The mountain road was not traveled. It was conquered.
Our armored convoy crawled up switchbacks hacked into raw bedrock, suspension groaning under the fight against unforgiving terrain. Manhattan’s glass glitter, the penthouse’s sterile luxury, the false calm of high-society power plays—all of it dissolved behind us, swallowed by endless grey mist and jagged, unyielding peaks.
The air breached the vehicle’s sealed barriers thin, damp, and mineral-sharp. Diesel fumes tangled with wet earth and something far older: a dormant, buried weight, the slow breath of a mountain that did not suffer intruders lightly.
I pressed my forehead to the cold window, watching cloud banks swallow the road in rolling grey waves. The folded Stonevault map rested heavy in my gear bag, the inked word Veinheart
