“Hurry, hurry,” I urged Appius.
Appius moaned and keened as he tried with everything he had to unclasp his clip. Time was running out. I could feel it slipping away, feel Appius slipping out of my arms and my own life hanging by a thread. The side of the cliff trembled as the tower collapsed completely above us and stones started to—
With a shout, Appius freed his clip from the bridge, and the two of us swung free from it just as the whole thing tumbled and spiraled down the side of the cliff. We were pummeled by rocks, especially when we swung back the other way, but by that point, I could feel the upward motion as the others hauled us up to the top of the cliff.
I should have helped by trying to scale the side of the cliff, but all I could do was cling to Appius the way he clung to me, securing him against me with my arms and legs.
“I’ve got you,” I panted. “I’ve got you, I’ve got you.”
I didn’t breathe easy until Leander, Darius, and Lucius pulled the two of us up over the edge of the cliff, then about twenty feet across the ground, scraping and bruising us and themselves as they did, until we were well away from the edge.
“Come on, get up,” Darius shouted. “The whole cliff feels like it’s about to crack.”
I felt what he meant. The ground was eerily unsteady. I scrambled, along with Appius, to get up and stumble as far away from the cliff as we could possibly get. I noticed briefly that Mara had dug a sort of trench in the ground where Lucius had braced himself as the anchor to our rope, but seconds after putting that together in my mind, a huge chunk of the cliff, including the base of the bridge where the tower had stood, broke off of the mountain and tumbled into the chasm.
We moved farther away, as far as we could while the mountain was still grumbling and cracking and breaking. As soon as we were satisfied that the ground where we stood wouldn’t suddenly disappear under us, we stopped and turned back, gaping in utter awe as the dust settled and all remnants of the bridge disappeared.
As quickly as it had started, the thunder of breaking rock turned distant, and then there was silence. Dust still rose in the air, glittering particles of rock winking in the sun as the wind carried them away.
That was it. The bridge was broken. It might have been possible to rebuild it with the bits that had remained before, but there was no hope of that now. The chasm was massive, and nothing and no one could cross it now.
The six of us had just witnessed the irrevocable severing of the Old Realm from the frontier.
We all just stood there. I still held Appius tightly, and he didn’t seem to be in any hurry to let go of me. We were grimy and bruised, and I was starting to feel blisters on my hands, but none of that mattered. Leander and Darius had come together in an embrace as well, as had Mara and Lucius. They were just as dirty as Appius and I were, and every one of us was weeping.
I didn’t know what I was crying for. I had had no intention of going back to the Old Realm ever. If I never even heard of it again it would be too soon. But the breaking of the bridge represented something as deep as the breaking of the world all those centuries ago. It was the dawning of a new era, and there was no going back.
I turned away from the chasm first, taking Appius with me to gather up my pack and some of the other things I’d left well out of the way of the cliff after crossing over. I said a quick prayer of thanks that I’d left my things far enough from the edge that they hadn’t been lost when the cliff broke.
Mara and Lucius followed after us, and by the time I’d struggled out of the rope harness and started coiling up the rope again, Leander and Darius had moved away from the edge as well.
We were silent as we gathered up our supplies, recoiled our rope, and set ourselves to right for walking again. I almost suggested that we stay there and rest, but just the thought of being within sight of the chasm made me feel sick. We all needed to get as far away from it as we could as fast as possible.
We walked for about an hour, until there was no sign at all that we were anywhere near a chasm, or anything other than solid ground. The forest was sparse at that altitude, and the air was cold and thin, but I needed the cold to clear my head. We came across one of the waystations previous generations had built into wilderness and paused there to make camp. None of us were in a mood to hunt, so we ate the food we’d brought with us and drank from the bottles we’d filled that morning.
“You’re the one who has been this way before,” Darius said to me as the six of us sat in a tight circle, sharing each other’s body heat for warmth and presence for comfort. “How many more bridges like that do we need to cross before we’re in the frontier?”
The others all looked at me in alarm.
I cringed as I admitted, “There is one more bridge, but it’s at least a full day’s walk from here, and it’s even shorter than that first one, where we climbed down and up the chasm. And who knows? Maybe General Rufus will have decided not to destroy that one.”
It was wishful thinking, but once we finished our meal and our rest and took turns treating each other’s bruises and bloodied hands—it was handy that all six of us were highly trained healers who knew just what to do for cuts, grazes, blisters, and rope burn—we gathered up our things and walked on.
No one was in a mood to talk for the rest of the day. We came across one more obstacle before nightfall—another wall of boulders where there’d been an avalanche, but it didn’t take more than half an hour to climb across, and there were no corpses scattered throughout the rocks. That told me the new army had never made it this far, which gave me hope that the final bridge would still be intact.
We walked until it was almost fully dark, then found another waystation and made camp for the night. All of us were exhausted, and if it wasn’t for the fact that the temperature dropped and flurries started to fall, we wouldn’t have even built a fire.
It was a stroke of luck that Mara came across a particularly large rabbit while the rest of us were gathering firewood, which meant we had roast rabbit for supper—which we overcooked yet again—before bundling up in our coats with our packs and ropes on top of us like blankets.
All six of us huddled together, but I took particular care to snuggle closely with Appius, comforting myself by breathing in the scent of his sweat.
“I thought I was going to lose you,” I whispered to him, aware that our friends would be able to hear anything we said, even if we whispered. I didn’t care.
Appius lifted his face from where he’d buried it against my neck. “I thought I was going to die.” He swallowed, then said, “You saved me.”
“I had to,” I said, my voice cracking. “I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I’d let you fall.”
Appius’s face pinched, which I could just barely make out in the light of the almost full moon above us.