Fate’s Peak

by Scott Volentine

  They returned to the sitting area, resuming their seats in front of the cold fireplace. Tim cracked open the bottles and handed one to William before lounging back on the couch. “Alright, man. I told you about my story, so let’s hear yours. How is it that you came to me?”

  William took a sip of his beer as he thought how to start. “Why am I climbing this mountain? To tell the truth, I do not—don’t really know. The sign I followed was chosen for me, and I try to stay true to His teachings.”

  “Whose teachings?”

  “My Father’s. He taught me about his failure with humanity, and in our failures with each other. Failures where no one acted wrong but the threads still did not connect. The Tapestry disintegrated over Time, but it can be restored. Perhaps a new thread can be introduced that will restore cohesion.”

  “Yeah, sure,” Tim grunted. “Why would he send you here just to find some yarn?”

  “We are in the Tapestry.”

  “Or are we weaving our own tapestry? Man, you gotta get your head in the game.”

  “You may have weaved yours, but I am my Father’s agent. He has sent me to find the Thread that has remained pure through all the rot, and to use this to create something new. I am here to connect this realm with my Father, through the Light of Sol Invictus.”

  “Imagine that…” Tim shook his head. “How long have you been traveling?”

  “I journeyed through the wasteland for several days. It required adjustment; the demands of the body are great, but I follow a higher path that imbues me with spirit. I experienced conflict but saw the return of life. One night a wolf found me. He was a good one…”

  “What happened?”

  “I never even gave it a name… we shared food and he became my traveling companion.”

  Tim laughed. “A wolf’s gotta have his pack, I guess.”

  “There was magic in the wolf. He must have come from the same place as the rest of the beasts, but he was different… filled with Light.”

  “What’s with the past tense?”

  “I… I tried to protect him. I had a sword, so he should have let me do the fighting. He died… but I would have died without him.”

  “You have a sword? I’ve gotta see this!”

  “I left it outside.”

  Tim hopped up, crossing the room to stick his head out the door. Whistling, he stepped outside, and William followed as Tim tested the sword’s weight in his hand. “Didn’t know we had any forges around here.”

  “I thought you knew my Father’s powers,” William said.

  “What, is this something he weaved?” Tim patted the flat of the blade against his palm. “Didn’t know you could weave metal.”

  “He weaved its elements.”

  “When you have evidence… this really does complicate issues.” Tim set the sword down and walked back inside.

  William stood for a moment looking over the plain, seeing patches of grass encroaching on the ruins, mottled to the horizon. Where does Tim fit into all of this? What does he really know? William stepped back inside as Tim came out of the kitchen with another beer and plopped onto the couch, taking a swig from the bottle. William took his seat and waited for Tim to speak. “Grudges go deep with your Father. Man, I feel like He takes pleasure in making us suffer like this. Finally decided I’d been punished enough?”

  “It was His punishment too. You can’t imagine the sorrow He has felt. I did not want to know, but he insisted I learn the perils of failure.”

  Tim smiled and took a sip from his bottle. “Makes me feel better, at least. He didn’t abandon us… I made a bet, one time. With that garbage man calls himself Death. I told him my theory that our Creator is an artist who had just moved on to the next painting. The creepy bastard said Death was the ultimate Creator, something about recycling. Self-important bullshit, man.”

  “Death…” William shook his head. “My Father never abandoned the Galaxy. The pantheon had separated Him from the material realm, so he didn’t know about the gravity of Darkness until it was too late.”

  “Man, I saw the End coming from a lightyear away. You don’t gotta lecture me about that: can’t let the Light go out. I always thought of myself as a lighthouse keeper, shame the world’s dead.”

  “The world is coming back to life! Fields and wildlife.”

  Tim snorted. “That wants to eat you. But it is the Darkness that provides the lighthouse keeper a job.”

  “I would like to see this lighthouse. Perhaps this is why I met you.”

