The ice bit at our skin like needles, driven by winds that howled around us. The cold sat in our lungs like razor blades. Even through the thick woollen gambesons, the frozen metal of our cuirasses drained the heat from our chests, and some of the men had torn theirs off and thrown them into the snow, greaves and pauldrons with them. Why were we climbing this mountain in full armour, with swords and shields? There was no enemy, no foe to the empire. Only an order from the king and his advisor that it needed to be done.
The only one of us who never faltered, stumbled, or rested was our captain, who led the march with his armour still on and a small box clutched under his arm. He never spoke of what was inside it, and he never let it leave his side.
What madness, to send a handful of soldiers to summit the peak of the world. And what did the captain know that we did not? The questions went around our tent in whispers each night as we tried to sleep and stave off the gnawing cold, but we had no answers. We only knew that we had to march.
The higher we climbed, the more the sky began to change. The vibrant blue slowly gave way to a faint but unmistakable red. Nobody acknowledged it. Nobody wanted to be the one to say the sky had turned to blood, for who in their right mind would believe such nonsense? Still, I saw it in the way their eyes flicked upward for the briefest moment. They saw it too. They glanced at the sky the same way they glanced at me, as something that did not belong, something unnatural. I could not fault them for it. I was of mixed heritage, never fully of this land.
We pushed through thick walls of snow that buried the blackened rock of the path, and as we neared the summit we came upon a cave. Within its sheltered maw sat a tent, lonely and battered by the wind, but standing. Without orders, some of the men rushed toward it, hungry for shelter and a little warmth. The captain protested for all of a moment before following us in.
We stood by the entrance, the urge to flee the cold forgotten. Huddled at the back of the tent was a man, frozen still and half rotten. We moved closer and inspected the corpse. His clothes were in a style none of us recognised, and at his feet lay a book, beside a long extinguished firepit.
"Captain," one of the men said. "Are we not the first to summit this peak?"
Of course, there was no record of anyone doing so, no knowledge in the halls of Balim of what lay atop it.
"No," the captain said, his voice as cold as the air around him. "But we will be the first to return."
The two men who carried our supplies produced kindling and flint, and the rest of us settled on the cold rock around the firepit. We watched the sparks fly, wondering if the fire would take, wondering if we might end up joining this corpse, wondering if the captain's words would hold true.
As the fire blossomed, the tent began to glow. Its fabric was unlike our own and threw the firelight back strongly, lighting the whole space. For the first time we saw the body properly, no longer a cold mass of rot but a man in finely patterned clothes and good boots. Not low-born, not a soldier, but not a noble either. I sat closest to him, so I reached down and scooped up the book. I opened it and began to read.
"It is the year sixty of the second age. Quima has seen much in the way of technological advancement. I, Carl Fies, have been working alongside machine smiths and labourers to create something I call a SpyGlass."
I stopped when I realised the others were staring at me. One of them, mouth agape, muttered, "Read that first line again."
I did. "It is the year sixty of the second age."
"You mean to say..." A different voice croaked. "This man has been frozen here for over a thousand years?"
"Seems so," I muttered. I flipped a few pages ahead and read on. "After many iterations, I found that a larger device affords greater magnification. The duchy of Quima has ordered several mounted above the western mountain pass to look out over the eastern sea. Using the largest prototype, I turned one toward Mount Eshik, and I spied something most unsettling."
I looked up at the gawking faces, then at the captain, whose eyes had narrowed slightly at my words. He knew something, and I feared he was worried I would say something I should not. I looked back down. "Atop the peak of the world, I saw what looked like a structure of unnatural shape. The tip of an arch. Who would be mad enough to place such a thing there, and when?"
Every one of us looked to the captain with the same thought in our minds. He said nothing. The tension broke as I rustled through the pages to the last one with writing on it.
"I fear I am to die here. The path I took has collapsed behind me, leaving no known way back. I have reached the peak of this world, and I leave with more questions than answers about the nature, or rather the unnatural existence, of the arch at the summit. Tomorrow I will ascend once more to draw what I see and chronicle this discovery, and then I will throw this book as hard as I can from the edge of the mountain and pray that by some miracle it is found."
The captain marched over and snatched the book from my hands. He flipped to the next page, then back, with a disappointed look. With a click of his tongue, he dropped it into the fire. "This is no time to be heeding the words of the long dead. We climb. Now."
The five others dragged themselves to their feet with a pained heave, and I followed. One of them turned back toward the corpse. "What of him?"
"Saint Maria watches over him now," the captain said. "We can do nothing."
The seven of us left the tent, and the biting chill struck our faces and lungs once more. We crested the final rise, and there it stood: a towering archway of black carved stone. Along its width were indentations in what could only be a long-lost language, all strange flowing lines and sharp corners. Only the top held a curve, so that it looked more like a door than an arch. The ground was flattened unnaturally, as if someone had felled the peak of the mountain like a tree.
The structure gave off an ominous air, a warning to the senses not to come close, the same instinct you feel near a coiled snake or a snarling dog. The captain stepped forward, shifted the box from under his arm, and opened it, holding it aloft with both hands. We watched with morbid curiosity as black smoke rose from inside. It was not like the smoke of a fire. It was thicker, darker, and it flowed against the wind, almost alive.
As the dark thing poured toward the arch, the five others drew their swords and screamed over the wind, calling the captain a heretic and a traitor, shouting that this was magic.
The smoke filled the frame of the arch, darker than night. The captain turned and looked directly at me, and through the wind I could, inexplicably, hear his whisper. "This is the only way."
The wind died. The snow stopped falling. A deep tremor came from the archway, then another, and another. They were not tremors of the earth but footsteps, looming and powerful. Red eyes opened in the deep dark, towering far above us, as something slowly emerged. Huge clawed hands wrapped around the edges of the arch and drew closer. It was not hidden by the dark. It was the darkness. It stepped forward and let loose a horrid scratching that pierced our ears until they bled. Then it looked down at me and made another sound.
"Ssssshhhii," it hissed. I knew what it was going to say before it said it. "Shhhiiiinya." My name. "Shinya," it said, more clearly.
"Shinya!"
My eyes snapped open at the sound of my name. My mother stood behind the thin veil that served as the door to my room. I groaned softly.
"Finally. Wake up, we're headed into the village today." She moved on, and the morning light from the window behind her spilled into the room.
My room was little more than a large wooden box, with a thin veil hanging where a door should be. A real door would have plunged it into pure darkness. It had once been a storage room for long-life grains and salted meats, meant to be dark and cool. The bed I had built myself last year, when I turned twelve, with my mother's help. It was crude, but comfortable enough with its feather-stuffed sack.
I dragged myself up and changed, still turning the dream over. There was something familiar about it, as if I had dreamt it before, though I couldn't say when. My mother called again, and I hurried out through the narrow hall to the kitchen, the largest of our home's three rooms. She stood at the fireplace with her back to me, trying to coax it alight.
"Go fetch some water, would you?"
I yawned and stepped outside, where the smell of growing crops mingled with the foul stench of animal dung. I rounded the house, past the clothesline and the chicken coop, to the well between our home and the forest's edge. I hooked a bucket to the rope and lowered it into the dark below.
What was that dream? I felt like I had been atop a mountain. Strange. How do I know what snow looks like? The more I thought about it, the more it slipped away, like every dream I had ever had. This one, too, began to erase itself from memory.