Brine filled his mouth as he coughed while he pushed against the waves and every stroke was matched by an equally powerful shove by the currents surrounding the Spine and he could feel his abused body failing so he pushed towards a peak of coral breaching the surface and settled his feet on top of it and rested yet the cold was ubiquitous and the tide was rising and he grew no stronger so he paddled forward towards the island where the waves and rock met and shot foam high into the air and he too crashed against the rocks which broke the skin over his hands and legs and jarred painfully but then he was on solid ground again and he rose to his feet then stumbled and fell and could not find the strength to stand.
A moment later night had vanished and the sun beat his body blistered and his tongue was thick and cumbersome within his mouth and when he staggered upright his legs supported him and he stumbled over to the cliff-face and judged it greater than any climb he had made before and he placed his hands on outcrops and squeezed his boots between cracks and began hauling himself upright yet not five paces up his strength waned and he dangled and his fingers slipped and he fell.
Circumventing the island seemed to take a hundred sun-scorched hours but eventually he found a cove with a gentle slope upwards and he walked up the brown dirt with burning calves and felt himself dry but the salt blanketed his body as insufficient beads of sweat trickled and his thirst grew sharp in his throat and he cusped the lip of the hill and looked up and the Spine struck towards the heavens as if to hold the weight of divinity upon its back.
Despite its majesty the sight reminded him of some overburdened mule or drooping pine yet it was straight as an arrow and the immense pressure of its existence must have driven all life from the island surrounding it excepting a small ring of vegetation surrounding it and for all its privilege as the fulcrum of mortal and celestial realms to him the Spine of the World seemed sad and lonely in its duty for nothing in existence shared its split and liminal identity and he continued walking towards it and with hollow focus he traced a route up its side.
He walked for some time and when the sun became eclipsed by the Spine’s form he realised it was far more distant than he had anticipated and cramps dug into his stomach and he drunk from pools of stagnant rainwater and crunched the worms and insects that dwelled in them for they were his only companions in the expanse and when a bug or lizard scuttled past he caught it beneath his boot and chewed its juices and ate its flesh and it felt like eating the autumnal leaves that paved the way for winter and when he collapsed that empty season remained on his mind.
Sickness and fever surged within his body with a persistence to undo the will of mankind and he left his food and water in smears behind him and dug himself a hole next to a small waterhole where he dipped in and out of the living world and when the sickness consumed reality he found himself marching at the head of an army with the land having grown the Spines of the dead and those Spines held aloft a clouded sky and he said they would never be old but they would be immortal and only one of those things were true and he walked on the proffered hands of corpses and they smiled with hollow eye-sockets and he reached his enemy and he killed his enemy and he killed his allies and he killed the land and he killed himself.
He had never thought he could die and now he knew he would and he woke and found a snake cradled beneath the warmth of his sickness and he wrung the snake’s body and ate it and drunk from the clouded waters next to him and tasted nothing.
The journey was long but it was full of absence and he felt himself carried upon its path like parchment in a gale and he ate and drunk and weakened with his constant companion bisecting the skyline while it grew infinitesimally larger with every step and sometimes the thought struck him that he was not moving forward but was rather turning the earth beneath his feet and the difference between the two scenarios was illusory yet he lingered on it for days.
Then another step transformed the Spine from splitting the sky to consuming it and he fell to one knee and touched the cracked dirt beneath him because he felt himself tipping sideways and when he rose he closed his eyes and saw only through the sensations of his soles and some time later when grass crunched beneath his boots he opened them again.
The trees around him were heavy with unknown fruits and the ground littered with the remnants of past expeditions with tattered tents and fires and tools more rust than metal all overgrown with vines and shrubs determines to pull them down into the maw of the earth and hold them in its embrace until the end of time and he ate the fruits and regurgitated them and he ate more and listened to the animals scurry and birds twitter and he stared at the canopy and slept and whatever he dreamt passed through his mind unremarked upon by memory.
When he woke he gathered fruits from the branches and collected clothes and cloth and wrapped it all in a patch of moth-eaten fabric and tied the bundle around his neck and went through the forest accompanied by the scrabbling small critters and the barks of some canid creature and he reached the Spine and on its skin lay no stairs but instead a grand sloping path formed of some dark mysterious stone spiralling up its side and at the very beginning there was a statue covered in moss and beneath it lay text but it was in a language unknown to him so he passed it by and began up the path.
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He lay at the bottom of the path bereft of several fingers and toes and the remnant stumps were jagged and uneven and blackened by the bite of frost. The empty season had hit its stride and though the absence of heat was something he had felt dearly most years even that was warmer than the chill of the heavens and he ate the fruit that had fallen on the ground unmindful of mould or rot.
