New Beginning 741

There stands a bridge in the northern country, a bridge nigh as ancient as the mountains in which it stands, a bridge so high in the mists that it is scarcely real, and it is with this arch from solidity to solidity that our story begins.

It is the dead of an autumn night, the sort of night where the cold seeps into your bones—the cold of dead adventurers' stony graves, hidden deep from the sun's light in the folds of the mountain. Farther down the mountain, below the tree line, the pines rust...