While Empress Anastasia Volkov's three Winter Legions executed their calculated, theatrical thirty-mile withdrawal from the walls of Frozen Heaven Pass—leaving behind burned decoy campfires and scattered supply wagons that sent Third Prince Huang Lin's unsuspecting scouts into paroxysms of premature celebration—four shadows were limping through a desolate, ash-choked volcanic fissure two hundred miles northwest in the Dead-Bone Mountains.
This barren, sulfur-reeking wasteland was one of the few places left on the northern continent where neither the patrols of the Celestial Dragon Empire nor the Frost-Wyrm scouts of the Rimefrost Imperium bothered to waste their boots.
Inside a cramped, damp lava-tube cave hidden behind a curtain of frozen black waterfalls, a small fire of low-grade charcoal sputtered weakly against the biting cold.
