Excerpt:

The landscape bore out the threat like a rising hammer. The gradual grassland began to dip away to a sandy gray gravel beneath the wheels of the cart. Ahead of them the sunlight was full and heavy, but the cool wind that blew almost continuously through the eastern lands lent reprieve to their backs.

‘It looks like desert out there.’ Lucien observed.

‘It pretty much is,’ Ariel looked up from her book. ‘Valley is a misnomer. ‘Crater’ would probably be more appropriate.’ She shut the book, carefully noting her page and put it on her lap. ‘I only saw it from afar but it looked-‘

Like a huge long scar. Like something with talons reached out of the sky and scraped a line in the earth; here, and no further. The mountain they were told was called Teferan, or God’s Seat. She raised out of seemingly nowhere; perfectly flat grassland without warning gave way to rocky terrain then to the mountain, rising like a pimple from the earth. Whatever had raised it, a greater force had gutted it; the Valley itself had been dug straight through the middle of the mountain, leaving two smaller peaks straddling a massive trench.

The mountain was large but not tall. Horizontally it engulfed the entire horizon. Gentle slopes alternated with teeth-like protrusions ascending towards the peaks who sat squat, narrow and jagged. Between them the Valley fell away like gravity. The inward faces were nearly vertical; miles of drop falling into a forbidding cleft of near-obsidian darkness.