Eventually the water subsided, filling the shaft but no longer lapping over its edge. He climbed down the cliff face, finding easy handholds in the broken rock.
He knew this cliff.
When he had thrown himself into the central shaft of the Vincularium, a bare moment after he’d touched flame to the black powder in the ancient dwarven barrels, he had not expected to live. He’d been thrown this way and that by the explosions and the shifting ground, tossed about with the water until he couldn’t even think straight. He had fully expected to die. Yet somehow his body had been sucked into one of the emergency escape shafts-the same one, in fact, that he had watched the demon slither through years earlier. The pressure of the water behind him had been enough to shoot him free just before the mountain collapsed inward on itself.
And now-now he was still alive.
The landscape before him he knew. It was the land of his birth, the eastern steppes of the clans. He turned and looked back, and looked for the familiar shape of the mountain Cloudblade, that stood as a sentinel between this land and the more civilized kingdom of Skrae, to the west.
The mountain was gone.
Utterly gone.
In its place was a wide valley of broken rock, filled with smoke and roiling dust. When the Vincularium collapsed, it had taken Cloudblade with it. Now there was a gap in the Whitewall. What had been an impassible barrier of rock and snow that no man could climb was now… open. The mountain had fallen and become a pass. A serviceable, if rugged, new pass through the mountains. A pass so wide that an army could march through it.
Looking out on what he’d wrought, Morget tilted his head back and laughed, and laughed, and laughed.
