*****

After breakfast, Val and Adrien went to have a short walk in the snowy forest; they'd gone in a loop that brought them back to the tower's stone steps. Looking down from the top of the hill, the clearer sky now revealed a view even more stunning than before - nothing but white and white until the distant horizon. The snow-covered landscape was so immense in its openness that Adrien's eyes failed to make sense of it; the furthest mountains flickered into his perception as if he could leap over them if he only tried, and yet as if they only barely existed as an unreachable backdrop for his imagination to wander.

He had been aware of it before, but it was in that moment that Adrien found himself struck by the full realization of how remote of a place this was.