My bonfire was pathetic.
A few sticks of wind-dried scrub, barely thicker than my fingers, leaning against each other over a nest of dead moss that had taken four attempts to light. The flame it produced was small, orange and deeply unconvincing - the kind of fire that's mostly a symbolic gesture toward warmth that the actual temperature of the air ignored entirely.
I didn't care. The fire wasn't just for heat. Yes, it warmed my fingertips, barely. But it was for company.
The ledge jutted out from the peak's eastern face, a flat shelf of dark stone roughly ten meters wide and twice as long, dusted with snow that the wind hadn't managed to scour away. Behind me, the peak continued upward for another fifty meters or so - bare rock, ice-crusted, the final stretch of Karith's summit that we hadn't bothered climbing because the mission was finished and nobody wanted to spend another hour ascending for the sake of standing on a slightly higher piece of stone.
