Chapter 135
The Sacred Mountain
Rowan staggered to his knees.
He felt oddly warm. The wind was gone. It felt like he’d spent his entire life living within that ceaseless wind. Now that it was suddenly gone, it felt… prickly on his skin. Painful even.
Funny that. It had hurt to feel it, and now it hurt because it was gone.
Before him was darkness and what looked to be a large brazier burning in the centre of it. As his eyes adjusted he could see that the flames were casting a bronze halo over a rough stone ceiling and casting shadows off pillars about the hall.
He turned his head and looked behind him to see if the ferrax was following him. It was. As it always had. The doorway back to the outside was a glaringly white square.
The others followed too. The ocelix, Baroc and his kin. A dozen of them, following him on his pilgrimage as he climbed to the highest ruin on the mountain.
His lips were cracked and bloody. His breaths ragged and weak.
There was no elation, no rush of triumph. Just an overwhelming urge to crumple upon the stone floor and sleep.
“What is your name?” the voice rumbled, deep as thunder. But he could understand it.
He parted his dry lips, his voice no more than a whisper.
“Ro…” his voice cracked, “Rowan.”
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“Do you know why you have come here, to this sacred peak, Rowan of the Lower Lands?”
“Yes,” he answered. At least he thought he did. This climb was meant to break him, to reveal something of himself that had been hidden in shadow. He’d known this. Carried it with him as he climbed. All of it was a test.
A mottled figure appeared through the haze—a large ocelix, fur weathered with streaks of grey, his muzzle white with age. “I am Elder Hrakan,” the ocelix said, his tone solemn. “You have come to bond, to join with the ancient power that calls you.”
“Yes,” Rowan answered.
“Then follow,” Hrakan commanded, “with these last steps you shall face your final challenge.”
Rowan coughed, his whole body recoiling from the effort. A voice in his mind screamed at him to collapse, to lie there on the cold stone and let the mountain cradle him into oblivion. But something beyond his exhaustion drove him onward, and he found himself pulling himself upright, his legs trembling but holding. He felt like he was floating above his body, watching this weak and broken man struggle to walk, detached from him.
He could see the ferrax moving beside him, slipping around the brazier, its eyes flickering like embers as it serpentine circled the flame, enclosing the two of them. Rowan followed Hrakan, the Elder ocelix using a large decorative spear as walking cane. They edged close enough to feel the warmth radiating from the brazier, a heat that seemed to sear Rowan’s skin even from a distance.
Beneath him, the stone emitted a faint green light. He realised with confused surprise that they were standing on an entire dais of jade bondstone, the stone humming beneath his feet like a live thing.
The other ocelix gathered in a wide circle around the dais, their baritone voices rising in a deep, haunting chant. He swayed. He was an exhausted man, clinging to the cliff-edge of his consciousness. His body began shifting in rhythm with their strange hymn.
Hrakan’s voice boomed out, speaking in a language Rowan didn’t know. Old Esterin, a faraway part of his mind whispered.
“We begin,” Hrakan intoned, raising his spear high before bringing it down on the jade floor with a force that resounded across the mountain. A crack split through the air as green light burst from the bondstone, engulfing Rowan, flooding his vision in a pulsing radiance.
And then the ground seemed to vanish beneath him, the world falling away as he plunged into a darkness that felt like it stretched down forever, as if the very mountain were drawing him into its depths.