The desert did not forgive weakness, and it made its displeasure known almost immediately. With the unconscious miner Kerrick slung across his shoulders, Rorak Therenoor pushed out from the seep near the glass spires, only to feel his back seize beneath the strain. He would not let the desert claim another life that day. Gritting his teeth, he called on the last of his battle-fury and forced his body onward through the pain until the ruined stones of a waystation rose out of the dust ahead.
They made camp there, four miles short of Dusthollow, with Callidora taking the first watch over her exhausted companion and their unconscious charge. While the camp slept, Rorak searched through Kerrick's belongings and found two things that troubled him. The first was an oilcloth map, carefully inked, showing the north tower's base and a spiral staircase winding down to a sealed door. Scrawled beside it, in a hand that seemed to shake as it wrote: something behind it, and it can hear it breathing. The second was a sliver of glass, diamond-clear and impossibly cold, that refused to warm even against the desert's heat radiating up through the sand.
Dusthollow greeted them with welcome relief. Zahira Sunforge pressed a pouch of resin-ink paste into their hands, explaining its purpose in clipped, practical terms: coat the fists, blind the glass figures on contact, ten minutes of sunlight to set. She pressed a second pouch into their hands as well, in case of emergencies.
There was no time to linger. The plan was set: rest briefly, then push through the night to reach the glass city's north tower by noon, when the sun would be high enough to matter. The forced march tested them both. Rorak shrugged off the night's demands as though the desert itself had grown tired of trying to break him, but Callidora felt the exhaustion settle into her bones, a weight that would not be washed away by morning.
They arrived at the glass city's north side before dawn, the tower looming pale and silent ahead of them, the sun not yet high enough to arm them with its light. It was there, in the gray hour before sunrise, that something in both of them shifted and hardened, tempered by the miles behind them and the danger ahead. Rorak felt a new ferocity kindle in his chest, a sharper sense for danger creeping at the edge of his awareness. Callidora felt her connection to the divine deepen, new words of command and healing rising unbidden to her lips, the fruit of survival and resolve rather than any promise of what lay ahead.
They stood at the foot of the north tower as the last stars faded, stronger than they had been, but with the map's warning fresh in their minds. Something waited behind that sealed door below the spiral stair. Something that could hear.