expedition.”

  “Don’t play dumb, old man,” Thovas cut in, stepping up beside his brother. “There’s a fortune on those sleds. Maybe a hundred thousand. And we get two hundred fifty each? Like dock porters?”

  “We hauled those rocks three days!” Thomas jabbed a finger toward the sleds. “We froze our asses off! We took the hit with that bird!”

  “I offered you a share,” Garret said, his voice turning hard as a whip crack. “More than once. You refused. Remember what you said? ‘Ten percent of nothing is still nothing.’ You wanted fixed pay. You got it. Now this.”

  “You knew you’d hit a vein,” Thomas shrieked. “Greedy bastard. It’s not fair. We want a new deal. We want a cut. Five percent for both of us. That’s fair.”

  “And that useless kid—no offense,” Thovas said, pointing at Harlan, “and the cripple who hasn’t swung a pick once on this run, they’ll each walk away with five, ten thousand. We’re the ones doing the work and we get five hundred? That ain’t happening.”

  Harlan stopped scrubbing the bowl. Thorren tensed, his hand settling near the hatchet.

  Garret rose slowly. He was shorter than the twins, yet they both edged back a half step.

  “Fair?” he asked softly. “Weren’t you the one who told me, ‘We respect a contract—don’t haggle with us’?”

  Red blotches spread across Thomas’s face.

  “That’s different…”

  “It’s the same,” Garret cut him off. “I respect a contract, Thomas. You signed it. You took guarantees because you were scared you’d come out empty.”

  “You’re screwing us,” Thovas hissed. His hand slid onto the handle of his knife.

  “I keep my word,” Garret stepped closer, staring straight into his eyes. “You get your five hundred talers. And I’ll add a bonus—one thousand on top, for heavy hauling. That’s more than fair. Now go sleep. Tomorrow’s a hard day.”

  He turned his back on them and sat down again.

  Thomas stood for a few seconds, drilling the commander’s back with a look of pure, undiluted hate. Harlan saw Thomas’s fingers shake.

  But Thomas only spat into the fire.

  “I want two thousand in bonus,” he croaked.

  “Fifteen hundred,” Garret said flatly. “Final.”

  Thomas swept a finger around the camp.

  “You’re witnesses.”

  He snorted, and the twins walked off to their tent.

  Thorren let out a quiet breath. “You shouldn’t have done that, Garret. Should’ve given them a small percent.”

  “They’re greedy fools,” Garret said, tired. “Give ’em a finger, they’ll bite your whole hand off. If I bend now, tomorrow they’ll demand half. Sleep, Thorren. I’ll take first watch.”

  Harlan lay in his tent and listened to the wind worrying the fabric. From the twins’ tent came a low, irritated mutter—words he couldn’t make out, but the tone carried.

  ?

  Dawn broke with a leaden sky instead of sun. They secured the load, cinched straps until they squealed, and started back.

  This leg turned into a trial of endurance. The sleds, heavy with crystals, seemed to gain weight overnight. The runners cut deep into the crust, leaving wide, ragged grooves behind. A Royal Cluster demanded royal effort to haul.

  Mark rode on the second sled, atop bundles of tents. He looked like a pale shadow of himself—hollow cheeks, fever-bright eyes—but he stayed conscious and kept scanning the ridges. A few times he spotted animals on the slopes, but they were mountain goats, watching lazily. From the cliffs, the men must have looked like insects crawling through the snow.

  It was brutal work, and nobody complained. The crystals glowed even through thick tarp and burlap. A soft, pulsing blue seeped out, staining the snow around the sleds in ghostly tones.

  Even Thomas—hot-headed as he was—seemed soothed by that light. After the hard talk the night before, he’d calmed down. In the morning he acted like himself again.

  Every time Harlan leaned into the harness, he glanced at the sleds. He pictured a warm room with a real stove. A full plate of hot meat. The chance to say “no” one day—to anyone trying to order him around.

  At a long stop, sheltered from the wind behind a rock ledge, even Garret allowed himself to loosen up. He sat on a tool crate, warmed his hands on a mug, and stared at the covered load with a rare half-smile.

  “Eleven times I came back empty,” he said quietly, to no one in particular. “They called me unlucky. Whispered behind my back. But the twelfth… damn it, the twelfth will be a legend. I want to see Barrow’s face when we dump this on his scales.”

  “Hah,” Thorren laughed, rolling his stiff shoulders. “I’d pay to see that. And we ought to bring Kel a stone too. Even a small one. Shut his harpy up for a couple months. The man earned it, even if he didn’t come.”

  The laughter died mid-breath.

  “Not out of the common pot,” Thomas’s voice came dry, like a snapped twig.

  Everyone turned. The twins sat a little apart, packs still on. They weren’t drinking tea. They were watching.

  “Of course not,” Garret said slowly, and the smile slid off his face. “Out of my personal share. But you’re on fixed pay plus bonus, so don’t worry.”

  The talk died before it could catch fire. The silence turned sticky and unpleasant.

  Garret frowned, drained his tea in one swallow, and stood.

  “We move. We cross the pass before dark.”

  Harlan got up, brushing snow off his knees. The mood soured, instant and dark. He hitched himself back into the harness, feeling the rope bite into an overworked shoulder.

  But that wasn’t what bothered him.

  His neck prickled, as if someone were drilling into him with a stare. Harlan looked back—saw nothing.

  “Don’t fall behind, kid!” Thorren called.

  Harlan faced forward and pulled, trying to shove away the bad feeling. They still had the hardest mountain stretch ahead. They needed to stay sharp.

  And Harlan could feel it—something was wrong.