The Khursaga mountains didn't provide comfort, but they offered something better: a place to hide.
Three years had changed the boy who once skipped stones into a man who could move mountains. Zekar was now twenty-two, though he felt closer to fifty. His body had filled out, and his shoulders had broadened. He looked more like the ancient statues of Druvkaur kings than the skinny hunter Emery had known. He had led his band of survivors—nearly two hundred now, a mix of Druvkaur fire-bloods and Khursaga miners—to a hidden valley they called New Varnathian. It was a bowl surrounded by stone and pine, protected by peaks so high that Imperial hawks rarely flew over them.
