Zoe fell through clouds as Anton gripped her hand. His grip wasn’t tight, or painful, merely firm enough that no wind would dislodge them. He didn’t struggle when she leaped and didn’t protest now. The only screaming she heard was the mountain wind rushing all around them. It probed at their clasping hands, but Mirror and flesh were inseparable. She plummeted, mist racing past, but she didn’t wonder how long she would fall. Why would she?
This place wasn’t real.
Dimensions such as time and distance were illusory.
The thoughts percolating at the back of her mind broke free. Every step she climbed contributed to the understanding. The first step involved letting go of the idea she would know what she faced, that what she faced would be something she could know, and that she would even need to face anything. If you do nothing but reflexively bite at the world you eventually consume yourself. She couldn’t lower her defenses, because her defenses were a part of her, nor could she stop expecting danger, because she lived in a dangerous world… but there was a middle way.
The extremes of thought told her that there were only two paths: on the mountain, or off the mountain. Bella and Skidmark were off the mountain because they didn’t believe it, and she and Anton were on the mountain because they did. What would happen if she broke the distinction between those two answers? What if off and on blurred in the middle?
Mist raced through her as she breathed.
The giant in the second test. His blows hit like meteors. No matter how hard she fought, he defeated her as handily as a lion facing a kitten. She couldn’t defeat him, but he never killed her, because she didn’t need to fight him to win. It wasn’t a trick, she felt that in her bones, no, it was simply that the naming of the test, the words, didn’t matter. All that mattered was that she climbed the mountain.
The wind ceased.
She fell.
She floated.
Silence rang out a pearly white as bright as sunshine burning across the surface of clouds.
She smiled.
Leaping: leap of faith, falling, climbing… how can you fall when direction is meaningless? How do you climb a mountain when there is no time? The dream of doing is worth more than any real action, for without the dream, without the thought… The question of understanding faith required her to remove the question from her mind. It wasn't about trusting in plans or herself. It wasn’t about hoping for the best or removing the fear of the worst. It wasn’t even about knowing that one moment shall follow the next, that the sun too shall rise, no, it wasn’t about anything at all.
Faith, if the mind behind her mind could place it into words at all, was… whatever is, is, and whatever will be, will be, not because it is predestined, or purposed, or uncaring mechanics of a galactic pinball machine, no… simply… a cloud bright because it reflects light… a moment quiet because no sound penetrates… a heart beating because blood flows in and must flow out… she fell, not through the sky, not through the mists, but through her mind and her mind spun into a thousand thoughts like dandelion fluff shattered by the wind and she drifted…
For a moment, glorious, eternally without time yet sliced between two fractions of a second, she was not.
Not Zoe.
Not anything.
Not real.
Not thinking.
Not worrying.
Not moving.
Not fighting.
Not bleeding.
Not falling.
And then, inside that moment within a moment, she reached within the hollow star of her heart and pulled away the Mirrored shield.
Black silence bloomed within the bright quiet. The devouring opened within the empty moment. Hunger fought against fasting and in the end…
Hunger won.
Clouds raced toward her. She couldn’t open her eyes against the screaming wind, but she didn’t need to see to know what happened. Fingers of gales plucked at her skin, dragged icy nails deep into her flesh, and she laughed as her heart sucked down that Mountain sky.
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Anton’s hand squeezed hers. His grip slipped as his grip came loose, but she grabbed him tight. Moth’s Mirrored hand flowed around his until it encased him completely.
“You can’t take him!” Zoe screamed against the wind as the emptiness faded, swirled, and drained into her starving heart. “But I can take you!”
She no longer fell as her heart sucked the very sky into herself. This wasn’t the feeling of Skein, of strands of essence joining the tangle that was her Crimson Armada self, no this was something older, as dust is to stars, but still, a hole is a hole, and bottomless is bottomless, and Zoe devoured. Her lips, no longer scarred by the mark of the Glutton, quirked in a grin of satisfaction as she swallowed the Mountain of Faith.
It burned through her like bodies on fire down the gullet of a giant. It didn’t fill her, but she could feel her skin cracking, her bones swelling, her flesh writhing as it started to think for itself, to dream, to see, to believe.
Her eyes saw only white, saw only darkness, neither true, neither there, merely a concept of senses as the dimensionless dimension broke down.
The two shades shifted, and the dark was winning.
As her body broke apart under the strain of her heart, she reached through her memory to the latest technique she acquired.
