The Thing That Climbs
Nobody stopped us.
That was the first thing I noticed.
No gates. No checkpoint. No desperate commander grabbing my arm and explaining why I was wrong and they were right and this was suicide. The soldiers we passed looked through us like we were already gone. Maybe they thought we were.
Elira walked half a step behind me and slightly to the left. A habit, I was starting to understand, not deference. She liked her exits clear.
Virex rode my shoulder like he owned it.
The city fell away behind us. Not dramatically. It just... stopped. The road became a path. The path became suggestion. The suggestion became rock.
The mountain was bigger up close. Obviously. But it wasn't the size that hit me.
It was the silence.
Not quiet. Silence. The kind that isn't the absence of sound but the presence of something that ate sound. My boots on the rock should have scraped. My breath should have fogged. Instead everything landed flat, absorbed before it could echo.
"Is it always like this?" I asked.
"Yes," Elira said.
"You've been here before."
It wasn't a question. She answered anyway.
"Once," she said. "Years ago. I didn't make it far."
I glanced at her. She was watching the slope above us, jaw set, eyes doing that calculating thing she probably thought was invisible.
"What stopped you?"
"I made a different choice."
I let that sit. With Elira, pulling at threads rarely got you the whole answer faster. You had to wait for her to decide the truth was more useful than the version she preferred.
Virex's tail curled once around the back of my neck. Not warning. Just contact.
We climbed.
---
The first hour was almost normal.
The slope was steep but manageable. The rock was pale and close-grained, the kind that held footholds well. The cold was sharp without being brutal. If you ignored the sky, the way it bent slightly wrong above the peak, colors muting as they got closer to it, like paint diluted past the point of meaning you could almost convince yourself this was just a mountain.
I am very good at ignoring things. It's a survival skill.
The spirits started appearing around the second hour.
Not attacking. Not even acknowledging us, really. They moved upward, the same direction we did, some slow and vast and trailing distortions in their wake, some small and fast, flickering between visible and not. I watched them the way you watch traffic when you're crossing a road. Not afraid. Just aware.
"They don't care about us," I said.
"They don't care about anything that isn't the artifact," Elira replied. "Right now we're just in the same direction."
"Comforting."
"I wasn't trying to be comforting."
"I know."
Virex turned his head and watched a spirit drift past. It was the shape of something that might have been a deer, once, if deer were made of old glass and moved like they were underwater. Its edges phased in and out of clarity as it climbed.
"They are not calm," Virex said quietly.
"They look calm."
"They look purposeful," he corrected. "That is different. Calm is the absence of urgency. What they feel is urgency so total it has become still."
I watched the glass-deer spirit until it dissolved into the pale sky above.
"Like a deadline," I said.
"Yes," he said. "Exactly like that."
---
Elira stopped around the third hour.
Not from exhaustion. She stopped the way people stop when they've been arguing with themselves and one side finally wins.
I turned. She was standing on a shelf of rock, looking up, her expression doing something I hadn't seen on her face before.
I'd seen her calculating. I'd seen her performing. I'd seen her exhausted and I'd seen her certain and I'd seen her, once, genuinely afraid.
This was different. This was smaller.
"I should have come back," she said.
Not to me. Just out loud.
"To the mountain?"
"After the first time." She exhaled slowly. "I told myself I needed more information. More preparation. A better plan." A pause. "What I needed was to stop waiting until I was sure."
I climbed back down to her level. Not because she needed me to, but because that kind of admission deserves eye contact.
"What changed?" I asked.
"You," she said. Then, before I could respond: "Not in a meaningful way. Don't make it into something. I just watched you look at the evidence and move instead of deliberate, and I remembered what that felt like."
I thought about pointing out that she had, in fact, spent considerable effort steering me toward exactly this point. That my moving instead of deliberating had been, to some degree, managed. That being used as a catalyst is a specific thing.
I didn't.
Some truths are worth saving for a better moment.
"Well," I said. "We're here now."
She looked at me. Something in the set of her expression shifted, loosened by one degree.
"Yes," she said. "We are."
We kept climbing.
---
The rock changed above the midpoint.
I don't know how else to describe it. The mountain stopped being geology and started being something else. The stone was the same color, the same texture, but it felt different underfoot. Weighted. Like it was paying attention.
Hairline fractures ran through everything up here, too regular for weather, too fine for seismic damage. When I crouched and looked close, they ran in patterns. Not symbols. Not writing. Something older than both. Geometry that didn't quite match any geometry I knew, like someone had tried to draw a circle using only right angles and nearly succeeded.
I touched one. Just a fingertip along the edge.
The fragment in my pack pulsed.
Not threatening. Responsive. Like a word in a conversation I didn't speak yet.
"The resonance is stronger here," I said.
"It will keep increasing," Virex said. "The closer we get, the more the artifact is aware of us."
"It's aware?"
He considered this. "Aware is not quite the right word. A fire is not aware of wood. But it responds to it."
"That's not reassuring."
"I remain uninterested in your reassurance."
Elira made a sound that might, in different circumstances, have been a laugh.
---
We stopped as the light started failing.
Not because it was the smart choice, which it was, but because the mountain stopped being climbable. The path such as it had been had ended entirely, replaced by a vertical face of the resonance-cracked stone that would need equipment and daylight we didn't have.
There was a hollow in the rock face. Natural, or natural enough. We didn't discuss it. We just stopped there.
I sat with my back against the stone and felt the warmth bleeding through from inside the mountain. The artifact-warmth. Not comfortable. Present.
Virex curled in my lap, which he did sometimes when he was thinking hard about something and didn't want to show it.
Elira sat across from me, knees drawn up, looking out over the slope below. The city was a faint scatter of light in the dark distance. From here it looked small enough to hold in one hand.
"The king," I said. "What is he actually experiencing up there?"
"We don't know," she said. "Not precisely."
"Best guess."
She was quiet for a moment. "Pain," she said. "Sustained, constant, three centuries of it. Holding something together that was already broken when he tried to hold it."
"Does he know it's not working?"
"I think," she said slowly, "that he has known for a very long time. And that he holds on anyway, because the alternative is letting go."
I looked at the mountain above us. At the pale wrongness of the sky at its peak.
A man who knew he was failing, and kept failing on purpose, because stopping was worse.
I understood that more than I wanted to.
"We're not going to fix this tomorrow," I said.
"No," Elira agreed.
"We might not fix it at all."
"No."
"So what are we doing?"
She looked at me then, in the dark, with the mountain warm against our backs and the distant spirits still moving upward through the night like they had all the time in the world and none of it.
"We are doing the next thing," she said. "Which is getting to the top. And after that, the thing after that."
I thought about that.
"Very practical of you."
"I am occasionally practical."
"Occasionally."
Virex opened one eye. "Sleep," he said. "Both of you. I will watch."
I almost argued.
Almost.
I closed my eyes, and the mountain breathed around us, slow and broken and still holding, and I let it.
Tomorrow we would find out what was at the top.
Tonight, I was just tired enough to sleep.