The wind was blowing hard over head, but down between the shoulders of two ridges, he was protected. He followed the bottom of the ravine, and dark, harshly broken boulders spread out around him. Broken shale crunched and skittered beneath his feet. The quickly fading light of the late evening sun did little to illuminate the dusty red landscape.

He crested over the highest point in the canyon and looked down into the valley. The word valley may be overly ambitious, he thought dryly, as the space below was really just a small, relatively flat area between three mountains. One rose directly to his left, its peaks reaching to incompressible heights, and another, smaller one was further off to his right. Straight ahead, disappearing into the haze, lay the last.

He squinted, straining to see what lay in that haze. A walled city, barely perceivable from this distance, was built up against the foot of the far mountain, and, just beyond that, lay the dark fortress. Just as he managed to pick it out from the dimness, a light turned on in one of its many towers. That was followed by another, and then many more. A floating constellation against the darkening mountain.

“Well,” he sighed, “there it is. The last place any sane person would ever want to be.”

Luckily for him, sanity was not a quality he had been cultivating lately.