The Ox led them up the switchback trail to the cathedral’s base, through the press of dilapidated homes, past a long-dried well, its hatching splintered and scattered over the faded road underfoot. Anji scanned the vastness at their backs. From the high vantage, the untamed, uncaring wilderness looked so beautiful she felt a sudden urge to paint it, to lock its beauty forever on a canvas. Anji suppressed a laugh—she’d never painted in her life. She wished she’d tried to learn. How many things might she have found a passion for if she’d been allowed to live a normal life? If the abnormal one she had wasn’t about to be cut short?

They passed beneath the flying buttresses, arched and carved with runes Anji couldn’t make out, then rounded the front corner under the watchful spire standing quiet sentinel over its desolated hill. Finally, the Ox clicked her tongue and tugged at the reins, and they stopped in the cathedral courtyard—what remained of it, at least.

Broken cobbles lay buried under decades of grit and dust, sedge and moss grown thick out of cracks and gouges in the earth. Dead, stunted brush lined the outer rim of stone, once tended, Anji thought, but now a copse of reedy corpses convulsing in the icy breeze. A pair of winged, humanoid statues flanked shallow steps, their faces long blasted away by the elements. The building’s facade harbored weathered double doors, twenty feet tall and banded with bolted iron. A wide, bronze disc sat where they met, dark green with age, but despite its patina Anji could just make out the nine-pointed star that had lifted her spirits on so many hungry days.

Anji rolled her eyes to the shattered rose window and beyond: the spire, so spindly from a distance, now stretched like a black road into the yawning sky. She averted her gaze from the massive presence the heap of rubble still commanded.

The Ox nudged Anji out of the saddle and dismounted, her boots sending up puffs of gray dirt. Without a word, she grasped Anji’s forearm and ushered her toward the entrance.

“You’ve nowhere to go,” the stout woman said, voice low behind the mask. “Try to run, and you’ll find naught but miles of wilderness and tundra and no food. If you want to eat and sleep somewhere warm tonight, you’d best stay put, no matter what happens in there. Got it?”