  “I think of the mountain as the lighthouse. The energy is more focused up top, pulsing out into space. I climb up when I try to communicate with different worlds. Not that it works, but I like to keep an open signal on the chance…” Tim grinned at William. “Happened when I wasn’t even looking, man.”

  “Then I’ll have to keep climbing.”

  “Wouldn’t do that now if I were you. A storm’s covered the peak for days, crackling with strange energy. Didn’t seem natural to me.”

  William smiled. “A set piece in the Game. There aren’t any surprises left after the strings have been exposed.”

  “When you think you know what you’re walking into, that’s when you’re going to make mistakes. Even your dear Father made a mistake.”

  “What do you know of Him?”

  “Never met the guy. Wish I had. Could have told him a thing or two ’bout the state of things. The pantheon be damned! The Galaxy needs a direct line to the Source. He hid himself behind too many messengers, but not me! I stood on the sidewalk preaching the spiritual revolution. It never came, man, everything just came tumbling down.”

  “My Father isn’t hiding Himself anymore. I’m sorry you have suffered so long, but He has sent me as witness to His failure so I can redeem his Creation.”

  Tim set his beer bottle on the coffee table, smiling to himself. “I forgot what hope feels like. I don’t know what your Father has planned, but we gotta get you to the peak. I’m feelin’ some sacred alchemy, man. Let me show you…”

  Tim sprang to his feet and walked into his bedroom, returning a moment later with a map of the mountain drawn in crayon. He thrust it into William’s hands, pointing out where his shack was sketched, halfway up the slope. “You ain’t seen nothing yet. You’ll have to scale sheer rock faces. One slip and you’re done for. Take your time.” He traced a crooked line up the mountain. “I smoothed out this trail over time. Avoids the worst of it. You’ll enter the cloud cover here,” he said, tapping the map. “Who knows what conditions you’ll face there. You’ll have to give everything you’ve got.”

  “I can do nothing else.” William stood up to face Tim. “I will need water for the climb.”

  “Of course!” Tim scampered into the kitchen, returning a moment later with a canteen on a lanyard, which he handed to William. “You can take the map too!”

  “Thank you.” William shook the canteen, hearing the slosh, while Tim kept on smiling, a blush on his face and a twinkle in his eyes.

  Tim gave William and hug, strapping the lanyard over his shoulder. “Don’t fail me, man.”

  William patted him on the back. “My Father sees what you have been through. He looks forward to long chats in the future.”

  Tim laughed and then sobbed. He let go of William, who walked to the door and paused, looking around the shack. Where did I leave my boots? He returned to the bathroom and pulled them on his feet, then he crossed the living room and stepped outside. “You can keep my sword.” He glanced back inside and saw Tim grab the bottle of rum from the oaken table. “I will not need it anymore.”

  TWENTY

  The porch debouched onto a packed-dirt switchback in the trail, and William followed it up the mountain, climbing along the crest of a rockface. When the trail cut back, he saw Tim’s shack shrinking and blending into the stony slope as he rose higher. Craning h
is neck, he saw the storm swirling darkly around the peak and felt a gust rustle through his hair. His vision began to swirl like the clouds and he stumbled backwards, bumping into a boulder. He sat down on it, resting his head in his palms until the vertigo passed. Father, I am so close, do not let my strength fail me now. He drank from his canteen and resumed the hike.

  Tim denied being a god but no mortal could have survived Ragnarök. The Darkness sought to extinguish all Life, so Tim’s inner flame must be strong enough to withstand the Darkness’s ascension. He mentioned how he had warned his peers of the coming apocalypse, so he must possess the gift of prophecy. Why did the people ignore his warnings? Did they dismiss Tim as a raving lunatic, as I did at first? I can understand how it must have felt to be alone in foreseeing doom, so if he had medicated with liquor then everyone would have thought of him as another drunk, dismissed his warnings as incoherent babbling. If only they could have talked with him in the morning; if only Tim had the courage to face the terror with a clear head.

