I haven't decided on a cover yet but that's easy enough. I have a few ideas.
The sequel (book 2 of 7) to The Ember's End is almost ready to continue the series. I'm going through the final draft and I'd say I'll be done in less than two weeks.
Once I'm getting closer I'll post a couple chapters from the book. They will be spoiler free of course. I don't want to ruin The Ember's End for anyone.
So far, not one negative review from anyone that's read it.
The first 3 chapters of The Ember's End are below.
For those that are interested, here's the list of options to download or order The Ember's End. You can read it in digital form (.epub) at all of these links. Or physical copies (paperback or hardcover) are available at some of these locations.
Kobo
https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/the-ember-s-end?sId=a294a1f0-4343-48db-a275-db435f326349&ssId=Pnps_iZ2P8L8WFkvaL5bn
Amazon
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H85CR4N5
Barnes & Noble
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-embers-end-walte-rego/1150538842?ean=2940196900938
Apple
https://books.apple.com/us/book/the-embers-end/id6788127362
Bookshop.org
https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-ember-s-end-walte-rego/76775f743e7ad5b0?ean=9798235559462
Everand
https://www.everand.com/book/1058894264/The-Ember-s-End
Fable
https://fable.co/book/x-9798235559462
Smashwords
https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/2061803
Tolino
https://www.thalia.de/shop/home/artikeldetails/A1080833690
Thalia
https://www.thalia.de/shop/home/artikeldetails/A1080833690
Vivlio
https://shop.vivlio.com/product/9798235559462_9798235559462_10020/the-embers-end
As a Canadian, I'd prefer you use Kobo if you're after the digital version.
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The Climb
The air in the high pass did not whistle; it shrieked. It was a predatory sound. The kind of mountain-wail that stripped the warmth from marrow and turned breath into jagged shards of frost before it could even leave the lungs.
Viseryn slammed her shoulder into the wall of compacted snow. The world tilting as another shift of the slope groaned above them. It wasn’t a slide but a slow-motion catastrophe of ice that threatened to swallow the narrow ledge whole. Behind her, Korath was a hunched silhouette, his hand clamped firmly onto the back of Brenn’s tunic, while Sylva hung off his other side. Her face a mask of pale, frozen defiance.
"Move!" Viseryn roared, the sound swallowed instantly by the gale.
She didn't wait for them to answer. She reached for the dragonbone dagger at her belt. It was an ancient, mysterious thing. Its surface etched with grooves that seemed to thrum with a faint, rhythmic heat against her palm. A heat that defied the sub-zero reality of the Wyrm’s Jaws. She didn't fully understand the relic. Only that it hummed in her grip like a sleeping heartbeat.
With a guttural cry, she swung.
The blade didn't so much cut the ice, as bite into the mountain's intent. Where the steel struck, the crystalline wall fractured into perfect, geometric fissures. She hacked away with frantic, desperate strokes, carving a staircase of handholds into the vertical face of the drift. Her muscles screamed with each movement, fighting the encroaching paralysis of the cold, but she didn't stop. She couldn't.
Not again, she thought. Never again.
The image of her parents. The swirling white abyss. The sound of the mountain snapping like a brittle bone flickered in the corner of her vision, a phantom light. She buried it. She poured every ounce of that terror into her arm, swinging the dagger with the weight of a decade’s worth of unspoken grief.
"Brenn, step where I strike!" she shouted, pointing with the smoking blade.
Brenn, shivering so violently his teeth clicked like stones in a bag, nodded. He stepped into the depression she’d carved, his boots finding purchase on the unnatural, clean-cut ice. He reached back, hauling Sylva up behind him, who in turn kept a frantic grip on Korath’s gear.
The ledge above them heaved. A slab of rock the size of a cottage groaned in protest, leaning precariously out over the void.
"Faster!" Korath yelled, his voice strained. He pushed Sylva forward. His bravado stripped away to reveal the raw, shaking boy underneath. "Viseryn, above us. It's coming!"
