Chapter Text
It was a beautiful day outside. Birds were chirping. The golden flowers that grew in such numbers along the lower fields were blooming, and the morning breeze carried their scent up to where I stood at the edge of the access road. On days like these, a kid like me should be anywhere else but here. Anywhere, but the foot of Mount Ebott.
The morning sun had not yet cleared the mountain’s shoulder. The valley behind me was still in shadow; the peak above me was already gold. I had grown up in the long shadow of this mountain. I had watched it from my bedroom window for as long as I had had a bedroom window. The way its peak seemed to form the shape of a hand reaching for the heavens had always spoken to me: yearning, but determined.
There were a great many legends about the mountain, and most of them I had heard so many times they had stopped meaning anything in particular. The one that had not stopped meaning anything in particular was the one Grandpa told.
He claimed to have been a boy when it happened. A goat creature, he said, had come down out of the mountain and walked into the local field of golden flowers carrying the body of a human girl in its arms. The girl was beautiful, he said, and as she lay against the creature’s chest she seemed at peace with the world. Some of the village said the creature was vicious — that it would have killed them all if not for the heroic efforts of the local mages. Others said it had simply stood there, absorbing their attacks until they had spent themselves, and then turned and walked back the way it had come. Nobody, in either telling, had been hurt by it.
My grandfather believed the second telling. So did I. A creature strong enough to weather the worst the mages could throw at it could not have been defeated by a single human; the most natural reading was the kindest one, which was that the goat had only been trying to bring the child back home. We had not given it the chance to say so. We had never, as far as I could tell, given any of them the chance to say anything.
That was why I was here.
I shifted the strap of my pack on my shoulder. I had not told anyone where I was going. There was nobody at home who would have noticed I was gone for some time yet, and by the time anyone did notice, the question would already be answered.
“I’ll make you proud,” I said, quietly, to no one in particular.
The morning took the words and did nothing with them. I started walking.
* * *
The perimeter had changed since last week.
I noticed it before I had even finished the approach through the trees. There were two new floodlights on the south fence — squat, military things on tripods, not yet switched on but pointed in the direction I had planned to come from. A second truck was parked beside the first, dust still clinging to its tires; it had arrived recently, and from somewhere far enough that nobody had bothered to wash it. The patrol I had timed to walk past at quarter-past was already on its third pass.
Something had spooked them.
I dropped lower into the brush and watched. A part of me — the part Grandpa called the cautious part, the part that does most of the actual surviving — wanted me to turn around. To come back next week, when whatever had stirred them up had gone quiet again. The other part of me, the part that had spent three weeks learning the shifts and the gaps and the slow looping rhythm of a bored man with a rifle, said no, today. If they were tightening up, then every day from now on would be worse than this one. I had not climbed this far up the mountain only to turn back at the actual fence.
I crawled along the treeline until I reached the outcrop where the slope dipped into the runoff gully. From there I could see almost the whole compound, and — more importantly — the mouth of the crevice was only twenty yards off, on the inside of the wire, hidden behind a knuckle of rock the soldiers had never bothered to walk around. There was nothing on the other side of it, as far as they knew, but more rock.
I waited.
It was perhaps ten minutes before the two of them came along the fence line, and I knew before either of them spoke that one of them was not stationed here. The taller man wore a uniform a shade darker than the others, and an insignia I did not recognize on his collar. He walked the way men walk when they have come a long way to be unhappy.
The other man — younger, his uniform creased in the places a uniform creases when its owner has not stopped moving for several hours — was talking, and trying not to sound like he was hurrying.
“—and respectfully, sir, there has not been an incident on this post in living memory. Not since my grandfather’s day. The locals have been hiking these slopes since I was a boy. There’s no reason to assume—”
“Lieutenant.”
The older man did not raise his voice. He simply said the word, and the lieutenant stopped mid-sentence as though he had walked into a wall.
“Tell me,” the colonel said, still not raising his voice, “what you think is on the other side of that mountain.”
