CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
Merk pulled his shirt tight around his neck as he hiked, lowering his head, trying to shield himself from the incessant gales of wind that tore at his skin. The wind howled off the Sea of Tears on one side of him and the Bay of Death on the other, swaying him back and forth like a rag doll as he trekked endlessly, as he had been for days, between the two bodies of water, down the narrow, barren peninsula known as the Devil’s Finger.
It was a name that inspired fear in most of Escalon, the one place that most Escalonites feared to go. They had little reason to. It was a barren, rock-strewn appendage to the bountiful land, a place one went to slip to one’s death. Merk slipped and slid on its moss-covered boulders, all slick with ocean spray, making his way slowly and t
