He had to offer her the choice to go back to the sunlight before they crossed the final pass into the Iron Marches.
If he truly loved her, if he was a father and not a monster, he had to let the little bird fly back to the peaceful garden.
Even if the agony of letting her go would permanently, irreversibly sever his own soul.
***
The twelfth day of the Western transit brought the convoy to the highest and the most treacherous pass of the mountain crags: the Spire of Granite.
The road here was a narrow, unpaved ledge carved directly into the face of a vertical cliff.
To the left rose an unyielding wall of dark, jagged stone; to the right dropped a yawning, bottomless abyss of swirling gray mist and freezing wind.
The sky above was completely blotted out by heavy, low-hanging clouds that scraped the peaks, plunging the midday transit into a deep, gloomy, oppressive twilight.
Inside the mythril carriage, the silence was thick and suffocating.
