AWOL

Anyone who had the faintest interest in this blog will have long since given up on it by now. All casual passers-by have drifted away in search of more interesting fare, and I am alone here again. No noses pressed against the glass, no shadows moving past my door.

Which suits me, at the moment.

I have made a pact with myself to write new words in the WIP every day. Maybe there won't be a lot of them, but they will get written and they will move the story incrementally forward. Yes, it's a slog sometimes, but ground not ventured is ground not taken. It's far, far too easy to camp out on the plot of land that's been tamed so far, to tend it and landscape it to a fare-thee-well, while the remaining wilderness promises nothing but sheer hard work. But (I remind myself) it also promises adventure and secret paths and unexpected discoveries.

I have camped out long enough. Time to explore. Time to climb the last few hundred yards of my own personal Everest.

***
The hound led him through the second arch, first into a tunnel, then a cramped side passage that ended in a crevice much like the one he and Yakoba had used when they first entered the stone river. It opened onto his first sight of the forbidden, immortal land of Cuhlnari legend: a tangle of viciously thorny bushes clinging to a stony mountainside. Skah wriggled through the roots of the thicket, but Riordan had to battle his way out through the worst of it. Hands bleeding from a dozen scratches, he scrambled to the summit to get his bearings.

A distant range that could only be the Graystones sliced the northern sky like a gigantic, toothy jawbone, one peak jutting markedly higher than the others. The Eagle? If so, it looked far sleeker and more deadly from this angle, more like an exposed fang than the watchful head of a raptor. The range dropped southward into a fractured highland of gaunt gray cliffs and crumbling mountains stubbled with fir and spruce and powdered with snow. Ravines ran in crooked seams everywhere, filled with foaming streams and sometimes lined with groves of bent and twisted trees that looked so ancient they might have been seedlings when the world was young.

An odd feeling washed over him, equal parts disillusionment and discovery. The Graystones did not guard the edge of mortal earth after all, but hid a harsh, elderly land. Time and weather had eroded its flesh, but the gnarled bones of it remained, saturated with something that made the hairs prickle along his arms. This might not be the realm of spirits, as he had been taught, but some power slept here, dense and deep.

(from The Knife-Giver, ch. 54 "Woman of Stone")