The mountains didn’t answer me back, and there were plenty of them right now, as we’d left the villages behind and started moving through a range taller than any I’d seen on Earth. It was cut through by a narrow valley with a river frothing with rapids at the bottom, and sprinkled with tiny fisherman’s villages, just a cluster of cottages at a time. But eventually, even that gave way to a winter wonderland of pure snow and ice and stone.

The highest peaks were wreathed in clouds and lost to sight, but even the lower ones towered on either side, row after row clad in stark colors of gray, dark gray, black and white. There were no villages here, or any sign of life at all. Just an occasional glacier filling the gaps in between pinnacles, like a sleeping giant under a blanket of snow, but holding strange blue fire at their hearts.

And then I was treated to something that made all of that look like nothing, just nothing at all.

We had been climbing for a while, steadily fighting our way upward with every powerful beat of those great wings, and finally rose high enough to break through the clouds. A cascade of light rewarded us, flooding the scene and making me blink. I didn’t know what the fey called their star—I’d never thought to ask—but it was dazzling.

But not as much as that, I thought, as a city appeared in the distance. It was carved into a magnificent cliffside, with multiple towers, domes and terraces. It was hard to make out details at this distance, hard to see it at all in fact, but not because of the clouds. Most of them were below us now, spread out like a vast white sea. They boiled up against the bottom of the cliff like waves crashing against a rocky shore, to the point that I half expected to hear the roar of the ocean.

No, the problem was that the city was carved out of stone almost as pale as the clouds surrounding it, like cream right before it turned into butter: off white with occasional veins of pale gold. The bulbous look of the domes also blended in perfectly with the surrounding cloud banks, fooling the eye, and making the city seem like just another part of the sky. If the fey hadn’t been looking right at it, I might have missed it all together, or thought I was seeing a mirage.

I still sort of did because I’d already seen Aeslinn’s capital. Issengeir, the City of Ice Spires in their language, currently lay in ruins at the center of a gigantic plain, inside a protective ring of mountains that hadn’t proved so protective, after all. But this was even grander. It looked like somebody was trying to copy Olympus which… knowing Aeslinn a little now, he probably was.