It was a grey dawn when the pair left the safety of the alpine forest to begin their journey proper. Even at eight o’clock the sun was absent from the sky and there was not a hint that it would emerge over the rest of the day. In front of the twin climbers was pure white occasionally broken by dark rock and the mountain stretched up so high that it was difficult to distinguish the snow-covered ground and the cloudless sky above. The only sounds besides the mournful polar winds were the crunching of snow under clawed boots and the pitiful humming of a portable radiator.
The mountain the pair was climbing was not ordinary, even accounting for its impossible height. If the climbers’ vision were not obscured by an endless coating of frost, they would have seen before them no fewer than a dozen frozen corpses. It was said that for every step a prospective adventurer took past the forest the air would grow colder by a degree. The first step out of the forest would be perhaps four degrees Celsius on a good day, the next step thus three degrees, and by the tenth step six degrees of frost. Were it not for the Radiator then, an elaborate cylindrical contraption of bronze and glass that could theoretically burn as hot as the desert sun, the adventurers now climbing would have already felt their blood chill and their joints slow. Indeed, the Radiator’s creation is what made the climb viable and its existence made the image of the two men, one chained to the engine to feed its hunger for dark energies, preparing to leave a mining town known across the continent.
“Well Al’Gups, we’ve made it through the easy part, now the true adventure begins!” The man not bound to the Radiator shouted, his voice doing its best to not be drowned under crunching snow and howling wind.
“It’s cold, Cuttling.” The morose member of the pair, Al’Gups, replied. A wince of pain accompanied the Radiator’s renewed hunger for Maleficium. Dark fluid slowly filled the tube attached to Al’Gup’s left arm via a thick metal restraint and as it reached the Radiator the snow surrounding the contraption began to melt.
“We could be knee deep in sand, devils surfacing left and right, and you’d still say ‘it’s cold’. Cheer up, it’s only the undeath talking.” Irvin Cuttling reached over the Radiator to roughly pat the zonbi’s back.
“Don’t remind me Cuttling.”
Al’Gups may have been a zonbi, a corpse buried in cursed soil and thus risen once more and kept at the precipice of sanity, but his sensation of cold was more accurate than his warm-blooded companion. If either man glanced back as they walked they would see their footprints covered with snow near the very instant they left them. Cuttling’s mouth could already barely open and his setae were covered in a layer of frost. At the very least, unlike the climb through the forest the snow was dense enough that the pair didn’t feel the need to navigate a field of rocks and outcroppings. Only the largest spires of basalt stood out from the endless frost and were the only landscape features that offered any protection.
Cuttling gestured towards the nearest such tower and Al’Gups followed, pulling along the Radiator that once again sucked down what counted for blood. Under the rocky pillar the wind died down and the chill loosened its grip. Cuttling rubbed his face firmly and stooped down to warm himself by the electric bonfire. Under such conditions, space was not the only thing that froze, but the sensation of time also. Already the pine forest was beyond sight and Cuttling’s clock read twelve and the altimeter two thousand metres. Cuttling tugged at one of the numerous projections of the Radiator and pulled out a new device of nixie tubes and copper wire with a long silver cylinder coming out one end. Arm and device outstretched, he inched closer and closer to the edge of the Radiator’s warmth until suddenly he jerked back, device dropped.
“Fuck! Gups get the thermometer!” Cuttling struggled to take his massive deerskin glove while Al’Gups, ungloved, reached down to pick up the peculiar device before it got covered in snow. Finally free of the leather wrappings, Cuttling saw his fingers had blackened and buckled.
“It’s seventy below zero out there. Even if we make for Charity Pass it’ll be difficult to make it through the Range.”
Cuttling paused rubbing his frostbitten hand before raising a blackened digit up the mountain slope.
“We’re not aiming for Charity Pass, I plan to summit.”
“You’re insane.”
“And you’re dead Gups. Hooked into your rotten arm is the means to make history, but if you want I can lend you my knife and you can discover that the state of your mental faculties is a privilege for your kind, not a right.” Cuttling paused. “So drink up, I need you to have enough energy to keep the Radiator running. As for me,” Cuttling rummaged through a bag attached to the base of the rumbling machine before pulling out a sandwich, “I’ll be having lunch.”
