With those words burning within him, Erasyl immediately drew himself up to his full height. The frost upon his trembling eyelashes cracked with a sharp snap, like pristine winter crust yielding beneath the very first step of a boot. Inside him, a fierce, wolf-like resilience suddenly flared—the only warmth left for shakhryms around. The leader clung to that inner fire as if it were the last remaining ember of a dying hearth, for it alone possessed the power to kindle life back into his frozen soul. He bellowed to the Moyyrs behind him: "Moyyrs! Follow the kobyz! Follow the hum! Do not listen to the names! Only the hum!" The low, mourning wail of the kobyz playing ahead, piercing through the river ice and returning as a deep vibration, became the survivors’ sole beacon in a world of snow, ice, and death. In this abyss, everything lied—the voices, the blizzard, memory itself, and even their own senses, which desperately conjured the nonexistent scents of home and dried kurt cheese. Yet there was nothing out here but the ice and the Breath of Ulgen driving men mad. The spirits of the mist could mimic any human word or the chime of any metal. Yet, try as they might, they could never replicate the deep vibration of living wood and taut horsehair—the only sound on earth capable of defying the deception of the river's monolith. Figures began to materialize from the fog like ghosts. Weeping women, their hands once more locking onto the horsehair rope; exhausted men, leading ice-encrusted tuyeks. They gravitated toward the groan of the kobyz like blind puppies tracking the scent of their mother. Ospan Kariy forged ahead slowly, his steps heavy and short. On every third stride, he would pause, pressing the kobyz firmly against his thigh. He would strike a long, dense note from the instrument, listen to the returning vibration through the soles of his boots, and veer either left or right, navigating around icy traps invisible to the eye. Erasyl marched right beside him, his fingers maintaining a death grip on the old man’s shoulder, keeping him steady whenever the elder stumbled from the sheer exhaustion washing over him. The fog only began to yield when the eastern edge of the canyon stained the sky with the cold, pale hues of lead and vermilion. First, the white shroud grew thin and translucent. Then, the black, jagged silhouettes of the coastal cliffs pierced through it. And finally, a rocky bank overgrown with dry chiy grass loomed before them. True, solid earth. For the final five paces, they no longer marched—they literally tumbled out of the fog. The khoy sheep leaped onto the rocky scree with wild, frantic bleating. The tuyeks fell to their knees with hollow roars, collapsing straight into the dry snow of the riverbank. Out of twenty souls, barely fifteen managed to scramble onto the shore. Erasyl collapsed facedown onto the dry, freezing winter stones, burying his face in the snow as his breath came in heavy, ragged sobs. The freezing air seared his lungs, yet this was the air of the living world, not the icy vapor of the river choked by the Breath of Ulgen. When the first direct ray of the sun broke over the jagged peaks of the canyon and struck the ice of the Bozbolyk, the fog vanished entirely. The river now looked like an ordinary, frozen expanse—a quiet, motionless surface bound by ice, as if it had never possessed that malicious force that had just dragged several souls into the abyss. Erasyl raised his head. Ospan Kariy sat on a stone a short distance away. His bare fingers, entirely devoid of sensation and blackened at the tips, struggled slowly to pack the kobyz back into its leather case. Upon the dry camel hide of the old man’s instrument, small, dark ruby droplets of his own blood had frozen solid. Erasyl pushed himself up on unsteady, leaden legs and, swaying, approached the blind elder, sinking to his knees beside him. "Ata..." His throat seized, completely constricted, as if an icicle had been driven deep into it. "I... I almost went to her. To her voice. It felt so real. If it weren't for you, Ata, all of us would be lying beneath the ice of the Bozbolyk right now." Ospan did not immediately turn his gaunt, hollow face—it looked as though it had been carved from bone bleached by winter winds and frost. His sightless white eyes stared somewhere past Erasyl, out to where the golden steppe sun was climbing over the canyon walls, rising reluctantly, as if by sheer force. Its very first ray fell across Kariy’s eyelids, yet it brought not a single shred of warmth. "You are still young, Erasyl," the old man said softly, a faint smile touching his lips. His voice was dry, resembling the rustle of reeds shifting under a brisk wind. It no longer held that immense power that had manifested out on the ice when the elder drew his bow through the depths; it was merely a soft whisper left in the wake of a prolonged storm. "Hot blood always seeks those it loves. But remember, boy—the spirits of the mist may call us by our names, but they lack the power to breathe genuine, living warmth into them." The old man fell silent, resting his cracked palms against his knees. He added in a whisper so faint that only the leader could catch it, as if the blind man's words were simply too heavy for the morning steppe air to bear: "Thank you, Erasyl, for holding fast to my shoulders down there. Without your strength and resilience, I would surely have fallen, and the bone of the river would never have allowed me to rise again." Erasyl offered no answer to the old man’s words. He simply took that withered, ice-cold hand into his own hot palms and squeezed it tightly. He could feel the alien, inhuman cold slowly and reluctantly beginning to seep through his own warmth. And far behind them, beneath the heavy, frozen mass of ice and frazil slush, a faint, delicate chime could still be heard, swept away by the swift undercurrent. With every passing second, it drifted farther and farther away, growing duller until it became entirely indistinguishable from the dead silence itself. It was one of the bronze konyrau bells that had torn free from the old man’s staff. It chimed somewhere in the black depths, drifting away alongside the bodies of several Moyyrs toward the distant lake where the waters of the Bozbolyk emptied—there, where the current might finally release the dead to their eternal rest. The river had claimed its toll, weighing it upon its invisible scales and taking not a single grain more than required. But those who had learned to listen to it—to listen not to the voice, but through the bone—forged ahead, to keep on living.