A long pause. “Sir, I —”
“Tell me. Use the word the men who built this post used. The word the treaty uses. The word, if you read carefully, the histories use.”
A longer pause.
“…Monsters, sir.”
“Monsters. Yes. Now say it like a man who believes what he is saying. We have not put eighty men and four trucks on the spine of this mountain for two centuries because we are afraid of the locals. We are here because what is sealed in this rock would, given a single afternoon outside it, eat the children in your wife’s classroom and walk back up here for seconds before sundown. Do you understand me.”
I had stopped breathing. I made myself start again, slowly, through the nose.
The lieutenant tried again, more quietly. “Sir, with respect, the records — they don’t show any —”
“I am aware of the records. I have read them. The records do not say no monsters. The records say no monsters yet. The complacency of two centuries of yet is exactly the soil in which a thing like this returns. The reason your locals can hike these slopes, Lieutenant, is because men in uniforms have been standing on them. Do not, in my presence, congratulate the locals for what we have been doing for them.”
They had stopped walking, which was bad for me — they had stopped within twenty feet of where I was lying — and good for me, because they had stopped looking at the fence. I pressed my cheek to the dirt and watched a pinecone three inches from my nose with an attention I would not have believed myself capable of.
“Sir,” the lieutenant said, “if you’d like, we can request—”
“I have already requested. Additional personnel will be here on Friday. Until then, you, Lieutenant, are going to act as though you have understood what I have been very politely telling you for the past hour. Which is that there is a generation of children in the valley below us who have grown up on the assumption that the thing in this mountain has stopped being a thing. They are wrong. It has only been waiting for the next generation of fools to forget about it. You will not, on my watch, be the fool who forgets. Are we clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
Beneath the colonel’s quiet menace I felt, despite myself, a small stab of agreement and a much larger stab of disagreement. Yes — the lieutenant had been right. There had been no incident in living memory. No — the colonel was wrong about what was waiting on the other side of that rock. They had been down there for two hundred years, imprisoned under the surface of the Earth. They were not what he was describing. They could not be. And every floodlight on this fence, every cold rifle slung over every cold shoulder, was a small ugly act of cruelty pointed at a people who had not earned any of it. The colonel was making my case for me without knowing he was making it. If the men in uniforms could not see what was on the other side of this rock as people, then someone — someone other than the men in uniforms — was going to have to.
“Good. Now walk me to the south gate. I want to see those lights tested before sundown.”
They began walking again. Their boots made a slow, even sound on the gravel that grew, second by second, less interested in me. I waited until I could no longer hear them — until the only sounds were the generator and a single jay arguing with itself in a tree somewhere behind the camp — and then I waited a full minute longer, because Grandpa had also taught me that the first minute after you think it is safe is the minute that catches you.
Then I moved.
The crevice was narrower than I remembered, or I was bigger than the last time I had measured myself against it. I had to turn my head sideways to get my shoulders through, and the cold of the rock pressed against both of my cheeks at once, and for one bad second I thought I had misjudged it and was going to be stuck there in the dark with my arms pinned to my sides. Then the passage gave, the way a held breath gives, and I was through.
Inside, the cave was darker than I had let myself remember. I clicked on the small flashlight I had brought, and the beam picked out a low ceiling and a scatter of pale stones I had mapped on the previous trip. I went carefully. I had time, now, to be careful.
It took perhaps twenty minutes to thread the cave. Toward the end I began to see the mouth of it ahead, a ragged oval of light that grew, as I approached, from white to gold. I switched off the flashlight ten paces before I reached the opening and let my eyes adjust.
When I stepped out, the sun had at last cleared the shoulder of the mountain. Its light was dancing its way between the pine trees on the slope above me; a thin, clean breeze was coming down off the higher ground, smelling of rock and resin and something colder beneath. I was on the mountain proper now. There was no fence between me and the peak.
* * *
The trail started off gentle. It was still morning, and the sun had not yet started to swelter. The slope was gradual, barely an incline at all, and the vegetation was still plentiful — enough to give you the feeling you were walking through a forest rather than up a mountain. I cannot say I was ever in great shape, but I had made sure to prepare my body for the climb in the weeks before, and so I was acclimating to the pace well enough.
