the first time lewis rockward heard about towlin hill, it was through the kind of story people tell when the night runs too long and the whiskey runs too cheap.
a rumor. a dare. a broken compass kind of myth.
they were in a narrow bar on the northern edge of silvervale a mining town pressed against the foothills of the northern ridges, where mist never truly left the streets. hendrick carlson sat across from him, his glasses fogged by the steam that drifted from the bar's cracked radiator. between them lay a folded local newspaper, its ink bleeding slightly where condensation from their drinks had touched it.
"they say," hendrick murmured, tapping the headline, "that if you reach the top, you can ask for three things. anything. and when you sleep, it happens. just like that."
lewis stared at him for a long second, then laughed not mockingly, but in that way people laugh when something inside them quietly stirs.
"and who proved it?" he asked.
"no one. that's the point. it's a story that feeds itself."
the newspaper article was brief: towlin hill expedition halted after severe weather, one missing climber. no names. no bodies. just the quiet certainty of mountain statistics.
towlin hill or what the locals called "the lone tower" was nearly ten thousand meters high, far taller than anything that should have existed this close to sea level. the geological records said it was a volcanic extrusion formed roughly two million years ago, though recent surveys found no evidence of magma chambers, only hollow resonance zones natural caverns that responded to seismic frequencies in unpredictable ways.
for lewis, that last part mattered.
he wasn't a believer. not in gods, nor destiny, nor any invisible mechanism of mercy. but he was a scientist once or almost one a graduate student in cognitive physics before his funding vanished. he knew that extreme conditions, especially hypoxic environments, could alter brain function so severely that perception folded in on itself. high-altitude hypoxia had been known to cause vivid hallucinations, auditory distortions, even shared visions among climbers.
people saw what their minds needed to see. sometimes they called it god.
"hendrick," he said slowly, "if that story is real, there has to be a pattern. something measurable."
hendrick smiled in the dim light. "you're saying you want to measure a myth?"
"i'm saying myths start from something measurable."
the bartender, an old man with glacier-blue eyes, leaned over from the far end of the counter.
"you boys talking about towlin?"
his voice was dry, the kind of dry that suggested he'd told this story before.
hendrick nodded. "we are. you know it?"
the man laughed softly. "know it? i've buried people because of it."
he leaned closer, elbows on the wood.
"towlin isn't like other hills. the air thins too quickly. instruments fail. people start seeing things sometimes their fears, sometimes their memories. one man came down swearing he saw his wife waiting at the summit. she'd been dead for six years."
"hallucinations," lewis said automatically.
"maybe," the bartender replied. "or maybe the mountain just knows what you fear most. that's how it keeps you."
hendrick looked at lewis then, a flash of amusement in his expression. "that sounds like your kind of research, doesn't it?"
lewis didn't answer. he watched the condensation slide down his glass and thought of the long nights in the lab when his instruments picked up resonances that weren't supposed to exist low-frequency hums that didn't match any known vibration pattern. he used to call them "echo fields." places where the boundary between perception and matter blurred. towlin, with its hollow resonance chambers, sounded like one enormous echo field.
outside, the wind picked up. the windows rattled faintly in their frames.
the bartender's voice dropped to a near whisper.
"if you really want to go there, listen carefully. there's a man who lives somewhere along the slope. nobody knows how high. people call him the wise man. he tells you what not to do. that's all he does. he doesn't save you just warns you. if he tells you not to look at something, don't look."
hendrick chuckled. "and if we do?"
"then the hill stops being a hill," the man said. "and you stop being you."
lewis wrote the words down later in his notebook. he had this habit documenting field data even when there wasn't any field.
under the header towlin anomalies, he wrote:
1. altitude: 9,981 m
2. geological age: ~2 million years
3. composition: basalt + unknown hollow resonance layers
4. local lore: three wishes upon summit, manifest upon post-ascent sleep
5. psychological factor: fear projection (possible hypoxia-induced imagery)
6. mention of resident: "wise man" unidentified
he drew a line beneath the notes and wrote one final phrase:
> "what if fear is the instrument of proof?"
hendrick caught him writing.
"you really mean to go, don't you?"
lewis nodded without looking up. "yes."
"why?"
"because if it's not real, we can prove it. and if it is… we'll understand what makes it real."
the conversation ended there, not with conviction but with silence the kind that happens when an idea grows heavier than reason.
they left the bar around midnight. the streetlights were faint halos in the mist, their glow diffused by fine water particles hanging in the air. the night smelled of wet earth and diesel. in the distance, above the last row of buildings, the outline of towlin was barely visible an impossible shape against a darker sky, its peak hidden behind clouds that never moved.
hendrick stopped walking and stared at it.
"you really think something waits up there?"
lewis looked at the mountain for a long time. his breath condensed in front of him, curling into small ghosts before fading.
"everything waits for someone to believe in it," he said quietly. "maybe it's time we test what belief can do."
as they walked toward the small inn at the edge of town, a thin layer of frost began to form on the windows. inside the bar they'd left behind, the bartender slowly wiped the counter clean, then whispered to himself without looking up:
"and so it begins again."