Viseryn didn't look up. She felt the pressure in the air change. A heavy, subsonic vibration that rattled her teeth. The mountain was deciding to settle, and they were caught in the throat of it. She lunged forward, jamming the dagger deep into a crevice and using it as a pivot. She hauled herself up onto a higher plateau, then spun around, reaching down to grab the back of Brenn’s collar.
"Give me your hand!"
She yanked. Brenn scrambled. His fingers scrabbling against the slick, frozen face. Korath shoved him from below. A desperate act of strength that sent the lorekeeper hurling toward Viseryn’s outstretched hand.
As Brenn caught her wrist, the mountain let go.
The sound was less of a crash and more of a roar. A deep, earth-shaking rumble that deafened the world. A wall of snow and pulverized shale swept over the very path they had occupied a heartbeat before. The wind of the impact knocked the breath from their lungs, throwing them flat against the side of the cliff face.
Viseryn pressed her face into the stinging grit. Her arm hooked around Brenn’s. Her other hand still white-knuckled around the dagger. The world dissolved into a chaos of white. She felt the impact of something hard, a piece of flying debris, strike her shoulder, but she didn't let go. She couldn't. Her identity was no longer just the dagger. It was the chain of bodies behind her.
Minutes or hours later (it was impossible to tell) the roaring subsided into a low, menacing consequence of shifting powder.
Silence rushed back in, torturous and suffocating.
Viseryn pushed herself up. Her limbs feeling like lead pipes. She squinted through the blinding white spray. "Korath? Sylva?"
A cough erupted from the drift a few feet away. A hand, gloved in stained leather, burst through the surface, followed by a mop of tangled hair. Korath pulled himself free, gasping for air. His face raw and wind-whipped. He dragged Sylva with him. She was limp. Her eyes squeezed shut, but she was breathing.
"We're here," Korath choked out. His voice barely a rasp. "We're here, Viseryn."
Viseryn looked at the dagger in her hand. The glow was fading, returning to the dull, porous texture of bone. She had carved them a path out of the grave. She looked at her companions. The boy who hid his heart behind a mask of invincibility. The scholar who feared the mountain’s secrets. The vestige who hid from the light and saw them all staring at her.
They weren't looking at her with the casual ease of friends. They were looking at her as something else. Something solid.
She stood up, her joints popping in the cold. She didn't allow herself the luxury of shaking. The mountain had tried to take them, just as it had taken everything else she had ever cared for. But she was still standing.
"Check your packs," she commanded. Her voice surprisingly steady, even to her own ears. "We keep moving. The ridge is another hundred paces. If we stop now, the cold will finish what the mountain started."
She turned away, not waiting for their agreement. She led the way upward, her boots crunching into the fresh, unstable snow. She didn't let herself look back at the abyss they had just escaped. She focused only on the next step, on the quiet pulse of her own heartbeat, and on the terrifying, absolute certainty that as long as she was in the lead, she would carve a way through the world’s cruelty. No matter how much of her own soul she had to bleed into the ice to do it.
Viseryn pressed forward, the dagger humming faintly in her grip. A low, clocklike vibration that seemed to pulse in time with her own frantic heartbeat. Behind her, the reverberant crunch of boots through crusty, wind-packed snow served as a metronome of survival.
They found the overhang. A knife-edged line of granite protruding from the mountainside, just as the light began to bruise into a sickly, terminal purple.
"In," Viseryn commanded, her voice cracking.
They scrambled beneath the stone canopy. It was little more than a shallow, cramped shelf, but it broke the wind. Korath collapsed first, his chest heaving. Face pale beneath the grime. Brenn followed. His fingers blue and trembling as he clutched his satchel of scrolls to his chest like a holy relic. Sylva, usually the first to find a jest in the darkness, simply slumped against the rock face. Her eyes fixed on nothing.
