Trafalgar went off the cliff without a word, and Moses went with him.
They came down the broken slope in long bounds, and as he fell Trafalgar called his gear out of the empty air. Obsidian Wings poured over him from nothing, black plate knitting itself across his shoulders and arms between one stride and the next, and Maledicta formed in his grip an instant behind it, the hilt filling his hand as though it had never been anywhere else. To his side Moses reached into the air and closed a fist, and a greatsword answered the gesture, a slab of dark demonic steel longer than a tall man, hauled out of nowhere and laid across one shoulder as if it weighed no more than a walking stick.
Below them, the grey things at the mouth of the mine turned as one.
They had kept their patience through a month of grief and a mountain of the dead, and some instinct in them read the two figures coming down the slope as a threat of a wholly different order. The tall ice-born drew themselves upright.