  Visions of the jungle massacre flashed before William’s eyes. Corpses cooling in pools of blood, a rifle in his face. His stomach clenched with the terror of his imminent death, even now, a kilometer above the plain, no jungle in sight. It is nice to be able to alter my mood with a few drinks, forget all the trauma of living. He knew that was the easy way out, though, and would only lead to failure. The difficult path, full of strife and suffering, always offered the greater reward.

  The dirt path came to an end at the edge of a vast rockface wrapped steeply around the mountainside. There were no more switchbacks ahead but there were grooves in the stone where he could grip to pull himself up. He stood for a while, scoping out the best route to take. Chasms cut through the rockface like fingers, but he saw where boulders had become lodged within the gap. He marked out a few ledges where he could rest and a roundabout path to the storm, hundreds of meters above, became illuminated in his mind’s eye.

  William drank from his canteen and hung it over his back, then he mounted the rockface, reaching for a grip and pulling himself higher, but his boots scrabbled against the stone and he slipped. Clinging to the rockface, he kicked his shoes off and watched as they tumbled into dots. His toes gripped the rockface and gave him leverage to scamper higher, climbing diagonally until he came to a bridged chasm. He caught his breath then nudged the boulder; when it did not move under pressure, he clambered over its skewed surface, gazing down into the crystalline depths of the chasm, sparkling with light. The spectacle ended and he climbed higher up the mountain, his adrenaline gushing from all the air beneath his feet. His fingers started bleeding but he let the stone cut deeper. No pain can stop me.

  As an hour of this grueling climb passed by, the air grew thinner and colder. William started gasping for breath, but his lungs struggled to inflate. His vision started to spin as he looked for a ledge where he could rest, and it took all his energy to climb a few meters further. He crawled across the ledge and lay on his back, his face red, his lungs heaving. Not far above him, wisps of the storm swirled over the rockface, frost in the air.

  William sat up to look over the plain, a green-grey patchwork stretching to the horizon. Turning his gaze to the ruins below, starched in sunlight, he could envision a fly warren in the network of lanes cutting through the rubble. Leaning forward to look for Tim’s shack, he spotted a smoke trail rising through the air and followed it to the source: the shack’s roof wedged in between stone outcroppings. Is Tim singing down there, singing for his redemption and the redemption of the world? William smiled. Alcohol may have been his downfall, but he gave me joy to balance against all my misery. His heart slowed and breath came easier to his lungs, so he took a long gulp from his canteen before he stood and lifted himself higher up the rockface.

  William started pausing to catch his breath each time he transferred to a new handhold. As he approached the storm’s underlayer the daylight dimmed and a frigid wind numbed his fingers. He clenched his fist to restore feeling then reached up over a ridge and pulled himself up, jamming his toes into an indentation in the rockface to leverage him up onto a flat surface. Crawling away from the edge, he rolled over and wiped the sweat from his forehead before it could freeze.

  Pebbles carpeted the meter-wide ridge as it curved up the side of the mountain, into the storm. The wind battered William as he pushed himself to his feet and fought his way along this path. His teeth started chattering as a wisp of cloud brushed over his face; around a bend the ridge melded with a rockface that climbed into the darkness, but a narrow trail continued around the slope. He clenched his jaw as he turned his back to the bluff and started edging around it, happening to glance down at the ruins sparkling kilometers below him. His stomach clenched and he closed his eyes, holding onto the bluff to guide his shuffling feet. When he felt open space, he looked to see a promontory stretching from the bluff, and his body relaxed as he stepped away from the edge.

  William followed the promontory’s slope higher and his head pierced the storm’s underbelly, misty clouds blurring his vision. Snowdrifts carpeted the path ahead of him, granular in the darkness, and it crunched coldly under his feet, a frost burn like the monument. He bent down to scoop up a handful of snow and felt it melt from his body heat, popping it into his mouth and swallowing the water. Cautious now, lest I slip. He straightened up and tramped through the snowdrift, his feet growing numb as the storm’s veil fell over him.