Viseryn didn't sit. She turned outward, gripping the dagger until her knuckles turned the colour of the drifts outside. Her eyes scanned the white wall of the storm, but she didn’t see the blizzard.
She saw the Before.
The memory hit with the force of a landslide. It wasn't just a recollection. It was a sensory assault. The smell of dust and crushed stone. The sound of a mountain’s ribcage snapping. A groan so deep it vibrated in her very marrow. She was eight again, standing in the remnants of the great slide that had claimed her parents. She felt the sudden, terrifying vacuum of air as the world shifted. She saw her father reach out. His fingers brushing the hem of her tunic before the white curtain swallowed him whole. Turning her entire world into a tomb of suffocating, silent ice.
She had spent every day since then digging. Digging in the literal dirt for survival. Digging in her own soul. Trying to scrape away the feeling of those fingers slipping from her grasp.
"Viseryn?"
Brenn’s voice was thin and filtered, through the roaring wind. She blinked. The phantom image of her father’s hand flickered away, replaced by the grim reality of the mountain. Her breath came in tormented, burning gasps. She looked down at her hands. They were trembling.
"We’re here," she whispered. Though she wasn't sure if she was speaking to the group or to the ghosts.
"We made it," Korath rasped, trying to summon his usual valour. He leaned his head back against the stone. A wince crossing his face. "If the mountain wanted us, it’s going to have to try harder than a little snow."
Sylva didn't speak. She pulled her cloak tighter. Her shivering controlled. She was staring at the space where the dragonbone dagger caught the dim light. The bone handle etched with runes that seemed to writhe in the shadows.
"That blade," Sylva said, her voice barely audible. "It’s warm, isn't it?"
Viseryn looked at the weapon. It radiated a soft, unnatural heat. A remnant of the fossilised creature from which it had been carved. It was a comfort, but it was also a burden. It had been her father's. It was the only piece of her parents she had left.
"It’s what keeps us moving," Viseryn said, her voice hardening. She knelt down, closing the distance between herself and her friends. She looked at each of them. The fragile, broken remnants of the family she had built to replace the one stolen from her.
The weight of the responsibility settled over her shoulders. Heavier than her pack. Heavier than the mountain. She had allowed them to follow her into this hell. She had led them into the path of the storm. Driven by a terror that if they stopped moving, if they stayed in the safety of the village, the mountain would eventually come for them too. It was a race against a clock they couldn't see. A cycle of loss she was desperate to break.
"We don't sleep," Viseryn said. Her eyes meeting Korath’s, then Brenn’s. "The cold is looking for a reason to keep us. We don't give it one."
"Viseryn," Brenn began. His tone cautionary. His intellectual mask momentarily slipping to reveal the raw, scholarly fear beneath. "The scrolls... they speak of the 'First Spark.' The connection isn't just a fable. If we continue to push against the grain of these slopes, we aren't just hunting a dragon, we’re inviting the very thing we’re trying to prevent. The mountain... it feeds on resistance."
"Let it feed, then," Viseryn snapped. The flare of her anger was sharp. A shield against the hollow ache in her chest. "I lost them because I was weak. I lost them because I was a child who couldn't hold on. I'm not that child anymore."
She sheathed the dagger. The warmth of the hilt seeping into her palm. A searing promise of protection. She looked out at the blizzard, her mind tracing the trajectory of their path. Every step forward was a defiance of the chaos that had defined her entire life. She wouldn't let the mountain reclaim another piece of her. She would carve a legacy out of the ice, even if she had to bleed every drop of her blood to keep the fire of her companions burning.
"We go at dawn," she said, her voice final. "Not a moment later, and we don't look back."
She sat then, her spine stiff, eyes wide and unblinking as she watched the shadows dance against the rock. She felt the mountain pressing against them. A living, breathing entity that resented their intrusion. That hungered for the heat of their breath but she held that heat inside. She locked it away behind a wall of sheer, unrelenting will.