Al’Gups glanced back and quirked an eye at Cuttling, pausing his ascent. Although the sun was not strictly visible the sky had dimmed enough to indicate afternoon. The climb had become far more arduous as snow-packed shallow inclines became jagged ice-filled expanses. Every step had to be navigated to prevent a sudden plunge into a pocket of ice fragments. Every strike of the icepick calculated to prevent a similar fate. At the very least, it was now so cold that the Radiator did nothing to reduce the ground’s stability. Beyond the cold however there was an unaccounted variable: for men are creatures of warmth true, but also animals of the soil. At great heights such as the ones the pair were at breathing became hard; flesh strained against chitin as it filled with fluid. Trickles of blood would drip from Cuttling’s nostrils and freeze before they could fall to the ground. Thus Al’Gups increasingly had to pause and wait for his living companion to catch his breath or wipe the frozen blood off his face before he could heave the Radiator a short distance up onto the next piece of solid ice.
Cuttling knew that if they stopped climbing up the icefall and headed east they could reach the Charity Pass that would take them over the Greatest Dividing Range and into the lands beyond. It would be easy even. The Radiator wheezed as it struck an ice fragment yanking Al’Gups back mid-step. The blades of the sled-like undercarriage had wedged themselves against spikes of compacted ice and snow rendering the Radiator immovable on its own. When the situation became apparent Cuttling had caught up to Al’Gups.
“It looks like there’s flat ground just up ahead, do you think you can carry the Radiator up there Al’Gups?” Cuttling pointed towards a grey shelf of rock with his non-blackened hand.
Al’Gups tapped the ground with his boot, “With your help maybe, but are you sure you can do it? You’ve been slowing down for a while now.”
“Nonsense, I’ll be fine. We don’t have time to waste, night is nearly upon us. Now come help me lift.”
The two men huddled around the Radiator and began to lift it, the dry electric heat of the machine bringing feeling back to their frozen faces. Cuttling instinctually began to open his mouth to catch the meltwater to assuage a sudden thirst. As the climbers moved towards the safety of solid ground their steps went from deliberate to paranoid, feeling around each block of ice with their talons for stability multiple times before sinking clawed boots into the frozen chunk. With the added exertion Cuttling struggled to breath in more air than what he had, his hand and forearm (used in lieu of his frostbitten extremity) began to shake and bend under pressure. Al’Gups tried to account for the instability, carefully taking point as the two climbed through the icefall. A near-fatal error made itself apparent when Al’Gups and Cuttling were carefully climbing either side of a long, thin crevasse that led into a moulin. Al’Gups felt the vampiric sucking of the Radiator rip out sputtering dark fluid from the cannula in his arm. He gurgled out a cry and in shock let go of the Radiator while Cuttling, now the only force keeping the contraption aloft, allowed in the same instance exhaustion to catch up to him likewise letting go.
The Radiator was long enough that it did not immediately fall into the crevasse along with Al’Gups but the clattering crunch of fragile electric components smashing against the ground was deafening. Al’Gups scrambled down the ice to haul the Radiator up to more stable ground. Were his nerves alive Al’Gups would have noticed the Radiator was emitting not a strong, stable heat but a hellish radiance that cracked his chitinous skin underneath thin winter furs. He could, however, see that the ground beneath him was turning to slush by the malfunctioning machine and thus called out to Cuttling:
“I’ll throw a rope down, we’re making it to safe ground before the whole icefall collapses!” Cuttling hooked his lanyard onto coarse rope Al’Gups provided, while Al’Gups hoisted the Radiator onto his back with arms bent to keep it held up by the ski-blades. He took a deep breath allowing reflexes and the motions of life long lost to return to his form, no longer merely allowing the dark energies of Maleficium to animate him but allowing his heart to beat and muscles to glut themselves on air. With great strides Al’Gups began to run up the icefall towards the light grey platform that Cuttling believed to be solid ground. Without the use of arms to stabilise himself, Al’Gups used his constant momentum to power through the increasingly unstable ground, each step slamming into slush causing instability to spread across the stilled waterfall. Through dulled sensations of touch Al’Gups recognised his muscles straining before tearing and heart chambers softened by decomposition loosening and allowing fluid into the body cavity. Cuttling for his part tried to avoid being dragged against the ice, scrabbling madly and using the momentum of Al’Gups’ charge to gain brief milliseconds of flight. The rapid ascent was not kind on him, forcing Cuttling to gasp and cough both in order to fulfil the contradictory needs to fill his body with air and force open his airways.
