The mountain recognized him.
That was the wrong way to think about it. Mountains didn’t recognize people. Mountains were stone and ice and indifference. But the terrain under Coal’s hooves was changing in ways that Sev’s body understood before his mind caught up, the specific angle of a ridge line, the particular shape of a cliff face, the way a stream bed curved around a rock formation that had been old when Sev was born and would be old when Sev was dust.
He knew this place.
He’