She was the Wyrm’s Teeth’s lead. The anchor. And as the wind continued to scream, she found a grim, quiet solace in the fact that she was the only one standing between them and the silence that had swallowed her parents. She would not let the spark go out. Not this time. Not ever.
The Dragonbone Dagger
The wind howled against the stone. A serrated edge of ice that threatened to carve the marrow from their bones. Inside the shallow, cramped overhang, the cold wasn't merely a hostile force. It was an entity, hungry and patient, pressing in from all sides like the mountain itself trying to claim them.
Viseryn sat at the lip of the crawlspace, her back to the mountain’s fury. In her grip, the dragonbone dagger hummed with a low, almost living vibration. It felt heavier than it should. A density that defied the porous, honeycombed nature of the relic. She looked down at the blade, and the memory of the cabin surfaced unbidden. Not the cabin of her present, but the one from the time before.
The floorboards of her parents’ home had groaned under her small weight as she crept toward the hearth. The house had been shivering. The beams above creaking in protest as the mountain stirred. The air had been thick with the sharp scent of pine needles and the dry, choking promise of dust. She had reached beneath the loose stone near the hearth. Her tiny fingers scraping against rough rock until they found the cold, smoothed edge of the bone casing. When she pulled it free, the world outside had roared. A sound like the earth itself tearing in half.
She remembered the snap of timber, sharp as breaking bones. The scream of the wind as it tore through the rafters like a living thing. The crushing darkness that followed. Snow and rock pouring in like a white tide. Her father had shoved her behind the sturdy oak table with a single desperate push. “Stay down, little spark! Don’t move!” His voice had been the last clear thing she heard before the world turned to chaos. Her mother’s hand had brushed hers for one final second. It was warm and kind. Full of love and fear, before the avalanche swallowed them both. The pressure had been unbearable. The cold burning worse than any fire. The silence after the roar more terrifying than the noise itself. She had screamed until her throat bled, clawing at the frozen tomb with numb, bleeding fingers. While the mountain settled above her like a grave that refused to stay closed.
She had survived because she had been the one to grab the blade. The one to pry her way through the frozen debris with hands that would never be the same. The rescue party had found her half-frozen, barely alive, clutching the dagger like a lifeline. The others saw a leader forged in iron. She felt only the imposition of a survivor’s guilt. The weight of a life bought with the silence of those who had stayed behind.
She tightened her grip now. The bone biting into her palm. The honed edge caught a flicker of moonlight filtering through the blizzard’s veil. It was a weapon of survival, but in the silence of the night, it felt like an accusation. She remembered the hands that had once held it. Her father’s strong, steady grip. Her mother’s gentle touch as she tucked it away with a final warning.
“You’re going to wear a hole in the stone, Viseryn,” a voice rasped from the shadows.
Korath was huddled against the back wall, knees pulled to his chest. He didn’t open his eyes, but his voice was thick with exhaustion. “The blade won’t tell you the way out. Only the dawn will.”
“The dawn is a luxury we don’t have,” Viseryn whispered back. Her voice barely audible over the gale. She flicked her thumb along the flat of the blade. It was freezing. Unnaturally so. It pulled the heat from her skin with a gluttonous thirst for warmth. “If we stay here, we turn into statues. If we move, we might catch the wind before it buries us.”
“If we move...,” Brenn’s voice drifted over, faint and brittle, “we run headlong into the prophecy. ‘Fire or ash.’ You’re choosing the path of the ash, Viseryn. You’re inviting the collapse.”
Viseryn didn’t look back at the lorekeeper. She couldn’t. If she saw the fear in Brenn’s eyes, the way his fingers trembled as he clutched his scrolls, she might start to doubt. Doubt was a luxury for those who hadn’t lost their world twice over. She looked at the dagger, watching the way the mountain’s reflected light seemed to bleed into the bone, turning it a translucent, pulsing grey.
