THE MOUNTAIN CALLS

[woke 1157]

 

 

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ᴛʜᴇ ꜱᴀɢᴇ’ꜱ ꜱᴇᴀᴛ, ᴡʜᴇʀᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ᴜɴʀᴇᴀᴅʏ ᴀʀᴇ ʀᴇᴛᴜʀɴᴇᴅ ᴛᴏ ᴛʜᴇ ꜱʟᴏᴘᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀᴛʜʏ ᴀʀᴇ ʀᴇᴍᴀᴅᴇ ʙʏ ɪᴛ

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Antonius had not spoken much on the boat. Jerry had filled the silence, with observation and the occasional dry remark, but Antonius remained fixed on the isle as it emerged from the water ahead. He did not know what waited there, with the weight of a dreaded man. He had faced enemies on the field. He had buried men he respected. Those things had asked of him what steel and will could answer. This asked of him beyond his reach.

Before the two, lay a great tower, radiating with energy. It stood there, as if waiting for one to embellish it, etched upon its surface, in the tongue of lower-draconic.

 

ꜱᴄᴀʟᴇ ᴛʜɪꜱ ᴍᴏᴜɴᴛᴀɪɴ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴘʀᴏᴠᴇ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴍᴇᴛᴛʟᴇ, ꜱᴄɪᴏɴ ᴏꜰ ᴛʜᴇ ᴅʀᴀɢᴏɴꜱʙʟᴏᴏᴅ

 

“Huh…” Jerry murmured, his gaze fixed upon the tower as he took a moment to study the etched script. 

 

Antonius lifted his gaze to the volcano’s height, scaling its ascent. After a moment, he pushed away from the boat and set his boots on the ashen slope, giving a nod to answer his brother’s question.

 

The corner of Antonius's mouth moved into a smirk, and they climbed.

 

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A tree rose at the center of the hollow, vast and gnarled as though grown not upward but outward from the terra. Its bark blackened, cracked with ashen vein. Roots sprawled  against the scorched ground in every direction, thick as walls, clutching the fireland stone like hands that refused to let go. Above, ashen leaves held without burning, which should not have been possible, and yet.

 

The fire came next — a ring of it around the hollow's edge, bleeding from orange to deep crimson at its heart, bending inward against no wind. Jerry said something beside him. Antonius heard the words but not their meaning, as smoke had begun to rise from the roots, crimson-bruised and slow. Waiting, the way a river waits at the lip of a canyon. It rose with intent, coiling in slow, deliberate spirals, finding the air above the hollow and fitting it from below as water fills a basin. The smell was ancient, scorched.

 

The flames of Az'Uznath thickened, surrounding them entirely, entering their mind a dream would, unannounced and inevitable. First, warmth behind their eyes. Then, a weight behind their skull.  Within the smoke, a shape assembled itself, not arrived, simply present, occupying that space as it had always occupied it. An old figure, sagely clothed in the fabric of many roads, staff in hand, no face clearly defined, only the impression of some great age and elvish features. It walked, but seemingly to them, it had always been walking with them.

 

The road beneath its feet unrolled forward and backward simultaneously, as if it was being created by his own walk. 

 

“This road is not yours, it is you. The road does not end because you stop walking. It ends when no part of you remains to remember that you were ever here at all. What, then, would it mean to walk forever? What, then, would it mean if the road forgoes your name? Think on this.”

 

“Do not answer yet. You are not ready."

 

As if against his will, Antonius could not bear to look at his brother, trapped in the mind of something external.

Then the smoke took everything.

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The darkness that replaced it was not the absence of light. It had weight, and age, and the quality of a place that had held something enormous for a very long time. Antonius understood before he saw it: the name arriving without being spoken, pressed into him by the atmosphere itself.

 

Naldroth.

 

A figure lay below them, vast beyond reckoning, bound in chains of blinding white.  Antonius looked at it and felt his chest go quiet in a way it never had before, a recognition arriving before the King of Dragons.

 

The links bereaved not of any shape, but will: The imposed order of a once-golden, broken Light. The God who had now split the world with its own illusion Order.

 

The primordial figure grew slowly, expanding into the full terrible measure of what it had always been. The chains did not break, but became irrelevant, shed like a skin outgrown. A blinding screech enveloped their mind, as the figure rose with otherworldly speed. It grew, half of the mountain's size, majestic wings taking flight, a great terror of the World betrayed as it soared amongst the night sky. A great dragon, made of smoke, two red eyes glistening in its escape from the prison.

 

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A sound that did not travel through air arrived directly behind Antonius's eyes and pressed into the place where certainty lived. And left something there. Wordless. Total.

ɴᴏᴛʜɪɴɢ ᴛʜᴀᴛ ᴛʀᴜʟʏ ᴋɴᴏᴡꜱ ɪᴛꜱᴇʟꜰ ᴄᴀɴ ʙᴇ ʜᴇʟᴅ ʙʏ ᴀɴᴏᴛʜᴇʀ'ꜱ ᴡɪʟʟ.

