I woke up and found myself resting on the other side of the river. My back lay against wet stone, cold and sticky, as though the river hadn't yet finished with me. I sat up slowly, feeling the weight of damp cloth clinging to my chest. My limbs ached. My heart didn't race, but it felt... unsettled, like something inside was still shifting.
I stood. My legs were sore, but they obeyed. I pulled off the shirt, heavy and soaked, and let the wet fabric slap over my shoulder. My skin stung against the air, like I'd bathed in frost instead of water. The river had left no visible marks, but it had done something. The curse she gave me—it hadn't left me untouched.
I stared down at my chest. No brand. No sigil. Just pale skin and the faint outline of ribs under a lean frame. I didn't know if the change was buried deeper, or if I was already something else. I let out a short breath.
I hadn't gotten what I expected.
I had this idea—planned it, shaped it—for a week. Each version of it ended differently. Death was the worst outcome, but I'd accepted it. I had counted at least twelve possible ways this could have played out. Of those, getting cursed and surviving wasn't even in the top ten.
And yet, here I was. Alive. Damp. Shirtless. With whatever that was now inside me.
At least she could've dried my clothes. For all that ceremony, all that talk of power and souls, you'd think she had it in her to wring out a shirt or two. Her water was dirty, cold, spiteful. A gift of the dead, apparently.
I climbed the bank, feet squelching against the soft earth. The stones were slick but not sharp. Above me, the sky was still the same—lightless, hollow, without sun or stars. But something glowed in front of me.
The golden tree. The Aurean spire
It blazed quietly, far away, rising from the opposing range like a torch held by a forgotten god. From here, it looked enormous—even more than before. I don't know if that was because I'd come closer… or because I'd changed. But it loomed. It beckoned. Like it had been watching my trial with interest.
The heat from it barely reached me. It wasn't warm enough to dry me fast, but it was steady. Unmoving. That kind of permanence was rare in this world.
I adjusted my shirt over my shoulder and turned toward the ridge. My road was clear now. Plain. This stretch—this long, blackened plain between the river and the climb—was meant to be simple. Just walking.
No more phantoms. No beasts. No talking ladies of death.
It should've comforted me, but it didn't.
The plain was wide. Its edges were rimmed with brittle, thorned grass and rotted posts that once held ropes—some old border or forgotten path marker. The ground was uneven but manageable. The soil was dry, cracked, and smelled faintly of ash. Wind passed sometimes, low and slow, carrying with it a staleness I couldn't place. I heard nothing but my own steps, my breath, the occasional slap of the wet shirt on my back.
I walked for hours. Not long, but not short either. Time didn't pass properly here. The tree never got closer in a way that felt real. It just stayed there, waiting, unmoving. A reminder. A lighthouse in a sea of black stone and silence.
I passed ruins. Just the tips of stone blocks sticking out of the dirt. Once maybe they were towers or shrines, now they were just anonymous. A few cracked bowls, half a wooden frame still standing. All long abandoned. Whatever had lived here was gone. Or had changed into something else.
Bones lay scattered around some corners. Not fresh. White, clean. Picked bare by time or teeth. I didn't stop to check.
I passed a broken wagon wheel half-buried in soil. Its spokes stuck out like the ribs of a dead beast. The kind of thing that didn't belong here anymore, but refused to rot fully.
I stopped at one point, under a crooked, leafless tree. The only one in the entire stretch. Its bark was black and cracked like something had burnt it from the inside out. I sat under it for a while. Not because I needed to, but because walking alone, soaked and cursed, made it feel like I had to do things with some ceremony.
I didn't close my eyes. I just stared at the mountain ahead. The tree atop it burned brighter now. The higher ground made it look like it was blooming from the peak like a golden wound in the world. I imagined, briefly, what the bark would feel like. What would happen if I touched it. Would it burn? Would it talk back?
Eventually I stood up again. My feet had started to feel numb. Maybe from the curse. Maybe just from the cold. I wasn't sure anymore where the boundary was.
As I neared the edge of the plain, the terrain began to shift—rockier, narrower. A soft incline. Stone gave way to layered steps, half-naturally formed and half-carved. This was where the trail began.
I saw it now.
The spiral road that looped up the body of the mountain like a coiled scar. It cut across the ridges, always keeping the climb steady, never too steep. This was the route pilgrims used, or those who thought they had business with the tree.
No one had walked it in a long time.
But I would.