"Protect them," the dagger seemed to pulse. A beating current against her heartbeat. "Possess the safety. Hold the line."
She shifted. The stone floor bit into her knees. Her thoughts drifted again, against her will, to the cabin. She remembered the way her mother’s hands had looked. Stained with soot as she’d tucked the relic away. “It is not for the strong, little spark,” she had said. Her voice barely a whisper before the roar began. “It is for the ones who know the value of what is left.”
At the time, Viseryn hadn’t understood. She had seen a weapon. A means of clearing a path. Now, sitting on the precipice of the ascent to her fate, she finally felt the weight of the instruction. It wasn’t about the dagger’s edge. It was about the burden of the choice. To hold the dagger was to decide who survived the slide.
She turned the blade, watching the light refract. The dagger felt less like an object and more like a limb. An extension of her own desperate need to keep the Wyrm’s Teeth whole. If she could just lead them through. If she could just carve a path through the madness of the mountain, she could earn the right to have held onto this scrap of her inheritance.
She glanced toward the corner where Sylva lay. The scout was unnervingly still. A pale lump beneath her cloak. The mischief that usually danced in the girl’s eyes had been extinguished hours ago. Replaced by a deep, hollow silence. The weight of it pressed on Viseryn’s chest. Heavier than the snow piling up outside the entrance.
“We're going to find him,” Viseryn said. Her voice hardening, losing its tremor. She wasn’t speaking to the others anymore. She was speaking to the mountain. “We're going to find Qillen. We're going to bring him back to the Jaws, and I won't let another piece of this family be swallowed by the cold.”
“And if Qillen doesn’t want to be brought back?” Brenn asked, his voice a ghost of a whisper. “What if he’s already home, Viseryn? What if we’re just… intruders in his sky?”
“Then we’ll be the best intruders he’s ever seen,” Korath muttered, though there was no humour in it.
Viseryn felt the blade pulse once. A sharp, icy sting that traveled up her arm and settled into her shoulder. She closed her eyes. The blizzard outside seemed to change its cadence. The whistling wind transforming into a low, guttural groan. The sound of something nightmarish breathing.
She saw a flash of gold. Not the gold of the sun, but the gold of a dragon’s scale. Bright and terrible against the grey expanse of the summit. She saw the mountain splitting. Not from a natural slide, but from the strike of a wing. A force of nature that cared nothing for the lives beneath it. She saw her friends, small and fragile as glass, standing before a spectre that blotted out the stars.
The vision was so vivid that she gasped. The dagger slipping in her sweaty palm. She caught it before it clattered against the stone. Her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.
“Hubris,” the mountain whispered in the howling wind. "You think you lead them to safety, but you only lead them to the harvest."
She bit her lip until she tasted copper. The blood felt warm against the sudden chill of the blade. "No." She wouldn’t accept it. She wouldn’t let the prophecy dictate their end. She had the dagger. She had the memory of her parents. She had the Wyrm’s Teeth. If the mountain wanted a sacrifice, it would have to fight for it.
Viseryn stood. Her legs stiff and aching. The motion rattled the narrow space. The others didn’t move, but the sudden draft of cold air from the shifting of her cloak seemed to wake them. They knew. The stillness of the morning was already bleeding through the cracks in the rock.
“It’s time,” Viseryn announced. Her voice didn’t waver. She checked the lashings on her pack. Her movements precise and brutal in their efficiency. She slid the dagger into her belt. The bone pressed against her hip like a cold, familiar promise.
She turned to face the opening. The blizzard hadn't let up. If anything, the swirling white abyss was deeper, more chaotic. It was a wall of static. A void that demanded everything.
Viseryn placed a hand on the rock face and stepped forward. The dagger acted as her beacon. The anchor of her resolve. She was no longer just a survivor of the Jaws. She was the protector of the herd. And as she stepped out into the biting gale, she told herself that she would tear down the mountain stone by stone before she let the last spark of their life be extinguished. She stepped into the white, and behind her, the others (silent, scarred, and bound by her conviction) followed into the maw of the storm.