 

The smoke thinned. It drew itself upward through the branches, through the ring of fire, toward the peak. The hollow released them. The smoke did not speak again. It rose, and the question it carried heeded no words.

 

Will you follow?

 

Antonius looked at the slope above. At the distance yet to climb. The doubt he had carried up the mountain was still there, but it had changed shape, into resolve.

 

Antonius extended a hand to Jerry so they might begin their climb.

 

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The peak held nothing soft. The wind moved in silence this high, too far above the world for sound to persist. Antonius stood at the summit and felt the full exposure of it, nothing between himself and whatever came next, and breathed through it steadily.

 

The lava pulsed. Not the mountain's rhythm. A pressure rose from beneath, enormous and unhurried, swelling the surface until it cracked open: claw first, trailing rivers of molten rock, then scale, then the full and terrible architecture of a form that made the summit feel miniscule. Heat came in waves that did not push but drew his chin upward. Ash gathered along his cloak. A gaze settled upon him, unhurried, total, with nothing behind it that required his reaction to be complete.

 

“Are you prepared for my questions?” 

Antonius met the voice and answered from the place the Mountain had opened to him.

 “Ask them, and I shall hear, for a Man who would climb must first learn the height before him.” He did not prostrate himself. He did not tremble. He studied the vast architecture of scale and furnace-light as one studied scripture etched in the living frame.

 

“You followed smoke through fire and up to stand before me. I am certain that on the way, your mind was already questioning. This is the nature of your kind. Descendants think in solutions.”

 

The test began.

 

“What is immortality, if time is finite? And, how does one create himself?” 

The duo descended to the pit's edge without hesitation. One step then another, stone hot through his boots, air thickening his lungs with each foot of descent. He stopped where the drop began, and looked unto the form of teacher.

Qahnaarin, the Chosen.

“Immortality is mastery over what time consumes. That which shapes the ending outlives it.” His eyes rose beneath the ebony helmet to face the dragon, reflecting ember-light.

 

“No one creates themselves from nothing. Every person is shaped by their own will, by choices made again and again until those choices become part of who, and what they are. To create yourself is when to decide what within you burns, and what is given to the flames.” Jerry gave his answer only after trailing behind his brother into the descent of the firelit pit, his gaze almost mesmerized by the blazing depths below.

 

“Legacy. Deeds. Memory in the minds of those who come after. But it is the answer a man gives when civilization has already handed him a frame, and he has hung himself within it.”

 

“If your immortality lives in the memory of others, who holds it when the last who remembers you is dead? The deed that no record survived to name?” The dragon raised a clawed hand, and between the scaled fingers, a thread of flame uncoiled, breathing, the same smoke which led them here, curling with intent. “The smoke showed you a traveler. You remember it. The road that had no end.”

 

“The road was not the lesson. The road is the same, the one every living thing walks from birth towards death, and it does not care whether you walked it well. What I wanted you to see was simpler, but harder. The traveler does not persist because the road remembers him.”

 

“The traveler persists because while he walked, he chose. Every step a decision, every step a small act of creation.” The flame shifted, briefly the image of a seed falling, before it vanished.

 

“The Third Eye, wrote of a man who fell into deep black halls. He chased the shadows on the wall and called it knowledge. He bled himself over a hundred years until he was empty. And only then, only when he had shed everything he had become, could he begin to see.”

 

What followed, spoke to him deeply, and Antonius felt it as such: each word finding something in him and pressing on it, testing what it could bear.
 

“Do you understand what I mean when I say that most men never live at all? They are lived. They are moved by what was placed in them before they had the wit to refuse it. They are the sum of what others decided they should want -- wealth, name, rank, salvation. They confuse the shadow on the wall for the flame that made it. Just like you said, Jerry.”

 

“Immortality is not the shadow. It is truth. And truth, burns.”

Antonius thought of the frame that had been granted to him. Duke. Dragon Knight. He had worn those things, unquestionably.

“Now the second question. It is not separate from the first. Most hear them as two. They are on question wearing two faces. How does one create himself?”

“You saw the smoke's second vision. My father, The Titan in chains, bound by Order's will, by the shape his captors had decided he was. And what rose from that prison was not the corrupted thing it was built to contain. Something older. The original shape of a will that nothing outside it had ever truly reached.”

 

“My father, he was not made free by breaking of chains. He was free before they were forged. He had shed them. Eternal liberty. The difference between liberty and rescue, is that no one can give you the first.”

 

“My father went to the forefathers of your kind at the dawn of the world.” 

The Teacher began, heat wisping from his jaw.

 

“Not to command them. Not to demand worship. He went to show them something they forgot - that by God, divinity was already inside them, made in the image of a God who required nothing of them except that they hold themselves in respect.”

 

“Every false God that came after, Xan and his order, the Aspects and their domain, the spirits that take and take - every one of them offered the same trade. Give them your will, and they will give you something to belong to.”

