A wet, hacking cough rattled through the sulfuric haze twenty paces down the switchback, followed by the clatter of a dented scabbard scraping against the volcanic rock.
Stumbling over the loose shale, five figures crawled out of the yellow fog that submerged the lower ravine, their bodies shaking with uncontrollable spasms as they reached the edge of the high plateau. Leading them was Julian of the Azure Cloud Pavilion, a young lord whose pristine silk robes had been burned away at the shoulders, leaving raw, blackened blisters where the acid mist had seeped through the weave. The three scions behind him dragged a fourth comrade whose face had turned a mottled, bruised gray, his lips flecked with bubbling red froth as his lungs rejected the scorched air.
These were the same aristocratic