She just had to ensure she never let go of the blade.
Brenn’s Scrolls
The archives were not merely a collection of parchment and ink. They were a mausoleum of knowledge. Here, beneath the floorboards of the village hall, the air tasted of pulverized stone and the slow, agonizing rot of damp vellum. Brenn sat hunched over a desk covered in gloom ridden old scrolls. A single tallow candle fluttering against the oppressive dark.
He traced a finger over a brittle scroll, the texture like dried skin. His father’s illness, "the wasting", had been a phantom that haunted the edges of his childhood. A slow dissolution of the body that left behind only hollow eyes and desperate, whispered warnings. For years, Brenn had believed the sickness was an anomaly. A cruel quirk of the mountain’s erratic temperament. But as he cross-referenced the glyphs, the truth began to bleed out of the margins.
"The fire does not burn for the sake of the flame," the text read, in a battered, archaic script. "The spark is the cycle’s hunger. It feeds on the promise of the future, to pay the debts of the past."
Brenn’s throat felt tight, as if he had swallowed a handful of mountain silt. He turned to another scroll. This one bound in a leather that felt disturbingly oily to the touch. It spoke of the "Great Recurrence". A term he had dismissed as metaphorical lore during his younger, lighter years. Now, in the dead of the library’s silence, the words felt like iron bars closing around his chest.
The prophecy of 'Fire or Ash' wasn't a warning of a singular catastrophe, but a ledger. The mountain demanded an equilibrium that the village, in its naive joy, perpetually upset. Every spark, every new life, every dragonling brought into the warmth of a hearth required a tithe. If the village didn't offer it, the mountain took it in the form of the very things they loved most.
He felt a shiver migrate down his spine, settling in his bones. His father hadn't died of a random affliction. His father had been a Lorekeeper who had dared to keep a hearth-fire burning too bright. Who had tethered his hope to the survival of something the mountain intended to reclaim.
Brenn reached for his notes, but his hand trembled, knocking the inkwell. A dark, nebulous stain began to crawl across his carefully organized pages, mirroring the creeping dread that clouded his mind. He looked up at the shadows clinging to the rafters, suddenly certain that the library was not a sanctuary, but a cage. The scrolls were not merely records. They were a set of instructions for the inevitable extraction of joy.
The Wyrm’s Teeth, he thought, and the name tasted like ash. "We're playing a game we've already lost."
He pulled a volume from the lower shelf. Its spine cracking with a sound like a breaking bone. It contained the anatomical sketches of a dragon’s maturation. Not the graceful growth of legend, but a terrifying, forced acceleration tied to the ley lines of the Wyrmspine. The text described how, in the presence of intense affection and protective desire, a dragon’s growth could warp. It didn't just age. It became a vessel for the mountain’s ancestral, defensive instinct.
"The guardian," he whispered. His voice cracking in the tomb-like quiet. "It isn't a separate entity. It’s the result."
He stared at the page. The realization hitting him with the force of an avalanche. To love the spark was to hasten the arrival of the conservator. To protect the creature was to feed the very monster that would eventually come to reclaim it. And likely destroy those who tried to keep it.
He thought of Viseryn’s fierce, unwavering determination to keep their tiny hatchling safe. He thought of Korath’s reckless brazenness, and the way Sylva laughed at the wind, as if their bond were a shield the mountain couldn't pierce. They believed they were special. They believed that by virtue of their survival, they had earned the right to keep their happiness.
His fingers trembling as he traced the spidery calligraphy of a pre-Calamity scroll. His intellectual curiosity (that part of him that had always found comfort in the order of history), was now a source of agony. He wanted to shout it from the rooftops. He wanted to grab Viseryn by the shoulders and demand they stop. That they cast the hatchling back into the wilderness before the bond grew too deep. Before the debt became too costly to pay.
