The weather was clear.
Of course it was. Three independent verifications, the territorial weather station, and whatever Darius had said to the sky between the night before and this morning — the peaks were visible from the moment we cleared the dense-growth section, four in a line on the horizon, the specific sentence he had been wanting to show me.
He said nothing when I saw them.
He watched me see them.
They were not dramatic peaks — not the jagged alpine sort that appeared in paintings. They were old peaks, rounded by time, that specific softening of geological features that came from existing long enough that the sharp edges had given way to something more permanent. They stood in a line with the particular inevitability of things that have always been there and will continue to be