Finally, trailed by the rumbling of the antediluvian icefall once again moving, Al’Gups and Cuttling dragged themselves onto stable ground. The Radiator had finally calmed back to the soothing warmth it had previously emitted. Cuttling, despite desperately hacking and struggling for air, glanced around their new position. From below he thought that they might have been aiming for a small platform carved out of the mountain through minute motions of the earth, but instead, the pair found themselves on a massive, perfectly flat expanse of stone no smaller than a dozen metres across. Despite being high enough on the mountain that no living being unaided by technology could possibly survive, the platform was covered in only a light dusting of snow and just barely visible below were shallow lines cut into the stone in strange patterns. More strikingly, directly ahead of Cuttling and Al’Gups was a yawning cavern tens of metres high, not carved from the mountain face however but clearly constructed. Rather than a jagged opening the cavern was a near perfect pointed arch not entirely dissimilar in shape to a longhouse. Beneath thick layers of snow Cuttling could see that the supports for the structure were whole tree trunks bent and carved into shape.
Seeing that the sky was darkening to night, Al’Gups glanced over to Cuttling, only then fully clearing his throat, and began to walk towards the inexplicable lodging. Although it was not strictly speaking warmer inside, the massive walls of lumber provided protection against winds which in the time it took for the pair to get inside created a roaring blizzard. A gently swirling breeze still followed them well into the cavern.
“So Cuttling… we can still just complete the expedition as ordained. I can’t do something like that again,” Al’Gups gestured out towards the still-rumbling icefall, “my muscles are torn completely and the Radiator is broken somehow.”
“Say Al’Gups, what do you know about mountain spirits?” Cuttling said without looking up from laying down a blanket to sit on and stretching his frozen joints.
“Nothing. How is this relevant exactly?”
“Well, legends from Montaigne speak of the ever-growing mountain spirits; always hungry beings that stalk the Greatest Dividing Range, allegedly even migrating up and down the mountains through the impossible cold.”
Al’Gups started pacing back and forth around the Radiator.
“What I’m saying, Al’Gups, is that this ‘cavern’ clearly is not natural. We may be privy to sights and an understanding of lesser known denizens of the world never before seen or known! If we have time tomorrow and it isn’t dangerous we should examine the markings on the platform outside. I know many people would be very interested in our findings and I would not be the only person to benefit, you could too.
Al’Gups tapped his chin, “forget me then, what about your cough? Will you continue while it still hasn’t gone away?”
“I knew that you would not understand but my cough is simple high altitude pneumonia. Dangerous to be sure,” Cuttling paused rubbing his face in a vain attempt to regain warmth and raised a single finger, “but not necessarily deadly. Especially to someone of my good health. That being said, if you were still alive, and I’m sorry for bringing that up, and you had the same condition I would be much more worried.”
“And why is that Cuttling?” Al’Gups’ voice became brusque.
“Well I don’t want to put too fine a point on it” Cuttling paused, “but it is a fact that those from the Delta are perhaps more suited to swimming and crawling around tree roots than a hearty climb. I’ve been to the Delta myself once and the air was absolutely horrendous. Breathing the swamp gasses for a lifetime? It would be murderous on one’s fitness.”
Al’Gups leaked out an exasperated sigh.
“Say that reminds me, Al’Gups, when you were alive what was your profession? I suppose it didn’t matter all that much for your selection to join me… Were you one of those monster hunters? Or a doctor with all the peculiar tools you need to cure those bayou illnesses?”
Al’Gups finally sat down and stared directly at Cuttling.