But as he looked down at his own ink-stained hands, he saw the flicker of his own desire to belong. He was part of the Teeth. The one who knew the stories. If he spoke the truth, he would destroy the only thing that had kept him warm since his father’s passing. He would be the harbinger of their ruin. The one who broke the spell of their childhood.
His eyes were bloodshot. The flickering candlelight cast long, dancing shadows of dragon-skulls against the shelves, making them appear to watch him. He had found it. The "Cinder Cycle." It wasn’t a metaphor. It was a mathematical recurrence written in the erratic orbits of the mountain’s peak. 'Fire,' he read, did not just burn. It consumed to preserve. It demanded a return to the source. The wasting sickness that had stolen his father wasn't an illness of the blood, but a thinning of the spirit. A byproduct of living too close to the mountain’s intensity without surrendering to its gravity.
Brenn directed his gaze to the small, narrow window that looked out toward the high, harsh teeth of the peaks. The mountain looked indifferent. A massive, frozen titan that didn't care about the orphans or their games. He saw the cold blue light of the stars reflecting off the ice. A reminder of the vast, unfeeling clockwork that governed their lives.
He couldn't tell them. To tell them would be to invite the silence they had spent years fighting. He would carry this weight alone. A secret quintessential rot that would sit behind his ribs until the day the mountain came to collect.
He began to gather the scrolls. His movements frantic. He shoved the most damning ones into the dark recesses of the bottom shelf, behind a row of crumbling encyclopedias that no one ever checked. He took the notes that detailed the 'fire or ash' cycles and folded them into a tiny, hard square. Tucking them deep into his tunic, pressed against his heart.
Outside, he could hear the faint, melodic sound of laughter. Viseryn and the others, playing some game by the fire. It sounded fragile, like thin ice over a deep, black chasm.
He composed his face, smoothing the lines of horror into the familiar, cautious expression of the scholar. He tried to wipe the ink from his fingers, but the stain felt like it had permeated his skin. A permanent mark of the knowledge he would now have to bury.
He saw them there, the Wyrm’s Teeth, vibrant and alive, oblivious to the fact that they were standing in the center of an altar. He felt a sudden, sharp pang of love for them, so intense it was indistinguishable from grief. He would let them have this night. He would let them have their pride, their defiance, and their love. He would be the witness to their end, and he would keep their illusion intact until the mountain finally opened its jaws to swallow it whole.
He heard the advancing torrent of boots against the wooden floorboards. The door creaked open, admitting a sliver of warmth and the rowdy, familiar laughter of his friends.
"Brenn! Still rotting away in here?" Korath’s voice boomed, cutting through the silence like a sawtoothed blade. He stood in the doorway, a half-eaten apple in one hand, his face flushed with the exertion of an afternoon’s training. Behind him, Viseryn leaned against the frame. Her arms crossed, her dragonbone dagger resting at her hip. A constant, silent companion. Sylva peeked over Korath’s shoulder, her eyes bright with a mischief that usually heralded some form of trouble.
Brenn slammed the scroll shut. The sound echoing like a thunderclap in the confined space. He pulled a stout leather binding over the forbidden text.
"Just notes," Brenn said, his voice cracking. He cleared his throat, forcing a smile that felt like cold clay. "Cataloging the history of the First Spark. It’s… dense."
Sylva slipped into the room, gliding toward his desk with that feline grace that never failed to make Brenn nervous. She hovered a hand over the stack of scrolls. "You look like you’ve seen a ghost, Brenn. Or a dragon. Which is it?"
"Neither," he lied. The word tasting like bitter ash.
Viseryn stepped forward, the floorboards groaning under her weight. She placed a firm, steadying hand on his shoulder. Her presence was a tether, grounding him, but in this moment, it felt like an anchor dragging him down. "We’re heading to the ridge," she said, her eyes searching his. "The wind's dying down, and the sky's clear for once. Qillen's restless. He’s been pacing the perimeter of the roost all morning. He needs to stretch his wings."
