It was like nothing I had ever seen before. The stone road we followed became mere stone upon stone, and if we had not been following it for so long, we might not have even seen it. In the forest it had been covered with moss and surrounded by trees — here it was nothing more than an etching in the stone under our feet. There were runes every ten feet or so. We had gone from lush forest to stone sterility. Everywhere that I looked in the early dawn, there was nothing but dead rock. Nothing lived here. There was no plant life, anyhow. I reached out my mind in all directions and felt nothing. Ahead of us loomed a sheer stone wall. When I looked up, I couldn’t see the end of the mountain peak. Behind us, the forest was almost out of sight, and I almost stopped believing in it; I could no longer feel its energy and life. The etchings in the stone brought us to a sheer face. There were stairs, broken and cracked, a few hundred feet away. But the faint path seemed to run straight up to the wall, as if the mountain had been put there afterwards.
