Five years.
Dalga Ironvein stood on the ridge above the Thornwall Corridor's eastern entrance and watched the last charge detonate. The blast rolled through the pass — a dull, percussive thud that traveled through the granite like a heartbeat, rattling loose stone from the cliffs and sending a plume of grey dust billowing from the tunnel mouth two hundred meters below.
Fifteen seconds of silence. Then, from inside the tunnel: a cheer. Faint at first — dampened by eighty-seven kilometers of stone — then louder as the workers at the western end realized what the workers at the eastern end had just realized.
The Thornwall Corridor was through.
Dalga closed her eyes. The wind at this altitude bit through her coat — the Thornwall's spine sat at three thousand meters, and the thin air made her lungs work harder than they liked. She was sixty-seven years old. Five years older than the woman who had driven her first survey stake into the mountain's base and declared the stone her enemy.