[Witch’s Embryo]
The memory of that dark space of crowded, sweating, bodies, reminded her too much of this moment. Where before she was swallowed, now she was the swallower, and so she emulated the Witch and let that dark ichor swell through her cells. The shadow of Skein wrapped around her. She understood now how the Witch and Mubilashi were different. They were echoes of the system that predated the Crimson Armada. They were as the Mountain. Something older. The stone that caused the ripples.
She kept Anton close, wrapped her in himself as her form loosened like so much untangled yarn. Her technique drained her Skein, as she drained the Mountain, and she knew that none of this should be possible. This wasn’t a part of the game. She was a piece that shouldn’t have been played, and yet here she was, just as she would be, continuous and inexplicable as faith itself.
Without warning, it ended.
She no longer fell. She no longer devoured. She stood atop a Mountain, with Anton behind her. The landscape was barren. Piles of eroded dirt wedged between rocks of bluish stone. Snow swept across it all like a pristine afterthought. The sky above them, shockingly sapphire, but pale to the point of sickliness. Zoe took in all these details in an instant. Her increased Insight accelerated her environmental perception to a fraction of a second, but more than that, something else stole her attention.
Before them, splayed out like a lizard in the sun, lay a dragon. Monstrous in size, larger than any skyscraper, with scales of burning steel and great horns sweeping up into the sky. It leveled eyes larger than hers and snorted plumes of smoke.
[You devoured the Mountain of Faith]
Zoe straightened as the dragon accused her. She could feel each word's weight, like mountains, but they slid from her shoulders. This wasn’t Willpower, but something else, something greater.
[The deal we struck with your system was to provide a multiplier of power for each point of enlightenment, but what you have done… you threaten the treaty]
“Enlightenment cannot be measured.”
The dragon grinned and between its house-sized fangs and deep in its maw the fires of hell flashed brighter than the sun.
[Such a human thing to say]
It rose onto four feet and shook. Scales clanged like deafening cymbals. It took a step, circling them and rocks slid down the sheer cliffs surrounding them. Heat and smoke blasted from its nostrils and Zoe felt the great drum of its heart thrumming in her bones. She glanced down at her skin. The Witch’s technique no longer circled through her. Had it finished?
She looked up at the dragon and felt it waiting for her to speak.
“What Mountain is this?” she asked.
It snorted a scalding laugh.
[The Mountain of Faith]
“But… I…”
[Did you think that Faith was something so small as to be swallowed? Stretch your jaw wide little maw, no matter how many universes you cram between your teeth you shall not taste the end of Faith]
Zoe nodded slowly, looking down at the rock between her feet. Was this the same stony slope she’d climbed? Hard to tell without seeing the steps themselves, but she believed this was the case.
“What happens now?” she asked. “Will you kill us?”
Another snort of sparks and smoke. Slag leaked from the colossal nostrils as the dragon lay down. Steam rose and frozen rock cracked as the dragon nestled itself down and set its chin on its massive claws. Zoe knew that beings such as Rue and the Witch could easily destroy planets, but she never understood. With the dragon, she had no doubt. This was not a storm, but an ocean. The depths in its eyes could drown her and any other aspirant of civilization.
[Why do you ask me what happens now?]
“Because…” she wasn’t sure how to answer that.
“Because you’re a gigantic dragon!” Anton said. “And you could crush us like bugs.”
[You underestimate your goddess, little human]
Anton reddened.
“I would never.”
[Size is not power alone, and I’m not sure that a fight between me and her would be fun enough to justify itself]
Zoe clenched and unclenched her Mirrored fists. She could feel blood pumping through the glass, but they were no more living flesh than they had been before. Something changed after using [Witch’s Embryo], but it had been a process — the true ingredient was the Mountain of Faith inside her. Enlightenment couldn’t be measured, shouldn’t be measured, for once you held it in your hand it slipped through your fingers, but she understood the word “Mountain’” didn’t indicate the nature of the ordeals — how could it in a place that had no shape other than that conjured by the inhabitants mind? — but rather the sheer size. There was a Mountain of Faith here, and with the Witch’s technique, she had incorporated it into her flesh like a shadow.
She couldn’t know her limits, or if she had any, and such thoughts already drifted from what she knew to be human. Her fists reflected her face. The same face. The same expression of hope and anger and resigned exhaustion, but now a smile twitched the corner of her lips.
Was she more of herself? Or something else? But none of that answered the question weighing on her like the burden of the sun.
“Why are you here?” she asked the dragon.