When the body goes quiet like that, the mind goes wandering. Mine wandered, as it usually did, to Grandpa.
He had a saying he liked, for the days I came home from school with some new evidence that the world was not what it had been advertised to be. The world can be a cruel place, Frisk, he would say. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Live the kind of world you want to see.
I had asked him, once, what kind of world he meant.
He had smiled the way he smiled when I had asked a question he had not yet figured out how to answer, and he had said: I think you know.
I was not sure I had ever quite known. I had known, at least, that I was not going to be cruel back. That much I could carry up a mountain.
And — if I were honest about it on the way up the mountain — the climb was also a way out of something. I tried not to think too much about it. It would still be there when I came back down. Today the climb was permission to walk past it for a few hours.
The path bent. A bar of mid-morning sun came through a gap in the pines and lay itself across the trail in front of me, and I walked into it, and for one whole breath I was only a boy walking into a bar of light on a mountain. There was no one to be afraid of. No one to take care of. No one to forgive. The world was exactly the size of the next step.
I let myself have it.
Then I kept climbing.
* * *
The trees thinned as the slope steepened. Pine gave way to scrub, and scrub to bare patches of rock streaked with lichen the color of old copper. Higher up, almost hidden in the slope, I passed a thing that had been put there by human hands: a worn stone marker, chest-high, the letters on its face softened by weather into shapes that suggested meaning more than they held it. I could make out, at the top, the word I expected. HERE. And below it, half a verb that had lost its ending. FE—. Fell, maybe. Or fought. Or feared.
I knew what it was. There had been a great many of them, once, set along the old roads that ringed Mount Ebott — markers from the end of the war. Most of them had long since been carted off, or broken up for walls, or simply forgotten. This one was here because nobody had bothered to take it.
I rested my hand on the top of it for a moment. It was cold. Of course it was cold.
The histories I had been taught in school were short and certain. There had been monsters; there had been a war; the humans had won; the monsters had been sealed beneath the mountain behind a barrier no monster could cross, and there they had remained, and there they would remain, and that was the price of peace. The histories I had read in the back room of the old library were longer and uglier. The further I had dug, the less certain the war became, and the more it began to look like the kind of victory a people only celebrates because it cannot bear to look at what it actually did. Sealing a people under a mountain because you could is not justice. It is fear, dressed up in the clothes of a victory parade and told to stand still for the photograph.
I took my hand off the stone. I kept going.
Higher up, the climb stopped being a walk and became work.
The slope was steep enough now that I was using my hands as often as my feet. The wind had come back — a thin, high wind that did not push so much as it thinned you. My fingers were cold. The light had gone more golden, more sideways.
I was thinking, now, about the thing I had been trying not to think about for most of the climb.
It had been happening more often lately. The feeling. I did not have a word for it yet, and I had not told anyone about it, partly because there was no one to tell and partly because I was not sure what I would have said if there had been. It was not exactly déjà vu. Déjà vu is the sense that you have been somewhere like this before. What I had was the sense that I had been here. This room. This light. This word, half-formed on this person’s lips. Not a similar moment. The same one.
It would happen, and then it would pass, and afterward the moment would carry on, only slightly differently than I remembered it carrying on the first time — a sentence chosen instead of swallowed, a step taken instead of refused. Small things. Always small things. I would walk away from the rest of the day with the unsettled feeling of having dodged something I could not name, and by the time I reached home it would be hard to remember whether the moment had really happened twice or whether I had only imagined the first time after the fact, the way the mind is sometimes happy to pretend it predicted a thing it merely witnessed.
I had decided, mostly, that I was probably losing my mind a little. I had decided to keep an eye on it. I had decided not to mention it to anyone. So far it had not asked anything of me, and so I had not asked anything of it.
There had been one other thing.