Nestled in fabric abandoned by those that came before him he watched the sky as the light of the day was drained from it like its radiance was the lifeforce of a draining carcass hanging from a tree and when it disappeared he turned away and slept and in his dreams a stillness reigned.
He awoke with the knowledge that something was watching him and he emerged from his makeshift blankets and dragged his eyes across the forest and though its perfect stillness evaded his consciousness his gaze caught on the form of a dog, its broad frame and drooping jowls wound tightly over bone and languishing muscle. As he drew himself to his full height the dog withdrew slightly and continued staring and when he squatted against his own creaking weight and spoke to it the dog grew close and beneath the dappled light falling from the canopy he saw the worn rope around its neck and the dog’s tail begin to hesitantly wave back and forth.
It took little time for him to befriend her and when he did she refused to leave his side and when he gathered enough strength he waited with it for hours in the brush and together they caught several rodents scuttling through the autumnal leaves concealing the forest floor. When she was captivated by a stinking pile of leaves he left to gather fruit and after a few short moments panicked barks pierced through birdsong and the silence of winter and he returned to find it shaking. The mutt responded to commands with little prompting and begged as he gutted and dressed their kills and when she slept against him near the fading embers of a campfire he understood the kind of creature she was.
The two of them spent the next days hunting and eating and gathering their strength and they slept beneath the roots of an old tree wrapped in fabrics. When he could carry objects in great quantities again he looked through the remnants of those that had ascended the Spine and he took the things they had abandoned in his ravaged hands and he thought for a long time.
Fabric and nails from a crumbling cart and a cordage rope and a rusted saw and a jagged hatchet and a large stone were some of the few things he gathered and when the assortment became too much to carry he looked through them and examined the pieces and took the things that were necessary. Yet the process took only a handful of days and his eyes shied away from the empty expanse that awaited him and weakness held his body in steel chains and though strengthening himself was a constant endeavour at times his limbs would fail and his only companions for hours were the dog by his side, the cold on his front, and the damp seeping through his tunic.
The days spent recovering were long and the nights were longer because sleep often evaded his grasp and he would stare at the backs of his eyelids and slowly whisper things to the mutt slumbering at his side and he would tell her the plans he used to have and the plans he had now and the people he used to know and he would say that he believed the souls of the dead returned to somewhere deep in the earth to be hollowed of their contents and sent as husks to the surface and the discarded memories would fade into the contours of the dirt and the shades of leaves and the shapes of the trees and the eyes of the clouds and the space between stars to be remembered by things that did not think and forgotten by those that did. And he said that such a process was mindless.
Eventually the two of them left the small glade in the shadow of the Spine and the dog carried a small bundle tied to his back and him a much larger one and the winds blasted the two of them like the rage of a vengeful god but they continued against the cold and drunk from bottles of melted snow tied to the heat of his chest. When they lay down to sleep they did so in small holes with their forms curled around one another and the dog would sometimes whimper and cry out at her dreams and he would rub her fur as his face fell into the lines of his grief.
They walked and felt the season fiercely and when they reached the cliff’s edge they walked around until they found the small cove he had entered from and spent the remains of the day folding a camp into an alcove within the cliff and it was warm and the dog seemed pleased. The next day he stripped off his clothes and dove into the sea and the dog waited at the shore panicking and he returned with an unwieldy strip of sail and she leapt at him sending both back into the surf. He left and returned with more pieces and left and returned and eventually her fear was diluted into anxiety and remained no less terrible for it.
To the excitement of the mutt he would sometimes return with fish hanging from the end of a thin spear and she would stare at the ones drying in the wind when there was nothing else to do. After many days he had gathered enough pieces from the rock’s teeth and ocean’s maw to begin grafting together a small vessel and the first thing he put together was a spinnaker woven together from fishbone and thread from a coral-strewn rope, for stability. He sawed and he hammered and he talked to the dog about his plans for the boat and when he pushed the vessel into the water it sunk and he pulled it out and examined its sides and started again and failed again.
He dived and speared fish and slowly formed a map of the rocks and reefs around the island fermenting in the thick brine of the ocean and beneath the water he peered through the darkness of the sea and searched for corpses of dead ships to resurrect on the shore and pulling the pieces back became the work of hours for the smaller ones and days for the larger ones. When he put his own patchwork vessel together it would sink and he would let loose a torrent of violent cusses and start the attempt anew. The first one that could endure the violation of water beneath its hull fell apart as he pulled and pushed at it afterwards so he examined it and began again.
One day the boat did not fall apart. He and the dog stared at it for some time. The next day he tried everything in his power to prove it was not worthy and each time he was denied. He did not sleep that night.