“Cuttling, I worked at a fish cannery in the hamlet a day or so’s travel by train from Terminus. I was born in the Delta, but the majority of my life was spent breathing in salt and putting sardines into cans that people…” he looked Cuttling up and down, “well, people not like you eat across the continent. Did you even know that winter starvation used to kill thousands? I died on a trip back to Lure and my colleagues, also not being used to the oddities of the bayou, buried me instead of cremating my body. The rest you know.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Cuttling simply stared back at Al’Gups in response, taken aback by his outburst.
“Well that was… unexpected. Nothing wrong with good, hard work though. I suppose I will be getting some rest, wake me when it’s dawn and we can continue.”
Unlike a living man’s sleep, the repose of a zonbi could hardly be considered restful. While Cuttling twitched and wheezed, Al’Gups was locked in place with his mind trapped in a twilight state where every errant movement from Cuttling or the wind-carried snow disturbed his rest. When Al’Gups saw the great bulging eye staring at him from the entrance of the lodging, he tried to force his eyes to look down, assuming it to be a trick of the mind, yet he couldn’t move. The eye remained. It was impossible to gauge its size at a distance, but for Al’Gups to be able to make out faint red capillaries scoring the eye’s faintly blue sclera it must have belonged to an impossibly tall being.
The eye slowly rose out of Al’Gups’ constricted view but was replaced with great scaly clawed feet, first only one pair but soon an uncountable number. The only other feature of the giants besides their feet that Al’Gups could make out was that they were entirely skin and tendon without a hint of fat or excess muscle. Their skin was also bare except for small hairs or perhaps feathers. Conspicuously, each towering mountain spirit did not cross the threshold where the darkness of their shelter met the warmth of the Radiator, leaving a clear circle around Cuttling and Al’Gups.
For what felt like hours Al’Gups could only sit and allow his imagination to fill in what was occurring beyond his sight. Very occasionally a single eye would enter his field of view as a mountain spirit bent its neck at an uncomfortable angle to get a measure of the strangers sleeping in their retreat. The slight swirling of wind surrounding the camp was replaced in Al’Gups’ ears by quiet streams of air, as tender in quality as whispered secrets. Were Cuttling awake he would have recognised the sounds as matching one of the many legends surrounding the mountain spirits: so great did they grow from their endless hunger that they lost their voices, only able to speak through the wind.
As suddenly as they had entered, one by one the mountain spirits left their shelter to continue their migration down the mountain. One of the spirits, smaller than most of their kin, waited only a few steps outside the flickering radius of the Radiator. It looked over at the sleeping form of Cuttling almost expectantly, waving its hand, beckoning perhaps. When Cuttling refused to stir from sleep, the mountain spirit turned to follow the rest of its group down the mountain and away from the cold.
The rest of the night passed quietly but for the steady increasing heat of the Radiator. By dawn, the Radiator had become hot enough to both wake Cuttling and break Al’Gups’ paralytic slumber. The winds surrounding their camp had grown with the heat to a forceful gyre that occasionally kicked up small plumes of snow brought into the building from outside. In silence the pair packed up their campsite, Al’Gups too afraid to share what he had seen the night prior.
As Cuttling began rolling up his caribou-skin sleeping bag the Radiator finished its long cycling process, audibly screaming as it reached its maximum heat setting or indeed going beyond its intended parameters. Al’Gups then felt the most peculiar thing: droplets of water on his carapace. He raised a palm to catch more of the water, turning to look at Cuttling whose eyes had widened in fear. Cuttling’s attempt at speech was cut short by yet another coughing fit, but his frantic waving of arms towards the outside conveyed the message adequately. Cuttling raced ahead of Al’Gups, staying just within the blazing radius of the Radiator, struggling to attach his sleeping bag to his pack at the same time. Al’Gups, chained to the Radiator, was helpless to escape the worst of the evolving downpour of meltwater. Freezing water soaked through his coat, his shirt, and pooled in the cracks of his chitinous skin and beyond, settling in places where water used to accumulate in life. Places now devoid of the heat necessary to keep the water from refreezing.
Both Cuttling and Al’Gups emerged from the mountain spirits’ refuge thoroughly soaked, although under the now-steady heat of the Radiator the brief shower was unlikely to be fatal. The sky outside was bright and at that height the sun appeared as though rising from a great lake of clouds, dyeing the snow orange under its glow. Al’Gups and Cuttling wordlessly glanced at each other before continuing their climb.