I stepped onto the first stone of the trail, and for a moment, I looked back. Just once. The river was distant now. I couldn't see the current. Couldn't feel the pull. But I knew it was still watching. I didn't know if she was.
So I turned back to the tree.
And I climbed.
The first stretch of the trail wasn't difficult—just long. Each step wound me higher, the air thinning by fractions, the world below drawing further into a haze of gray. The golden tree still blazed above me, but not with warmth. It was a fixed light in a sky without stars. My clothes were still damp. I could feel it sticking to my spine, making every movement colder than it had to be.
The first real trouble came with the shrubs.
They weren't tall, just clusters of low thorned brush that grew out from the cracks in the stone. I didn't think much of them at first—until one caught my ankle. Just a nick. I barely noticed. But within ten minutes, my leg felt heavy. Then numb. Then hot. I dropped to one knee and looked at the scratch. The skin had turned red and started to welt around it.
Poison.
I remembered the old man's words, the way he talked about the shrubs that grew on higher soil—greydrift was what he called them. Not always lethal, but slow, dumb, and stubborn. The thorns had a toxin that dried the blood beneath the skin, tricking the muscles into sleeping.
I reached into the side of my belt and pulled out one of the vials I'd taken from his shelf. Pale green liquid, a mix he told me was for blood stir. I didn't know the name of the herbs he used to make it, but I trusted the label: FOR SLOW DEATHS. I poured a few drops on the wound, wincing at the sting. Then drank the rest.
I gagged immediately. It tasted like iron mixed with burned garlic and old metal.
But it worked.
Five minutes later, I could walk again. My leg still burned, but it moved.
The air changed too. As I climbed higher, the wind started to carry something with it. A smell like sour stone and dead insects. Not quite rot—but close. I held my breath as long as I could, but eventually, I had to breathe. When I did, my lungs tightened.
This is the part you forget to plan for, I thought. Invisible things.
The old man had warned me about vapors that clung to certain elevations—pockets of trapped air that had been released by landslides or opened crevices. He called it ghost breath, and though it wasn't fatal, it could make a man sleep for days—or walk straight off a cliff thinking he was home.
I chewed on a dried root I found in my pouch. Redstring bark. It burned the mouth, but cleared the head. Another one of his strange gifts. I bit hard until the numbness in my face faded and my lungs stopped choking.
I kept going.
Sometimes, I had to duck under fallen rocks. Other times, the trail thinned to just enough for one foot. One wrong step and I'd be dust on the slopes. Every corner twisted tighter around the mountain's ribs. I kept checking the sky, but it didn't change. No sun. No wind. Just that tree far above, like a wound in the world that wouldn't heal.
At one point, I slipped.
The stone beneath my foot gave way—not a fall, just a slide. My hand caught a crack in the wall, but the skin on my palm tore open. I held still, letting the blood drip onto the rock. I didn't scream. I just waited. When I was sure I wouldn't tumble, I pushed myself back onto the path.
I tore a strip from my already ruined shirt and wrapped it around my hand. The blood soaked through quickly. I didn't care.
I used everything the old man had taught me. Which stones to trust. Which cracks held spiders. How to smell rot in the air. How to tell if moss was old enough to be safe to step on. I cursed him with every other breath, but I also thanked him.
Eventually, I came around a bend and froze.
The trail ended.
A landslide, recent or not, had buried the path entirely. Thick slabs of stone piled on each other like broken teeth. Dust still hung in the air, dry and pale. No wonder no one climbed it anymore.
I stared for a long time. Hoping maybe it would move. Hoping there was a hole I could crawl through or some forgotten step cut into the wall.
There wasn't.
The trail was gone.
I looked up. The slope of the mountain above the landslide was jagged—no path, no ledge. Just stone and crumbled edges. It stretched nearly vertical. But the golden tree was still there. Still waiting. It looked closer now. Not near. But closer.
I exhaled slowly. I tightened the cloth around my bleeding hand. Then I said nothing.
I looked up again.
There was no other option now.
I would climb.
Barehanded.
I stood there for a while, staring up at the rock face. My legs still burned from the poison earlier. My arms weren't much better. I unshouldered the bag—the one I had carried all this way—and set it down by the ruined trail. It had food, notes, medicine. None of it would help me now.
It would only slow me down.
I tied my shirt tighter around my chest, twisting the damp cloth until it clung like a band. The blood from my hand had already dried into the fabric. My boots felt heavier than ever, but I needed the grip. And then, without saying anything, I placed my palms against the cold mountain and began the climb.
