Snow, ice, and rock: the mountain stood as high as the sky. I couldn’t separate the peak from the world, from the endless bright light above me. I couldn’t tell if I was standing down or lying up until I started moving my arms. I began to make snow angels.
The light against my eyes made me shut them tight. I felt the bitter cold through the white robe, which was getting soaked by the snow. I got to my feet while shivering. I spun in a circle looking for anybody around me, but the field of white snow was unbroken. I was surrounded by mountains on all sides, although the one I had seen first was definitely the tallest. I immediately felt that I had to keep walking to make myself warm. The cold wasn’t going away. It definitely didn’t feel like a dream. I was also suddenly very aware of my lack of footwear.
As I walked, the mountain didn’t seem to get any closer. The flat lighting made it impossible for me to gauge where I was relative to other objects. I walked until I got tired, but I still wasn’t getting closer. I wasn’t getting much warmer, either. The snow was blinding my eyes. Every breath I took was ragged; the air felt thin in my lungs.
I walked further and further. My footsteps turned from a feeling in my muscles into mere noise. It was a rhythm I couldn’t break. The sun beamed down on me, and I started to warm up, but it didn’t feel entirely true. It felt like the sun was getting brighter and brighter until it was going to melt me, but at the same time, it felt like it was so far away that its rays couldn’t touch me at all. I raised my hand up to block the light and saw that my fingertips had turned blue. They cut against the overcast sky.
The snowflakes that had fallen onto me all this time were starting to add up. I didn’t care. The feelings in my body were slowly disappearing, and the feelings in my mind felt like they were all I had to focus on.
Then I randomly stumbled, even though I didn’t feel tired at all. My muscles were working less and less. My coordination was dropping. I forced myself to continue, and after another eternity passed, I stood at the foot of the tall mountain.
Above me was a vertical slab of pure ice. I reached out my hand and tried to grab onto it, but there was nothing to grab onto. I tried to kick my leg in, but no matter what, I couldn’t get any grip. When I pressed my hands to the ice, they felt warm. I walked around for a while looking for another way up, but it was a sheer wall to even get started. Even if I were utterly strong, what would I be able to do? I had no tools.
I looked up at the peak again, the brightness roasting my eyes. I felt a tug in my chest as I looked at its majesty. There was something innately powerful about it, and it was calling my name. I wanted to do everything in my power to reach the top, but even though I felt that way so strongly, I couldn’t explain why to myself; any reason I tried to name felt illogical. Even if I were to get over this ice wall, the rest of the climb as well as the descent would be unimaginably dangerous; I had no gear; I’d die immediately. My mind opposed it, but against reason, my heart was all for it. I slammed my hand into the ice once again, trying to grasp at nothing. I slammed my foot in. I slammed my hand. Repetitive action over and over and over. I wasn’t even making a dent, but I couldn’t stop trying. I almost wanted to laugh at how useless my actions were against the sheer mass of this grand mountain. My arms were warm again, even though I logically knew they were freezing cold. I worked feverishly as the voice of the wind called out to me, coating my hair with snowflakes. Each snowflake, unique as it is, whispered its own message to me. I couldn’t tell the overlapping voices apart, but I knew deep down what they were trying to say. The warmth in my arm suddenly turned to pain. I was still trying to climb one second, and then I was holding something the next. What I was holding was a handful of snow, and I wasn’t sure where it came from. Then I realized I had fallen to the ground.
I stretched my arms out to ease the tension that was building in my body. Then my arm hit something soft. I couldn’t figure out what it was until I turned my head to look at it. There was a hand. At first, I thought it was my hand because I couldn’t really feel either of them, but I could see both of my arms, and this hand wasn’t attached to them. Attached to this hand was a wrist. Attached to the wrist was an arm, and attached to the arm was a body. It was half-frozen and wrapped in high-visibility climbing gear. If I thought my hands were turning blue before, that was nothing compared to this kind of blue. It was an evil-looking blue, dark and partially rotten.
My energy returned in a flash. I scrambled away in fright and confusion. Shouldn’t I have seen that as I was coming up here earlier? Tell me it’s a hallucination, please. How disoriented am I? Even though my mind is fuzzy, it all feels so real.
The lips were blue. I took off a pair of dark glasses to reveal closed eyes. I braced myself and grabbed their jacket, trying to unzip it with my weak hands. I felt a sense of guilt, but didn’t I need to live? A way to warm up was so close, but I didn’t have the strength to take it. I gave up trying; I didn’t really feel cold anyway. Slowly, the feeling of unease after seeing a dead body disappeared. As time went on, I felt happier and happier.
