The town of Stone over Fog stuck to the cliffs like scales to skin. The wind carried the smell of cinders, salt and old, cold tales of dragons. I was seventeen years old and had inherited something no one today wanted. My grandmother's compass pointed south when all the other needles screamed midnight. The night before the Festival of Silence, the compass warmed my hand like a freshly forged nail. The pin trembled, pointing to an old quarry where children had been forbidden to go for years. I went there after dark, when the lanterns were bursting with fog and the dogs were silent. The map in my pocket rustled, drawn by a thin hand suddenly very foreign. The quarry had a cracked bottom and a tunnel that sounded like an empty cylinder. The echo came back with a delay, as if someone was listening to me on the other side of the rock. - 'Mila, come back,' hissed Simon, my neighbour, clutching his torch and looking down nervously. - 'If there's something alive down there, it won't ask about your map or your courage. Instead of words, I showed him a compass and a black shell hidden in a box. I found it in the river in the spring, lighter than glass, cold as snow. Simon swallowed his saliva and I walked into the tunnel, counting steps and breaths. Underground, it smelled of rust and wet wool, and echoed our names. After twelve turns, the wall parted into a room with a ceiling like the night sky. In the middle lay a stone cracked lengthwise, and the crack looked like closed eyelids. The compass stopped trembling; the needle stood upright, as if looking into the earth itself. I placed my hand on the stone, and the skin burned, but I did not withdraw my hand. Warmth gushed from the crack, and the smell of thunderstorms and wet leaves. We could still hear the silence, which was not silence, but someone's hushed breath. Above the quarry the bells of the Holy Day rang, and down below something opened an eye. A muzzle slid out of the darkness, heated air touched my lips, and I heard my own name. - What is it? - whispered Simon, and the sound reverberated like a thrown stone. Silence answered, followed immediately by the clatter of steel from the tunnel entrance. The Brotherhood of the Torch was descending on ropes, their lights crawling along the walls like skylights. - 'Find the source of the heat,' ordered someone in a hard whisper that didn't like questions. The muzzle blinked, as if considering me and them, and the memory of a burnt world. The compass in my hand lit up again, and the pointer vibrated exactly towards its throat. A short, impatient bark of command came from the distance, and light hit our threshold.