On their first day on the mountain the expedition of two had climbed approximately twenty-five-hundred metres, a reckless pace whose consequences finally made themselves apparent in the following days. Both Cuttling and Al’Gups struggled to place one foot in front of the other with Cuttling’s cough getting worse and worse. Worse still, whenever the two were out on the mountain instead of inside a snow cave they were surrounded by a never-ending blizzard that tore at their clothes and fuelled itself on any spare moisture available turning even the saliva in Cuttling’s mouth into pinprick icicles. The only saving grace was that by some unknown providence the blizzard spared the area directly surrounding the Radiator allowing the two to climb at all. Instead of a white death demanding its due from the pair, the blizzard was an infinite array of arms isolating Cuttling and Al’Gups from the world. It pushed them onto the Radiator and strangled them if they dared to leave the machine’s warmth but nonetheless allowed them to pass further up the mountain. In all, the pace had slowed down to a mere, yet more reasonable five hundred metres per day. Late on the fifth morning, continually harried by frost and wind, Cuttling called for a rest day. Only Al’Gups had the strength to dig out a sorry excuse of an ice cave.
Even inside the snow shelter, warmed by the Radiator’s strongest setting and Cuttling’s spare body heat, the thermometer read negative one hundred degrees Celsius. In response Cuttling let out a hoarse chuckle interrupted by another coughing fit. Were Al’Gups not focused on creating a raised sleeping platform for Cuttling to help keep him warm he would have noticed that Cuttling’s cough was now staining his handkerchief pink.
“I trust that there is a reason that we have been pursuing your idiotic summit through an interminable blizzard rather than waiting it out or, better yet, turning around and doing what we were assigned to do.” Al’Gups spoke up, taking off his boots to flex ice-covered feet and frozen muscles. With only false blood running through his veins, he did not need to worry about frostbite.
Cuttling only stared into the steady glow of the Radiator when he replied.
“We cannot wait out the snowstorm, it will continue to follow us I suspect until we make it further up the mountain”
“It’s a cursed storm then? I thought Maleficium was only found in the Delta?”
Cuttling wheezed in amusement.
“No, nothing quite so exciting… It’s heat. We’re so far in the mountain’s grasp that not even the wind blows such is the cold, but our Radiator brings in just enough energy to start a brisk wind. As we keep climbing it’ll get worse I reckon, but eventually I suspect it will be so cold that not even the Radiator could stir the air.” With his explanation Cuttling held up a fist and swirled a finger around and above it in pantomime of the vortex effect around the Radiator.
“When did you notice this happening?”
“Around the time the shelter’s roof began melting, I wouldn’t have us hiking through a blizzard if I wasn’t certain that this was the cause.”
“So we keep climbing then? The best way out is through?” Al’Gups had taken off his coat and rolled up the sleeves of his woollen sweater, examining the chitin of his arms.
“Quite s-... Are you alright Al’Gups?” Cuttling stared at Al’Gups as he slowly peeled off section after section of carapace, revealing that they were only attached to his body in the first place by stringy wine-dark filaments. The muscles beneath were likewise entangled with Maleficium wires where they weren’t the consistency of slush.
“Ice crystals it looks like. It stings a bit,” Al’Gups pulled out a barely-coherent muscle strand out of his arm, covered in fine crystals and some larger ice formations, “it’s funny to think that I missed pain but it is far, far better than the cold.”
“I’m sorry to say I don’t think I’ll ever quite understand what you mean,” even at rest Cuttling’s speech and breathing was laboured. “We can endure the cold, we can conquer it, but nothing will ever fix your arms…” Cuttling trailed off into silence.
Day turned to night and into day again and the pair once more set out into the Radiator-spawned blizzard. Curiously, for both Cuttling and Al’Gups the knowledge that they only had to climb, that they could eventually outrun even the wind, made the localised snowstorm more tolerable. The notion that such an escape meant further isolating themselves in the mountain’s frost and airless grasp never crossed their minds. Additionally, the topography of the mountain began to shift as they climbed, transitioning into a simple, if steep, snow-covered slope that did not necessitate detours or ice-breaking to get the Radiator up. Only the occasional sudden shift in grade made the forward path remotely difficult to navigate with weary legs. All else about their surroundings was obscured by walls of white.
