Extra's Survival: Raising SSS-Rank Characters Is My Only Option

The novel had described the Riven in a single paragraph. Now that Encrid was looking at the real thing, he felt the author should be ashamed of himself.

The gorge was half a mile across. Its walls dropped straight down for three hundred feet of wet black stone, and at the bottom ran the river - though ”ran” was the wrong word. The Riven filled the gorge from wall to wall, grey-white and violent, moving so fast the eye struggled to follow it. Spray shot a hundred feet up the rock and froze there in huge pale sheets of ice. The sound of it wasn’t loud so much as everywhere. It came up through the ground, through the soles of his boots, and settled in his chest like a second heartbeat.

”They say it has no bottom,” Gus shouted beside him, delighted and terrified at the same time. ”They say it comes up from under the world!”

”Who says that?”

”Everyone, young master!”

Volk had come up the column to stand at the crest. The old bandit looked down into the gorge like a professional assessing an obstacle.

”Thirty years in the north,” he said, ”and it still turns my stomach. No boat survives that water. No swimmer. And no bridge built by men would last a single winter of it.” He raised one bound hand and pointed east along the rim. ”Which is why the legends say that the first of the dwarves had built that one.”

Encrid turned to look.

And there he saw the structure - something that was never explained in the novel because it no longer existed when the story began.

The Darwen Span.

It crossed the gorge in a single arch of grey-black stone, half a mile from wall to wall, with no pier, no cable, and no support of any kind beneath it. One unbroken curve, wide enough for eight wagons side by side, hanging two hundred feet above the water. The river’s frozen spray coated its underside, so the whole structure glittered in the winter light.

’That’s not something people build,’ was Encrid’s first honest thought. ’That’s something people find, and then argue about for a thousand years.’

”The deep-folk raised it,” Sir Gareth said, drawing rein beside him. ”The Darwen. Before the empire, before the Wall - before the forest turned wicked, if the old stories are true. No one knows how they did it. The stone has no joints anywhere. Masons travel from the capital just to stand under it and give up.” He looked at the bridge the way soldiers look at things that have outlasted every army. ”It is the only crossing of the Riven along its entire length. Everything the Wall eats, wears, and burns goes over that arch.”

’I know,’ Encrid thought.

He knew more than that.

He sat his horse at the top of the descent while the column started down toward the bridgehead - the squat toll-fort, the queue of supply wagons, the small figures of the bridge watch and the memory of the novel rose in him, cold and unwanted.

It was explained in volume nine.

In the past, when the Wall fell. The roamers of the Great Green Forest poured south with nothing left to stop them, and one man stood at this bridgehead.

And he alone held the bridge for three whole days until the Duke Aegis Von Gannon ordered the Darwen span to be destroyed and three more days until they destroyed it.

It had taken every mage the north could gather, three days of work, and a price the novel only hinted at - because you did not simply break something the deep-folk had made. But when the impossible arch finally fell into the Riven, the monsters of the Wave were left standing on the far rim with no way across, and the north bought itself two years. Two years to find the source of the Roamer Wave. Two years to end it, to stop the constant influx of strong roamers surviving the Riven and invading the north.

In the novel’s future, every human being alive south of this gorge owed their life to a broken bridge.

|| The Duke stood at the ruined bridgehead for a long time, they say. The greatest work of the elder world, and he had unmade it in an afternoon. When his officers asked if it had been worth it, he said only: ”I would do it again, if that’s what it takes to protect the north.” ||

Encrid looked at the Span, whole and glittering in the winter light, and felt like a man reading a gravestone that didn’t have a date carved on it yet.

’Two years,’ he thought. ’The Wall will fall in two years, and then my father breaks the unbreakable bridge, and the north survives by the width of this gorge. That’s the schedule.’

He thought.

’And that’s the schedule I’m going to stop.’

The whole reason why Encrid had chosen to go to the Wall, risking everything and even his life - was to alter the course of history in the biggest way possible - by stopping the fall of the Wall and saving countless lives.

That was his goal.

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The crossing took an hour.

The bridge watch - leathery men in the plain grey clothing of the Wall, the first Wall men Encrid had seen - checked the column against its documents slowly and thoroughly. For them, the bridge was a border, a customs house, and a religion all at once. The White Griffin seal shortened the process considerably. The thirty-seven roped bandits lengthened it again.

”Labor levy,” the watch sergeant read off Encrid’s letter. He looked down the line of Volk’s men with open appreciation. ”Thirty-seven of them. The Wall thanks you, my lord. We’d thank you more if it were forty.”

”They tried to kill me,” Encrid said.

”Most of the men in Wall also tried to kill someone before they were sent here, my lord,” the sergeant said calmly and waved the column on.

Riding onto the Span felt like riding onto the sky. The parapets were chest-high and covered in carvings. Encrid looked at the carvings once, and then made himself stop, because they reflected the water running at tremendous speed, and Encrid felt no desire to look into it.

Between the parapets there was only the arch, the wind, and the white roar rising from below. The horses hated every step. The bandits crossed in complete silence. Even Harun stopped talking.

At the very top of the arch, Encrid halted his horse and looked north.

The far rim of the gorge rose ahead. Beyond it, the land climbed in long grey steps toward a horizon that was dark. Not storm-dark. A fixed, unmoving dark - a line of deep green-black lying along the edge of the world.

The Great Green Forest.

It was still two days away but was already visible.

And against that darkness, so far off it looked like a pale scratch across the world, running unbroken past both edges of his sight-

”There she is,” said the watch sergeant, who had ridden across with them. Something had come into his voice that hadn’t been there at the toll-fort. Not pride, exactly. Something closer to ownership.

”The Wall.”

✦ ✦ ✦