The crown of her mountain had been drawn out of the world like a tooth from the jaw. She went home to call it back down — and a piece of the sky answered, and fell toward her.
They came up out of drowned Grithmaar Deep by a stone stair, and left two things behind them in the water: You Bastard, drowned, and Bob the Living Fortress, sunk and too great to move. Heyou dove back down to it only for the Blessed Branch and the Guardian's collar, and left the rest. They camped on the stair while the flood settled. Then Sylvie — who could cross distance in a blink now, and had a dream to answer — took them all in a single step to the Stoneheart Peaks, her own country: to a mountaintop whose crown had been torn clean out of it, a crater holding a small lake, with rough steps cut down to the water.
From the rim Jamal and Heyou saw a vast grimacing face press into the sky and vanish — Jamal knew it for the giant kin of the idol-faces near his childhood home. Sylvie walked the ruin, reading it point to point. Jamal went down to the lake and drew up a broken crab-shell with the meat still in it.
The crabs came for him. Heyou rushed in and blasted them at arm's length, and they swarmed him and tore him to pieces and dragged the pieces into the water. From the rim Sylvie struck one with a black fog that ate its claws away; Draz pinned another to the ground with an arrow; and she cooked the two that could not move and left the third to flee declawed into the lake. Each time she worked magic on that mountain she felt the ground and the sky lean toward one another, and saw an immense hand pressing down on the sky. The crabs would knit themselves back together if left whole, so they cut them apart for good.
She found a cleft the Stone Weavers had once sheltered in, and Heyou drew the stone across its mouth to close it, and they rested there; and she and Jamal gathered up Heyou's scattered parts and put him back together with oils and rags. Then the dreams came to her — a voice telling someone to take out their own eyes, so that they could believe the lies; Ygva in a furnished room above flooded ruins, looking past her, saying help me; and two she had once worked the stone beside, here on this mountain, scrying her as she slept, one of them saying, she will regret calling us back.
She woke to find Jamal gone — down into the lake, and up again riding a crab he had fought and declawed and fitted with the recovered collar, a new companion in the drowned mount's place, the one he would call Pinchie. And over the nights after, Sylvie worked deeper and more dangerous rites to call back what had been torn out of the peak, drawing on her wizardry and on the strange Splendor lodged in her; one night she woke hovering a hand's breadth off the ground. Jamal and Heyou saw the great presence press at the sky again and again, closer each time.
On the last night she took Heyou's help and reached for it — and the power wrenched up past her, and a massive stone body tore through the sky overhead and began to fall toward the mountain: a piece of the sky, the moon itself called back down. And in the reaching, the old Arcana and Splendor she had lost came briefly back into her memory, more than she had held in a long time. The stone came down, and they stood under it.