The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect Chapter 20: Chapter 20

Read chapter 20 of The Rise of the Unbound Sovereign Sect by Magic on NovelPedia.

"The mountain does not consult the stone before the avalanche." The second twilight since the rabbit’s disappearance settled over the Great Gem Cliff like cooling slag. Vora marched through the perimeter guards, her boots grinding into the glittering granite dust of the lower plateau. Her jaw was set, a hard line of muscle bunched at the hinge. Her hunting pouch hung against her flank, flat and empty. For forty-eight hours, she had pushed her scouting loops far past the safe boundaries of the territory, tracing the jagged, ash-strewn margins where the forest gave way to the crushing weight of the dead sovereign’s domain. She had found nothing but crushed grass that could have been made by a falling branch, and a single, tiny indentation in the mud that the heavy rains had already begun to dissolve. Around the central fire-pits, the hunters of the vanguard were already dividing the day’s yield. A massive, six-horned tusk-boar lay split on the butchering slabs, its thick, grease-heavy scent filling the air. Karg stood by the largest spit, his bone-cleaver scraping rhythmic curls of fat from a rib section. He did not look up as Vora approached, but the slow, mocking tilt of his head signaled his awareness long before she reached the firelight. "The vanguard returns," Karg rumbled. His voice was a low, seismic vibration that stirred the ash at his feet. "Two days on the high ridges, Vora. Two days of wasting the tribe’s salt, and your hands are as clean as a newborn’s. Tell us, did the mountain midge turn out to be too swift for the daughter of the cliff?" The younger hunters snickered, their massive frames shaking with rough, guttural amusement. A few of them cast brief, sliding glances toward Vora’s thigh, where the iron-viper's bite had left a clean, unblemished scar instead of the blackened, sloughing rot that usually claimed a warrior’s meat. They knew why she had gone out. They knew she had spent two full rotations tracking a fragile, hundred-and-twenty-pound piece of driftwood that had drifted down from the sky. Vora did not answer. She did not look at Karg. She walked past the spit, her stride rhythmic and unhurried, absorbing the mockery the way the granite roots of the mountain absorbed the winter frost. For nearly four thousand years, they had walked these identical paths. She had matched strides with Karg since they were both barely past their first century; they had bled on the same territorial borders and watched generations of younger, hot-headed Wall-Defenders challenge the vanguard only to be carried back in pieces on their shields. They were two ancient forces occupying the same narrow ledge. A few well-timed jabs from a rival did not move the marrow in her bones. But as she reached the threshold of the wall of caves, the laughter behind her died out, replaced by a heavy, deliberate silence. A group of foreign giants stood above on the entrance to the primary hall. There were seven of them, each taller and broader than the hunters of the Gem Cliff, their skin the color of cold volcanic ash. They carried harpoons forged from dark, heavy bog-iron and wore cloaks made from the coarse, oily hide of deep-water krakens. They were from the Sunken Ridge tribe—a clan that lived three weeks to the south, where the earth cracked open to reveal veins of black glass. At the front of the group stood the son of their Elder, a giant named Thul who had carried his blade through three thousand winters. His chest was a wall of muscle, crisscrossed with white, keloid scars from old territorial wars, and his small, yellow eyes fixed on Vora the moment she crossed the threshold. He did not look at her weapon or the hunting trophies on her belt. He looked at the width of her hips, the density of her frame, and the unblemished skin of her arms with the cold, calculating eye of a breeder selecting a draft animal. "She is late, Keeper," Thul said, his voice grating like stones sliding down a dry riverbed. He addressed the shadows within