On what should have been the last night of his life, the Exile sought out the Stone People. It was a crazy thing to do, as dangerous as death itself. He didn’t care. Perhaps that was why he did it.
He was a tall, dignified man of middle years, with a neatly-groomed beard going to grey, an incongruous figure to be climbing a mountain slope in the brilliant moonlight, while the frigid wind whipped his cloak around him like a flag and numbed his ears. He belonged in a more sedate setting, among gentlefolk (not the half-barbarians in the town below).
But here he was. He climbed. Pebbles rattled from where his numb fingers caught hold, slipped.
Above him, unreachable, loomed five columns of black, glass-like stone, sculpted by the wind, called (variously) the Towers, the Five Peaks, or the U
