[North Road — Day 66 — 4:30 PM]
The paved road ended without warning.
A clear line where the last stone block ended and compact mountain earth began, as if whoever built the road had come exactly this far and had decided that beyond this point was not their responsibility.
Maya stopped at that line.
She looked at the map.
She looked at the point where the road's solid line became a dotted line.
"Here," said Maya.
The team stopped.
The mountains ahead — no longer on the horizon but above, the snow‑capped peaks visible above the tree line, the scale up close completely different from the scale from Threshold Port. The wall of stone and vegetation that started where the road ended was vertical for the first fifty meters before becoming the steep slope that the maps described with dotted lines and notes like *"changing terrain"* and *"no estimated time reference"*.
"The village map says the alternate path starts two hundred meters to the west," said Grim.
