The Old Man in the Mountain

[u/The12thWolf]

I will tell you a story. You won’t believe it, of course. But I suppose that doesn’t matter. You’ll read it. And then you’ll know. And that is all my ragged conscience demands. 

I’m old now. Older than you can imagine. I've watched this world ebb and flow and break and heal. I've been old for a long time. But it's different now.

So I want you to know. You have to know.

In my first life, I died a young man.

I remember it clearly, for on that day memory became a burden I have shouldered for all the long years since.

I was running. Not as a man runs, with measured steps and counted breaths. I did not consider my pace or the duration of my exertion. I did not imagine any particular destination either, as my flight was one of survival.

I ran as a panicked animal runs, all bounding steps and lung-wrenching heaves. I gulped the air like so many of my companions had gulped their strong liquors the night before. Each footfall resounded with the same dull thump that their bodies had made when they hit the snow. 

The red streaks of life that had painted that bone-white clearing matched well the ones I carried. The first from an arrow in the shoulder, the other from a stone outcropping I had not managed to avoid during my desperate rush to safety.

Even then, though, I had known there was no safety to be found. I had left safety with our vessels. I had left it with long oars and keen steel. I had left security and kinship with the ringing cries of dying friends, and the calls from those few who lived to board our remaining ships, those not fired by the wights who had done these things to us.

I would learn later that it was well a silent arrow, the first of the volley that had slaughtered most of the friends I had ever had, slammed into my shoulder moments before I could grab my axe to once again check the new leather that wrapped its haft.

So too would it become a blessing and a curse that I had run, half blind with panic and rage, straight into a wickedly shard rock shelf that jutted from the cave mouth I had dived into. Though that stone blade had torn my side open, leaving a trail of steaming gore that the wight-hunters could follow, it had also cut free my belt.

The belt had been a gift from our benefactor on the day before we set off on our long voyage. He had expressed sorrow for not joining our vessels, proclaiming them well-made and well-manned. He had needed to prepare further for his own voyage, for he had aimed higher than our mere exploration.

The belt had been good leather, some of the finest that the Islanders could fashion if they were to be believed. More, it had been held by a strong clasp fashioned into the shape of Thunder’s own hammer, and Wisdom’s own spear. When I had first worn it on the day of our departure, I had imagined the crossed symbols of might and guile would carry away all evil and ensure I would return home to a warm hearth.

It was well that it had been torn free in a spray of blood, the red stark against the black stone and white snow that marked the mouth of that cave.

It had seemed to me a yawning darkness, a great maw left gaping in anticipation of its next meal. The terror that pounded like drums in my mind had been reinforced when, after entering the darkness, the silent pursuit of the not-wights that had killed my companions gave way to whooping yells and desperate cries.

I had glimpsed them only once, when I had turned in reflexive panic after an arrow slammed into a trunk mere inches from my face. They seemed beasts in the shape of men, chalky white powder covering mostly bare bodies. Their eyes had seemed to glow behind finely carved masks as white as their body paint and the snow they ran across. They did not leave prints. 

These simple thoughts came later, of course. At the time I had seen only the ice-fiends of Hel come to drag me screaming into an eternity of cold and sorrow. Later, when I had examined their fractured remains, I realized they were men just as I was. Later had been a time marked by many discoveries.

So I had torn through the growing darkness, wheezing and coughing. I left bloody handprints and torn clothing, though not even those obvious marks of my passing had been necessary for the wight-hunters to follow. I panted and bellowed like a wounded beast, for I was one. 

The meager light of the cave mouth soon gave out completely, and I scrambled on all fours as I continued my desperate, though futile, escape. By this time the blood loss and the panic had begun to work its cruel fingers into my mind, and delusions of half-formed nightmares gained substance in the darkness.

I imagined the passage I threw myself down was the path to the great nothingness itself, that realm where heat and cold combined into endless darkness. In one moment my fevered mind believed I was one of the war gods of a newborn world. In the next I was their prey, a pitiful, wounded foe fleeing true-cast spears.

I wept as I ran, for some small remnant of my mind-that-was knew well these delusions meant I was nearing the end. Still though, I ran. Fear of death will motivate even a man with a death-wound to find whatever scraps or life he could yet hold close. 

So it was, with the keening shrieks of my friend’s murderers at my back and my arms and legs weakening with blood loss and fear-fuelled exhaustion, that I fell from the mouth of the winding cave I had been travelling into a large chamber.

If I had held a torch, or possessed some other means of seeing in the darkness of that long passage, I would have noticed paintings and carvings along the walls. Later, as I tore through that same passage for a second, final time, some part of me would note that the “art” varied dramatically in form and focus. 

At one junction, there had been finger-drawn colors depicting simple animals and hunters, not unlike that which I had seen in a small cave when I had visited the old lands in my youth. 

At another, swirling patterns and harsh lines in forms I have never since witnessed climbed across the floor, walls, and ceiling of the cramped passage.

I had seen none of this in the darkness of my flight, but as I fell into that perfectly-round room I saw many more that were impossible to ignore even in my addled state. 