With my mind as clear as ever, I gazed up the mountain. It was then that I saw something I hadn’t noticed previously, but that was probably there to begin with. It was another flash of high-visibility material; here was a climber up there. As I watched, the climber moved slowly, like an ant, except I was the one far below. Even though I could barely make out the shape of their body, I could feel that their eyes were looking towards the peak.
I raced forward to catch them and began furiously trying to climb up. My hand scratched against the ice, and I made no progress. My legs were finally giving out for real. I still wanted to climb, but I could no longer try. My gaze rested on the climber who was on their way up the mountain, then on the dead one they had left behind.
Suddenly, I had a hallucination, or was it a hallucination? Maybe it was real. My mind couldn’t process it clearly, but the very ground in front of me was turning into a sinkhole. Everything was collapsing. That dead climber was being swallowed whole. Meanwhile, the world stretched around the one who was still climbing, making them seem impossibly high up in the sky. They were an infinite distance apart, and the distance was continuing to grow. I was caught somewhere in the middle.
Then everything stopped. I was lying on the field of snow again. Was all of that just an illusion? No; I looked to my right, and the dead climber was still there. The other was still climbing. The black hole and the collapsing of the world were gone as quickly as they had appeared. It was that moment that I had a feeling of understanding deep in my chest. And as soon as that understanding came to occur, I felt the many handles of a door pressing against my back. I reached my hand up one last time, and then it fell to the ground. The door opened and swallowed me up into darkness.
The next thing I knew, I was standing in front of Azarias. I was being propped up by two other people. “Enza, are you okay?” they asked. “Why are you… blue?”
“What do you mean I’m blue?” I held out my hand. They were right. The hypothermia hadn’t gone away at all. My fingers and toes were on the verge of falling off.
“No, it’s not that. It’s what’s surrounding you. It’s that light.”
I saw what they were talking about. There was a faint blue light cloaking me, and it was disappearing quickly.
Azarias said, “She needs emergency treatment, but we don’t have anything… Damn, should we amputate her limbs and then use Germinate to make them grow back?”
Through my haze, I loudly objected to this.
Azarias frowned. “I have another idea then, but it might be disgusting.” Before waiting for me to respond, he picked me up and sprinted out of the Institute building. Heads turned as he ran across Alavieska and climbed up the hill of boulders, entering the cave. He took me to the access point for Blood River and lowered me next to the bank. I was dunked into the river without warning, and I almost breathed it in by accident. The river was thick as the current ran over my face, and I hated how it felt. It was warm, though, and my skin started to feel better soon. Then I looked down at my feet and realized that three of my toes were missing completely. I nearly screamed, but Azarias put his hand over my mouth. “Don’t wake up the spider.”
He then had an excited expression on his face. “Enza, tell me: what did you see? Did you win? Did you endure psychological damage?”
All I could say was, “It was so real, and look, I’m really injured. Is that one of the doors that’s anchored to reality, or is that one of the doors that’s only an idea? If it’s the former, what part of reality was I seeing?”
He didn’t have an answer for me, although I could tell he wanted to say something stupid like “Who’s to say what’s real in the first place?”
I wrapped my hands around myself. I was glad that I didn’t feel cold or falsely warm anymore. I thought about his question, and one thing stood out in my mind the most. It was that truth I had received. I was connecting the dots to something we had seen before.
“I think I figured out how we have to cross the Chasm, but you’re not going to like it, and neither is anybody else. More than anything, I hope I’m wrong. You remember the clue in the hospital room, don’t you? It said the boxes will fall. What will fall is the friendship we sacrificed. That’s the missing piece, and I saw what will fall for myself. I saw what we’re going to have to put in those boxes…”
“What are you talking about?”
I grabbed him by the shoulders. “People are going to have to die.”
He was wide-eyed. “How can you be sure? Isn’t there another way? Tell me everything that you saw.”
I told him the full story of what I had seen. He looked at me quizzically. “Are you sure your mind isn’t still being affected by the hypothermia? Your theory seems like an awfully large leap to make.”
I stared him in the eye. “I know that I’m right. If you don’t listen to me right now, things are going to get chaotic. I’m the first one to figure it out, but there are definitely others who will, assuming the doors don’t stay a secret forever. It all adds up, don’t you get it? An explorer climbing while leaving their friend behind to die, and that explorer being cast into a pit of endless darkness. One has to be cast down for another to proceed.”
“How are you connecting the clue mentioning the boxes to all of this?”
That question stuck in my mind. He was right to be skeptical; I wasn’t quite sure myself how I was so certain. Then, an image appeared in my mind. It was a long box, and I could see every grain in the wood. The image appeared for only a fraction of a second before disappearing.
“I don’t need to understand the truth to know it’s the truth. I promise that no matter how many other handles you’ll try, you’ll never get anywhere unless you listen to me. For each that crosses, one must die.”
Leave a comment