 

“But my father's sacred gift reigned supreme. Knowledge. His Asioth, to bear the full weight of your own freedom, and not flinch toward something that will carry it for you.” The dragonkin’s palm opened. A torrent spun within it, hewn and ancient.

 

“This is what Asioth means when it speaks of liberty. Not freedom from enemies. Not freedom from law. Freedom from the desire that will make you whole. That voice is not yours, it was given to you.”

 

“Until you hold the chisel which made you, that commanded you, until you know what thoughts are yours, you cannot build yourself again.” 

 

“A man who is lived by others, who takes the shape of what his world pressed him into, who wants what he is told to want, who calls the shadows on the wall by the names he was give for them, this man cannot be immortal. Not because time forgets him. Because he was never truly there to be forgotten. He was a reflection. And when the thing that cast the reflection is gone, it too goes.”

 

“But.”

 

“A man who has emptied himself, who has bled, as the great sage wrote, over the jagged stone of his own unknowing, this man who acts, acts from something true as Flame. When he fights, it is his war. And what is real endures. Not because the world asked him of it. Because it was fully without apology, without performance, without the permission of anything outside the Self.”

 

A single beat passes, as the duo remained, as still as the mountain would let them. And then, Qahnaarin’s voice drew in finality.

 

“The answer to 'what is immortality, if time is finite' - and the answer to 'how does one create himself' -- are the same answer.”

 

The lava rose, swarming the dragon and melded him into something ethereal; wings of fire spread across his shoulder, uplifting him slowly into the air. The night above them opened, until all that remained below was warmth and ash and the fading point of red-orange against the dark.

Antonius stood in the trembling light, cloak snapping in the heated wind, and did not shield his eyes.

He had come up the mountain not knowing what waited.

He descended knowing he was not yet ready to know, and that this, too, was part of it.

⪻────𖤓────⪼

ᴋɴᴏᴡ ᴡʜᴏ ʏᴏᴜ ᴀʀᴇ, ᴋɴᴏᴡ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴘᴜʀᴘᴏꜱᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴀʟʟ ᴡɪʟʟ ʙᴇ ʀɪɢʜᴛ ɪɴ ᴛʜᴇ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ; ꜰᴏʀ ɪᴛ ɪꜱ ʏᴏᴜʀ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ, ᴍʏ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴏᴜʀ ᴡᴏʀʟᴅ.

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"Seeker of fire, reveal thy arms and legs."

The An-Gho studied him.

"You will be inscribed with images of the ancient past, the return of Azdromoth, Naldroth, Tor-Azdraeth. And your arm shall possess a scene of Apotheosis, the form of Satar, the Red Drake."

He let the words settle. Naldroth. He had stood above it in smoke and vision, had felt its chains become irrelevant. Now it would be pressed into his flesh permanently, carried forward into every day that followed.

"Let the door be opened, let the Eye shine." One brother spoke.

"May the fire, bestowed unto thee, burn ever hotter." The other brother answered.

The dragonkin unveiled, embers coalescing their digits, walking before Antonius and singing a deep, draconic, resonance with something of ancient origin.

Then the burning began.

A searing that went beyond heat, as though the flesh beneath were being unmade and remade simultaneously, the skin itself becoming the medium for something that demanded permanence. A great scene took shape there, rendered in fire and pain: Nephilim kneeling before the Titan, who held the heart of his son aloft. About them, figures Antonius recognized — Qahnaarin, raising a sword of fire. The Inquisitor-Eternal. Keledan. The An-Gho. Images bleeding into one another, abstract, tapestried, every line of it pressed into him with the deliberate weight of testimony.

A cry tore from him. His legs faltered.

"Are you weak, Dragon Knight?" The An-Gho mused. "I think you are. This agony is nothing. Nothing but a premonition."

He did not answer. He pulled what remained of his strength upward and found his feet again; to stand through it, his only response.

The An-Gho clutched his arm next, held it out, and drove those drawing fingers into the flesh anew. The form of Satar emerged: draconic, spreading, almost psychedelic in its sprawl across the skin. Beneath the Dragon-General contained a plethora of more images, akin to a vision he once saw, where armies of dragons and fire-seekers pummeled down the mountains, horses designated with the iconography of Praeth.

“You will never kneel again, herald.” Qahnaarin's voice ruminated from behind.

Antonius said nothing. The burning continued and he met it upright, and for the first time since setting foot on the slope, the whisper of doubt behind his mind was quiet. He felt the flame now, a renewed touch of the Firstborn, as his own.

“Rise. You now belong to my Father.”

 

Spoiler

 

Thanks to @MRCHENN for proofreading and holding the events that were written about!
DO NOT METAGAME THE M****LORD (ME)!

 

 

[SmackSmack 200]

Oh wow.

[MRCHENN 4741]

 

"Sojourn forth, my herald, into the path that awaits you. Find the Self, and you shall find purpose. Heed the words of none but what your heart commands. The Mountain does not forget, nor the Flame. It is yours now, as the World is, ripe for the taking. As my Father once did — soar."