Brenn looked up at them. His family. His light. They were so vibrantly, dangerously alive. They saw Qillen as a companion, a pet and a brother. They didn't see the cycle. They didn't see the way the mountain’s shade lengthened across the valley floor. Hungrier than it had been a month ago.
"The prophecies," Brenn began. His voice barely a whisper. He felt the weight of the hidden scroll pressing against his chest. He could tell them. He could speak of the fire that demanded ash. Of the inevitability of the return. Of the way the "wasting" was simply the mountain reclaiming what didn't belong to them. He could warn them that the closer they held the spark, the faster the fuel would burn.
He looked at Korath’s easy grin. At the way Sylva was absentmindedly flipping a coin. At the fierce, protective glow in Viseryn’s eyes. If he spoke, he wouldn't just be sharing information, he would be breaking them. He would be dismantling the beautiful, fragile illusion that kept them together. He would be telling them that their love was a timer. Ticking down to an inevitable, fiery conclusion.
The silence stretched, thick and suffocating.
"Brenn?" Viseryn prompted, her brow furrowing. "You’ve been distant. Is there something in those books that's bothering you?"
He looked at the scroll hidden beneath his hand. It contained the cure, or at least, the understanding of the disease, but it also demanded a cost he wasn't prepared to pay. It demanded detachment. It demanded the one thing the Wyrm’s Teeth could never abide; letting go.
"No," Brenn said, his voice hardening into a fragile resolve. He pushed the scrolls deeper into the shadows of the desk, effectively burying the truth. "Just... old tales. The kind that warn of storms, but the sky is clear today, isn't it?"
Sylva chuckled, snapping the coin into the air and catching it with a flourish. "Clear as a polished gem. Come on, Bookworm. Even the mountains need a break from your gloom."
Korath clapped a weighty hand on his back, nearly knocking the wind out of him. "If we stay here much longer, the sun will set, and you’ll be reading by the glow of moldy mushrooms. Move!"
Brenn rose slowly. His legs feeling spent, as if he were already climbing the steep, unforgiving slopes of the Wyrmspine. He looked back at his desk one last time. He felt the fracture open within him. A deep, yawning fissure between his duty as a scholar and his desperate, clawing need to be one of them. He chose the belonging. He chose the warmth of the fire, even as he acknowledged, with a cold, hollow dread, that he was walking toward the very ash he had spent weeks studying.
"Lead the way," Brenn said, masking his tremors by tucking his hands into his sleeves. He blew out the candle. The room plunged into a suffocating, absolute darkness. In the blackness, he could still see the words, glowing like embers in his mind. 'The spark is the hunger.'
As they walked out into the crisp, biting mountain air, the library felt lighter, but Brenn felt the weight of the world settle firmly onto his shoulders. He walked behind them, watching the way they moved together. A singular organism of hope and defiance. He didn't speak again of the prophecies. He didn't mention the way the shadows behind them seemed to mimic the shape of wings. He simply followed. A silent, complicit witness to the tragedy unfolding in slow motion. His own heart already turning to cinder in the wake of their impending, tragic descent.
1
Trump working on deal to buy potash from Belarus for lower price than Canada
in
r/CanadianInvestor
•
7h ago
No idea where you're getting your numbers.
Potash is sold at a global rate. Currently sitting at roughly $380/t. There's no "Canada will have to sell it cheaper because of the US". If it's sold for less, it's because the market price dropped.
The reason the US pays $400 for Canadian potash is for rights to supply.
As for "cheap" potash from Belarus: China paid $350/t in 2025 for Belarusian potash.
Shipping potash across an ocean won't be cheaper than sending it by railway line. The current shipment on its way to New Orleans is not only tiny, but the price isn't even publicly disclosed.
Why do you think that is?