Vix cautiously raised herself above the concealing shelf of rocks she had been crouching behind. She gazed out at her surroundings.

The Salt Plains lay below her, beginning at the bottom of the lone rise on which she had concealed herself and running to the base of the mountains in the distance. But it hardly seemed fitting to call them mountains at all – these were behemoths, masses of crumbling stone, their peaks slicing up through the clouds like spears piercing the belly of the ...