Yet still as time passed the schedule of rest days to climbing days slowed even further, from one to four, to one to three, to resting every second day. But eventually Cuttling and Al’Gups passed beyond the point where the air grew so inhospitably cold that not even the wind could blow. Cuttling could no longer tell if the numbness in his extremities was due to frostbite, or if indeed he was alive at all but for the constant gnawing need to grab more air from an atmosphere unwilling to give it and the horror of seeing snow dyed with more bloody sputum after each cough. Every sensation that proved to his senses that he was alive only told him that he was dying. Al’Gups could no longer drink the brackish swamp water that rejuvenated the seething energies keeping him animated with the waterskin now full of ice. Without that water he and Cuttling were on borrowed time for eventually the Radiator would drink in all that was left of Al’Gups to drink and both he and it would fall silent. Al’Gups also knew that he did not have much blackened blood to give either, as his charge at the icefall and drenching at the cavern had left his corpse in a state of ruin.
It seemed funny to Cuttling, that mercifully the world without wind was also without snow. Indeed, it was without a great many things: at this height the mountain before them seemed unfinished, absent the normal processes of geology and weather that sculpt large slabs of rock into their final shape. Instead, smooth, black planes of stone stretched out as far as the eye could see, occasionally plateauing into steps before returning to a steady upward incline. Sometimes rectangular pillars, just as smooth as the surrounding rock, jutted out of the earth forming the only natural breaks in the otherwise perfect landscape. Al’Gups noticed that the surface of the mountain was not quite flawless as there were dozens of terrible rents in the stone; tracks of some sort clearly, and only one species was capable of making the treacherous climb to those heights without freezing. Al’Gups tried to tell Cuttling, although the mountain had finally seen fit to take his voice. Cuttling for his part dedicated his whole being to placing one foot in front of the other, for he could see it, glorious and resplendent in ebon rock under the sun. What he had endured the elements for. The summit of the mountain so total in its inhospitality that it remained unnamed. Cuttling felt tears form on his eyes before they froze, blocking any more from following. So focused was Cuttling on the summit that he tripped on one of the claw tracks, slammed onto the rock and required Al’Gups to return him to his feet.
Of course, neither he nor Al’Gups knew that the summit was no less than one thousand metres above them still, yet the fact that it was visible provided a powerful second-wind. Under a sun barely obscured by atmosphere, Al’Gups and Cuttling climbed, or rather walked, without rest. At this height and at this temperature there could be no rest, to pause for even a moment would waste precious oxygen that was not present, it would become too easy to invite in the sublime numbness of the cold and welcome death’s presence. This understanding only heightened Cuttling’s mania and his eyes remained permanently affixed to the summit and while this determination gave him strength over the long hours, it also caused him to ignore his surroundings. Only when Al’Gups nudged him did Cuttling see it: a mound of snow trailing down from the pass onto the face of the mountain in an environment devoid of moisture. As the two approached they realised the scope of the mound was far beyond what was conveyed at a distance, it had to have been nearly a dozen meters in diameter and it was not alone. Down the slope Al’Gups, whose eyes had survived the rigours of the mountain more or less unscathed, could see many mounds of snow that ceased to become distinct as they pooled at the bottom of a small valley. He walked around to the other side of the snow mound and jumped back in horror.
Bone, skin, oily feathers, an enormous eye with pale blue sclera, and finally a mouth full of fragmented teeth whelmed and shattered under an eternal appetite. That was what was visible under the snow and in these features Al’Gups recognised the broken form of a mountain spirit. Cuttling fell onto his knees and shuffled over to the Radiator so his mouth was directly next to the coils and radiance of the machine. The spirit’s eye made a cracking sound as it slowly swivelled to look down at the kneeling Cuttling. Al’Gups thought it looked almost expectantly or in anticipation. Over many long, tense minutes Cuttling’s mouth thawed enough that he could speak.
