The memory surfaces like a bubble from deep water. Three weeks ago, the morning after I moved the last of my brewing kegs into the cellar, I hiked the bluff trail north of town. Couldn't sleep. The sky was still purple and the ocean air tasted like cold iron. I followed the switchbacks up past the lighthouse ruins, where the granite shelves jut out over the surf and the spray coats everything in a fine salt crust.
Growing in the cracks between the rocks. Wild. Scraggly. Unmistakable.
The same deep crimson leaf clusters. The same sulfuric heat radiating from the stems when you crush them between your fingers. Not the cultivated Orcish variety I import from the homeland, but its feral cousin. Rougher. Hotter. More volatile by a significant margin.
But close enough to make the glaze sing.
"The cliffs," I say.
Solene's brow furrows. "What?"
"North bluff. Past the lighthouse. There's a wild patch growing in the rock face." I'm already untying my apron. The leather falls heavy onto the counter. "Saw it three weeks ago. Crimson leaf, black stem. Same family as the cultivated spice."
"The cliffs are forty minutes round trip on foot."
"Then I better not walk."
I hit the back door at a dead sprint. The steel crash bar slams open and the door rebounds off the exterior wall. Morning air fills my lungs. Cool, salt-tinged, carrying the distant percussion of waves against stone.
My boots hammer the asphalt of the service alley. A delivery driver hauling crates of lettuce jumps sideways and presses himself flat against his truck as I barrel past. The lettuce crate wobbles. Doesn't fall. I don't look back.
The town's main street blurs by in fragments. The bakery awning. The post office flag snapping in the breeze. A dog tiedto a parking meter barking once, sharp, then going silent as my shadow swallows it and moves on.
I cut through the park at the north end of town. The grass is still wet from yesterday's storm and my boots chew divots into the turf with each stride. The trail entrance sits between two massive Douglas firs, marked by a wooden sign so weathered the text has faded to ghosts.
The switchbacks start immediately. Steep. The trail narrows to single track and the ground shifts from packed earth to loose gravel to raw granite shelving. My calves burn. My lungs pump like bellows. The elevation gain hits fast and the town drops away below me, the buildings shrinking to painted blocks, the harbor curling like a blue arm around the fishing boats.
I don't slow down.
The lighthouse ruins appear around a blind corner. Three crumbling walls of stacked stone, no roof, the old lamp housing long since scavenged for copper. The cliff edge beyond it drops two hundred feet to the churning surf. Spray drifts upward in a fine mist that coats my face and arms.
I scan the rock face.
There. Thirty feet below the trail, on a narrow granite ledge barely wider than my boot. Crimson leaf clusters pushing through a crack in the stone, their black stems rigid against the constant wind. A dozen plants, maybe fifteen, clinging to the cliff with the desperate tenacity of living things that refuse to acknowledge their situation is impossible.
The ledge sits between the trail and the ocean. No path leads to it. The rock face drops at a seventy-degree angle, slick with spray, pocked with shallow handholds that may or may not support two hundred and eighty pounds of orc.
I look down at the plants. The red leaves flutter and twist. Even from here, the smell reaches me. Sulfur and smoke andsomething almost sweet underneath, like burnt honey. The scent of home, wild and untamed.
I look at the handholds. Slick stone. Crumbling edges. A miscalculation means the surf, the rocks, and a closed casket.
I look at the clock in my head. Eighty-three minutes until judging.
I look at the image burned behind my eyes. Solene standing at the counter, her hand gripping the steel edge, her whole world balanced on a plate that needs this one missing element to become what we both know it can be.
I lower myself over the edge.
The first handhold crumbles the instant I commit my weight.
Granite fragments scatter into the void below. My fingers rake sideways and catch a ridge of harder stone, the kind that bites back. Knuckles scrape raw. Feet scramble against the wet face until my right boot finds a crack wide enough to wedge into.
I hang there. Two hundred eighty pounds suspended by friction, stubbornness, and a prayer to whatever old god watches over idiots who climb sea cliffs without rope.
Wind punches up from the surf and plasters my shirt against me. Salt spray coats my forearms. The rock is slicker than a greased skillet and twice as unforgiving. Every surface that looks solid turns to powder under my grip. Every ledge that promises stability slopes toward the drop.
I go down anyway.
Inch by inch. One hand finds a hold, tests it with a sharp pull, commits. One boot probes the face below until it finds purchase. Then the other hand releases, swings down, grabs. The rhythm is ugly and graceless. My shoulder joints pop and grind. A fingernail catches on a sharp edge and tears clean off. Blood mixes with the salt water already coating my hands and makes everything ten percent more treacherous.