Gwen’s shoes slipped on the stones, and she had to crawl across sharp formations jutting up from the ground. Without her pack, she missed something soft to lay her head on at night, as well as her dry socks and packaged food inside. She’d had a few loose matches in her coat pocket, but they wouldn’t even last her a week, and she’d never learned how to start a campfire using only stones and tinder. She was hungry and cold, and she agonized over the bird flying away with the Seers’ Glass. After two more days of climbing, she decided to take shelter for the night against a stone wall. Although she was high in the mountains, the land had flattened here into a rocky plain, with patches of wild thistles. The sun began to set, and the color of the rocks deepened to purple, then finally to dark, midnight blue. The landscape was bleak and empty, and Gwen felt lonelier than she ever had in her life. She wished she could have stayed at Fairmount, with her new friends.