“What are you?” Cuttling’s feeble voice was barely audible, a far cry from when he had first started climbing the mountain.
The mountain spirit too took a time to respond. Al’Gups peered over to see the spirit’s neck and where the skin had peeled he saw the creature’s throat was filled with perhaps a dozen tubes of different lengths, some with regularly spaced holes and slots. The whole rank flexed, extended, and pulsed in some arcane rhythm, drawing in and expelling bursts of air with a musical quality. The mountain spirit’s mouth didn’t open when it finally spoke.
“I am a dead thing left to die. For mine appetite hath outstripped what bounties the soil hath given.” The giant’s voice, if it could be called that, surrounded Al’Gups and Cuttling as a barely audible wind. “What, then, art thou?”
“My name is Irvin Cuttling of Orn, a dheghom and I will be the first man to summit this impossible mountain.” Cuttling launched into a coughing fit, straining at the effort of saying so many words.
The mountain spirit hummed in amusement.
“I am pleased that I will not then die alone, bereft of kith or kindred.”
“What?” Cuttling narrowed his eyes slightly.
“I am an appetite as were mine ancestors before me and mine kin forever after. Thou are’st also possessed of a hunger that gnaws at thy gut, I can see it in thine eyes. Like I, thou couldn’t fulfill thine treacherous and demanding maw. The appetite, it is nothing to be ashamed of, for it is the sign that we yet live.”
With those words the giant’s eye turned to look at Al’Gups. Cuttling sat in shock and before he could respond whatever dim light still existed in the mountain spirit’s body left. Cuttling turned around to rest his back against the spirit’s skull, breathing a shaky breath out.
“Gups?” Cuttling wheezed out.
“Yes?”
“I… am going to… just,” Cuttling could barely get words out, as if he could no longer breathe, and with one last inhale finished, “rest here for a while yes? It’s so close… I can retire for a few minutes right?”
Al’Gups nodded and wiped Cuttling’s mouth of blood, the dead comforting the dead.
“Yes Irvin, not long yet until you’ve made history.” Al’Gups whispered. Whether Cuttling had succumbed to the cold or could breathe no longer through lungs thickened with fluid Al’Gups couldn’t say. He took Cuttling’s knife and started once more towards the summit.
Before Al’Gups lay the final steps before the apex of the world: a perfectly flat curved slope upwards, no more than one hundred metres to the sun’s throne. On either side however, drops thousands of metres long no doubt to the base of the mountain. Al’Gups could only conceptualise his movement as one step and then another, not as fluid connected motions but singular acts disjointed from notions of space or time. The air was colder than cold. The rational man would say that all cold is the absence of heat, but Al’Gups believed that this frost was not just an absence but a true void. It did not drink in warmth, it could not be likened to the shark waiting to take its pound of flesh, it was not Lady Death in the mist standing by with her scythe. It was not an inevitability. The cold of the mountain summit was merely a void with not even a lack of desire, it was a tear in the natural laws that governed the earth and heavens that was inexplicably allowed to exist. The only thing it could not remove was Al’Gups’ consciousness and the foul energies that kept him moving even as the Radiator stuttered and died.
Al’Gups knew he could not make it to the summit even with these energies. His body was capable of movement but it was in tatters, the cold furthermore freezing and crumbling everything that wasn’t surrounding his veins. But in this dire state, half-way up the stairs to the sky, Al’Gups had a realisation. He could still fulfill the expedition’s true purpose. He used Cuttling’s knife to cut through the frozen leather tubing that had been his prison since awakening in undeath and spread his free arms wide to bask in the sun’s light. He swayed and fell down one of the faces of the mountain. He dived from the surface, the floor of the realm of starlight to the depths to which he belonged. He entered darkness as he receded from the throne of the sun into clouds and atmosphere. Deeper, darker, and deeper still did he descend. His body dashed on rock, then snow, then trees and moss and wildflowers struggling in the wind. Limb after limb shattered and fell apart, his torso disappeared piece by piece, and his head caved in. But Al’Gups had made it. He had entered the forbidden land beyond the Greatest Dividing Range and with but a single eye remaining gazed outwards.
It’s beautiful, and I might never have known…