  The path came to an end at an icy crag, but when William reached for a grip, his hand slipped free. He backtracked along the trail to an ice-free rockface and started climbing, feeling for any slick patches to avoid. The wind threatened to blow him from the mountainside, snow dancing all around him. Please Father, he prayed as he reached for a handhold, do not let me fall.

  William dug his fingers into a layer of snow and felt stone underneath, taking a grip and lifting a leg to wedge his numb toes into a former handhold. He pulled himself onto a ledge and rolled into the snow, panting for breath. The piercing wind wracked a terrible shiver through his body. I wish I kept my boots… need to keep moving. He pushed himself to his feet and looked into a veil of snow swirling about him, but he saw a ridge stretching away from him, a snow-covered path above snow-covered slopes. The cold burned his feet numb as he hiked up the ridge, taking tentative steps as the path materialized through the snowstorm, cradling his hands in his armpits. It felt like he was walking through the haze of a dream, crags looming out of the snowstorm only to disappear behind another gust.

  The ridge led William to a sheer rockface, wrapping around its front and ending in a drop-off. He saw refractions of the sunlit world below in the snowstorm, so he took a step back and turned to the cliff, ice shimmering up its side. As he studied the cliff, a pattern of notches in the stone were illumined in his mind. Gripping one notch in his bandaged hand, he pulled himself up and searched for the next handhold. Some feeling had returned to his hands, which he regretted as he pulled himself up the cliff. He found his feet too numb to grip, but his determination was like a second wind hit him and his arms started tingling with energy. He navigated up past the patches of ice, his fingers gripping any ice-free indentation in the cliff, and his head poked over the cliff’s edge, like a groundhog coming to check for spring.

  After William hoisted himself over the edge, his arms stopped tingling. He pushed himself to his feet and saw snow-covered ground gently sloping higher. As he walked through the veil of snow, he sensed the slope decreasing with each step until it felt as flat as the plain. A light appeared ahead of him, smudged by the swirling flakes—an indistinct point that reached for his heart and pulled him closer. He jogged towards the light, desperate to find its source. As he neared, the wind fell away and the snowflakes settled on the ground.

  Ahead of William, an enormous crag poked into the sky, the storm swirling in a parabola over the peak, but his eyes were drawn to a cave carved into the crag from which the light glimmered. I’m not g
oing to die! He broke into a run and burst into the warmth of the cave, gasping for air as if he had surfaced from a dive.

  TWENTY-ONE

  William found himself standing in a dome-like chamber—jagged stone walls arching over a dirt floor, illuminated from the right by a crackling fire that had stained the wall with ash. In the center of the chamber, a woman in a dress of swirling greens and blues sat upon a rock with her back turned to him. She was humming to herself as she tugged a wooden comb through the black tresses cascading down her back, her hair shimmering in the firelight. The humming stopped when she heard William’s labored breathing; she set the comb upon the rock and twisted around to see him framed by the mouth of the cave, smiling at him as their eyes locked.

  William felt his knees tremble, gazing upon this woman: alabaster skin, an oval face with high cheekbones and an aquiline nose; tender, brown eyes framed with long lashes that shared her smile; her beauty framed by waves of silky hair. The wind died away and the world stood still as the silence stretched out elastic, ready to snap. The whole of Being seemed to focus in on the cave, transfixed by the mystery. All my effort has been directed to this point, all the trauma I endured meant to prepare me for this. Although well-versed on the deeper workings of the Universe and the Divine Fountain of Knowledge that had birthed him, he felt like a child in concern to the workings of the human mind. What if I say the wrong thing, and…?

  William coughed. “Sorry… I mean, hello.” He felt like an egg had been cracked on his head, the yolk sliding down his face. Stupid, stupid.

  The woman’s smile turned into a grin. “Hello.” She stood and spun to face William, her dress swishing around her knees.

  A gust of wind blew into the cave and William stumbled forward; the woman glanced at his feet and gasped. “You need to warm up. Come.” He followed her to the fire and she turned to him, pointing at the ground “Sit.”