The mountains didn’t build up gradually the way terrain usually did.
They just appeared.
One moment the road was climbing through ordinary foothills, scrub grass and loose stone and the kind of unremarkable landscape that stops looking the same after enough days of walking through it.
Then the road crested a ridge and the Stormbreak range was simply there, filling the entire northern skyline like it had always been there and the world had just been hiding it until now.
Lucius stopped walking, and he wasn’t the only one.
The peaks were enormous in the specific way that makes the word enormous feel like an understatement, dark grey stone driven upward at angles that had nothing gentle about them, sheer faces dropping hundreds of meters into the foothills below.
But it was what sat above the peaks that held the eye. A permanent storm system, thick and churning, locked over the upper range like it had been nailed there. It didn’t move the way normal weather moved. It rotated slowly on itself, heavy and deliberate, the kind of cloud mass that belonged over open ocean not mountain stone.
And inside it, constant lights flickered, not striking, not flashing in the dramatic single-bolt way of passing storms, just running through the cloud in continuous branching threads, lighting the whole system from within at irregular intervals. Bright, then dim, then bright again. Like a heartbeat, if a heartbeat belonged to something the size of a mountain range.
The charge in the air reached them even at this distance. A faint static pressure that raised the hair on his forearms and made his solar core recognize something it hadn’t before, something counterpart to it, old and heavy and thoroughly embedded in everything around them.
This was the Weather God’s territory.
He could feel it without being told.
Seraphine stood beside him with her eyes on the cloud mass and said nothing. Valeria stood on his other side doing what she always did, reading the landscape below them in that fast systematic way, already past the mountains and onto the valley.
He followed her gaze down.
Ashvale sat in the valley floor below, small, exactly as Cophey’s notes had described it. A tight cluster of rooftops around a central building, perimeter fencing that looked recently reinforced, the kind of settlement that had learned to take its own defense seriously out of necessity rather than choice.
And smoke rising from it. Not the thin grey of cooking fires. Dark, multiple columns, the kind that came from things burning that weren’t supposed to be burning.
The wind shifted and carried the sound up the ridge to them.
Screaming.
Distant and fragmented but unmistakable, the specific pitch of people in immediate danger, the kind of sound that doesn’t need context to understand.
"A wolf pack," Valeria said. Her eyes were already moving through the valley below, picking apart what he was still struggling to resolve at this distance. "By the eastern perimeter. A dozen of them at least."
He found them once he knew where to look — dark shapes moving fast through the valley’s lower edge, too large and too deliberate for ordinary wolves.
Even from up here he could see the wrongness of them. The way lightning flickered along their fur in brief crawling arcs. The way they moved in coordinated patterns that wild animals didn’t use.
Divine energy pushed into them until it changed what they were.
Below, the village guards were visible at the eastern fence, outnumbered and giving ground, the defensive line already broken in one section. Villagers were running toward the central building, some of them carrying children, some of them just running.
Lucius was already moving down the ridge before he’d finished processing all of it.
"We help them," he said.
Valeria’s voice came from behind him, unhurried. "Why?. It’s not our problem."
"Because they’ll all die if we don’t." He kept moving, the slope steepening under his boots as the ridge dropped toward the valley floor. "And because we need them."
A pause.
Then her footsteps on the slope behind him, quick and certain.
Seraphine was already at his side, moving along with him.
They hit the valley floor running.
The eastern perimeter was worse up close than it had looked from the ridge. Two sections of fencing were already down, the reinforced wood splintered outward like it had been hit from the inside rather than forced from the outside.
Three guards were still on their feet near the larger breach, working together to hold the gap, but their formation was shrinking with every exchange and the wolves weren’t tiring the way the men were.
Lucius counted eleven of the animals in the first sweep of his Divine Sense. Eleven moving signatures, each one carrying that same energy he had felt from the ridge, the divine energy pushed into them sitting inside their natural signatures like something shoved into a space too small for it, crackling at the edges, unstable and mean.
Lightning jumped between two of the nearest wolves as they moved. One of them turned its head toward the sound of the three of them coming down the slope and its eyes caught the stormy light from above and reflected it back wrong, too bright, the pupils shot through with pale electric threads.
It made a sound that wasn’t quite a howl, and the pack turned.
Lucius pulled the solar energy up without breaking stride and let it build while he was still moving, not aiming it yet, just letting it accumulate, the warmth rising through his chest and arms and into his hands until his palms were throwing light across the valley floor ahead of him. He felt the moment it hit the threshold he was looking for and opened his hands.
Blazing Sun came out like a door being thrown open in a dark room.
The light expanded outward in a wide ring, low to the ground, heat rolling across the valley floor in a wave that bent the grass flat.
It hit the nearest four wolves simultaneously and the effect was immediate, the corrupted divine energy in them reacted against the solar output the way two opposite frequencies react against each other, violent and destabilizing.
All four staggered. Two of them broke away from the pack entirely, retreating toward the fence line with their corrupted energy flickering.
The drain hit him right after, the familiar pull from his core that told him Blazing Sun still cost more than he’d like. He absorbed it and kept moving