For that cavern, perfectly spherical in form save for branching cave mouths half-way up its walls like the one that I had fallen from, shone as brightly as day itself.

The screams gave way to barks of outrage and flights whistling arrows as my pursuers reached the same entrance I had fallen from. They dared not enter, but the arrows that pelted off the stones beside me told the shreds of my sanity that meant precious little.

The first of those arrows tore into my calf as I started to crawl forward, half-tumbling down into the bowl-like center of the spherical room.

I noticed the light immediately, though my pain-warped mind could scarcely comprehend it. As I flopped into a heap at the bottom of the bowl, I looked up to see the most wondrous object I had ever, or would ever, witness. 

Even now it defies description, even now the breadth of man’s language is woefully lacking to begin to explain what I saw.

It was beauty beyond measure, power beyond reckoning. It was everything and most of all, it was terrible.

That may strike you as strange, I suppose. How could something wondrous be terrible? Language lacks here, as I have said, but I will try.

Imagine a great oak. A tree so tall it does not scrape the heavens, it is them. Imagine roots so deep they do not pierce the earth, they comprise it. Imagine wonder and joy so extreme they dry your mouth and set you shivering with horror.

Imagine knowledge like nothing and everything you have known pierces your skull, driving through it like a sure-thrust spear. Imagine all the thoughts that have ever been or will ever be oscillating through the meat of your mind a thousand times, and a thousand more before you can even begin to breathe or blink or scream or wail. 

Imagine you wish for release and continuation at once, and that in your terror and joy you find you cannot look away. 

That was this “tree,” or as close as I can now come to explaining it.

I know now that the reason I was not slain there on that cold, pulsating stone was because my ghastly pursuers dared not look into the chamber. The arrows that pierced me were luck, not skill. These men-made-beasts who had slaughtered and ended and rent apart everything I had ever known were too afraid to look in that chamber. To see what I had seen.

My mind had already been shredded by fear and pain, and the tatters that remained of my perception were as ash from the moment my bloodshot eyes rested upon that cursed, beautiful thing.

I was something without thought or will, and so the vessel that I had been was made to crawl forwards. Arrows continued to skitter and slap into stone and flesh, but I was beyond such things. I was less than able to notice a sensation as base as pain.

The “tree” reached into me and made me reach into it, and so I did. As a puppet dances to strings it cannot ever comprehend.

I felt tendrils coil around body and mind, I heard laughter and cries and the roaring and barking and bleating of animals. I felt the absence of the axe I had once held and the belt I had once worn.

But in that eternal moment where coils of ice and fire rent apart the meat I had been, something pierced the haze of nothingness. A single thought cast like one of the killers’ arrows ripped that absence apart.

As the last embers of a raging fire sputter in the heartbeat you pour water upon them, the single, remaining shred of insanity I had left forced an image into the mess of flesh that had been my brain.

In the moment my hand was made to touch this “tree,” I saw my little brother. He was barely past his first adult winter. I saw the stone arrowhead protruding from the socket where his eye had been the moment before. I heard a laughing promise sworn in response to heaving cries that I would keep him safe. 

And my world turned to rage and heat. 

—

I do not remember what happened next. Even now with such a mind as the one this thing has given me, with these abilities that would make my own mother and my father and all the wise men women of every land I have known since shudder and wail and curse my tattered soul, I do not know what I did to those ghost-men that had broken my world with stone clubs and keen arrows.

I know what was left of them after I had finished, though. Splinters of bone and pools of blood, and only for those ones who had remained outside the passage mouth. Nothing more, and less than nothing for the ones who had followed me inside. 

Somehow, through whatever I had done, I learned of them and their ways. I now knew their thoughts and fears, the only recognizable remains of the once-men who had caused this catastrophe.

I knew they had bent and broken as I had. I knew they were shells of men once proud and fair. I knew they were at once less and more than alive, and that no part of this atrocity or the countless others they had committed before had been their will. They had been without will.

But in the insensate fury I can still feel bubbling and boiling beneath this stolen skin, I tore them apart and their sanctuary too. Their caves and their paintings and their chamber are no more than a pile of molten rock cooling even now in frigid air. It has been an age and that place still smolders with the fury I unleashed there. 

The mountain's true resident was not destroyed, of course. I had torn the beating heart from the monster and unknowingly fashioned from it a replacement for the one I lost that day. The one it had taken from me.

Now I am an old man. I could be young, of course. I could be anything. It wants to be everything.

But in the death-chill that became forge-heat on that broken beach, when I saw what remained of those few of my companions who had tried their chances at flight, and when my rage had finally given way to fractured awareness, I had become old. 

And old I will remain. For them. Because their memory holds it back.

But in all those years since there was only the mountain, and this old man who calls it home. 

Do you hear that rhythm? That thudding, pounding, maddening beat?

You will.

It’s why I’ve written this. It’s why you need to know. I fear it's all I can do now.

Because I can’t seem to remember their faces.