A few months ago, in the back room of the old library, I had come across a footnote on an old legend. It was in a book the librarian had not exactly handed to me but had not exactly hidden either, of the kind he kept on the shelf nearest his chair. The footnote was small. Two sentences. It said that there was, at any given time, exactly one person on the earth who could do a particular thing — a thing the book called, in the offhand way books call things they do not intend to explain, the SAVE. It said that the person who could was the one whose soul was the most determined.
I had not understood it. I had read it twice and I had not understood it the second time either. I had laughed a little, the way a person laughs at a sentence in a foreign language they don’t truly understand, and I had closed the book, and the librarian had pretended not to look at me over his glasses, and I had gone home.
The footnote had not let go of me. I would think of it in the middle of doing other things — washing a dish, walking to school — and the small unease of it would return, a thing standing just behind me whose breath I could feel without turning around. I did not know why. The footnote was about somebody else. How could a single person rewind time for everyone on Earth? More than that, the most determined soul on Earth was somebody, presumably, who had done more in their life than not finish their math homework. It had nothing to do with me.
It had nothing to do with me. I kept saying that. I had been saying it for months. It was more reassuring than delving any deeper on the question
I kept climbing.
* * *
The peak, when I reached it, was not what I had expected.
I had imagined — without meaning to — something dramatic. A spire of rock. A wind that took the breath. A view that demanded to be looked at. What I found instead was a wide bare shoulder of stone, almost flat, scattered with patches of stubborn grass and the bones of one long-dead tree bleached the color of paper. The wind was not strong. The light was doing something I had no words for.
The sun was going down behind the far ridge of the world, and the world was going gold. Not the gold of coins — the older gold, the gold of late wheat and old varnish and the inside of certain churches. The valley I had climbed out of was a long bowl of it. I could see, very small and very far, the camp at the foot of the mountain, the floodlights just beginning to come on, like the first stars deciding to be stars. I could see the river that ran through the valley, and the road that followed it, and the towns strung along the road like beads on a thread. I could see, beyond all of that, the curve of the world itself.
I let myself look at it. I let myself, for a moment, simply have it. I had not had very many things in my life. I was allowed to have this.
Then I turned around.
The cavern mouth was set into the stone behind me, low and wide, half-hidden by an overhang. From where I stood it did not look like a hole so much as a not-place — a piece of the mountain that had agreed, for whatever reason, to stop being mountain. The dark inside it was the kind of dark that did not soften when you looked at it. The kind that, the longer you looked, the more it looked back.
The air that came out of it was cold. Not the thin cold of the wind. A different cold. A cold that had not been touched by a season in a very long time.
I walked, slowly, to the edge of it. I stood there.
I was afraid.
I want to be honest about this, with myself, because I had come a long way and I did not want to have come it dishonestly. I was standing at the mouth of a hole that went down into a mountain nobody came back from, and I was afraid in a way that had nothing to do with any of the brave words I had been telling myself on the way up. My hands were shaking. My breath was doing a small embarrassing thing in my chest. The part of me that was an animal, and that did not care about wars or souls or footnotes or vows whispered to nobody at the foot of a mountain, was telling me, very clearly, to turn around.
I shouldered my pack. I stepped forward to begin the descent.
The stone under my foot was loose.
It was a small thing — a flake of rock no bigger than my hand, balanced on the lip of the cavern mouth in a way that had been waiting, perhaps for years, for somebody to put their weight on it. My foot came down. The stone went. My foot went with it.
There was a moment — just one — where I was still mostly above the edge, and where, if I had been quicker, or stronger, or had any kind of practice at this at all, I might have been able to catch myself. I was not quicker. I was not stronger. I had no practice at this at all.
I fell.
The fall was not long, in the way that the most important falls in a life are never long. There was a rush of cold air. There was the sound of my own breath being taken away from me. There was a dark that came up to meet me faster than I could think a thought about it. There was, somewhere very far away, a small bright voice in my chest that said, almost surprised: oh — so this is how.
And then there was nothing for a while.
* * *
I awoke on a bed of golden flowers.