The first stretch was easy.
Fingers found cracks. Toes caught ridges. My body was used to this kind of motion—half climbing, half scrambling. But that didn't last long.
My hand slipped once. Just a little. Enough to jolt my spine and send a breathless curse through my teeth. I held tighter after that, pressing my body flat against the slope whenever the wind changed. I didn't look down.
There were no more paths.
There were no more choices.
After the second ridge, my arms started to shake. I found a small ledge—barely the width of my foot—and stopped to rest. My breath was sharp in my throat. I spat once. The saliva was bitter. My mouth was too dry.
I leaned close to a crack in the stone where a thin trickle of moisture glistened. I ran my fingers along it and licked what little I could catch. Stale. But wet. It tasted like iron and soil. I forced myself to move again before my legs locked.
I chewed on a piece of dry grass I'd pulled from a ledge earlier—flat and tasteless, but it gave my jaw something to do. It helped me focus. My mind wanted to drift. Every time I blinked, I saw the river again. The way she stared behind me. The words she spoke. The weight inside my chest. Still pulsing. Still hot.
I don't know how long I climbed. Hours, maybe. Could've been longer.
At one point I scraped my knee so hard on the stone that I thought something had broken. I wrapped it with more of the cloth from my ruined shirt and kept going. Every ledge felt like a test. Some gave way under my weight. Others held firm.
Twice I almost fell. The second time, I hung there—suspended by three fingers and a toe, with nothing but wind under me. I didn't panic. I just waited for my breath to return, then pulled myself up one slow inch at a time.
The light of the golden tree above me never dimmed. It didn't flicker or move. It just glared from above, like a flame that didn't need fuel. At times, I thought it was getting smaller. Then larger. Then impossibly distant.
I found a pocket of moss near the top—green and damp and bitter. I tore some off and sucked on it. It numbed my tongue. I didn't care.
I kept moving.
Until finally—after one last pull, after one last moment of scraping bone against rock—I reached the edge.
The top.
My arm dragged over flat stone. I collapsed forward onto it, half crawling, half dragging the rest of my body after me. My face hit the ground. My fingers curled into dust and loose grass.
I didn't speak.
I didn't cry.
I just breathed.
Shallow. Quiet. Real.
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The summit he had reached—what he'd thought was the summit—was only a bluff. A cruel edge pretending to be the end. When he staggered over the rocky ledge and collapsed, he had believed, even if for a second, that he had made it. That the climb was over.
But when he looked up again, it stood above him.
The real peak.
Higher. Sharper. Almost double the distance he'd just spent hours clawing through. His eyes followed the jagged wall of stone and dust as it speared into the black clouds above. There was no trail. No ledge. No markers. Just the wind howling through cracks in the earth and the scent of stone left untouched by anything living.
He didn't speak. No curse, no disbelief. Just a slow realization that emptied his lungs.
A part of him had expected this. Not this exact cruelty—but something like it. A twist at the end. Some final reminder that he was still what he had always been.
Not a warrior. Not a chosen one. Just a nineteen-year-old boy.
His arms dangled by his sides as he sat at the false summit, shirt clinging to him with dried sweat and blood. His right foot throbbed with every breath—poison from the thorny shrubs had swollen the ankle, and now the toes barely moved. His ribs ached from a slip two hours ago, where he had slammed into the sharp edge of a shale ledge. He had kept going. Somehow. He had chewed bitter grasses he couldn't name, hoping they wouldn't kill him, hoping they would keep his stomach from twisting into knots. They had. And they hadn't. His throat was scratched from swallowing dried leaves. His mouth had become used to the taste of dirt.
But that had all brought him here.
To this new wall.
His limbs shook—not from fear, but from depletion. They no longer answered him properly. When he tried to stand again, his knee buckled. He fell forward, palms scraping, and when he looked up this time, he didn't see the top.
He saw a cave.
A dark hollow just behind where he had fallen. Jagged in shape, half-covered in moss and shadow. It wasn't deep. Not at first glance. But it was enough. Enough for a man to disappear inside. Enough for someone like him.
His body told him to go in. To crawl in and sleep. Just a little. Just to close his eyes.
He didn't want to die. But this didn't feel like dying. Not exactly. It felt like ending. Like stopping. Like the world saying, You've done enough.
He dragged himself closer to the entrance on his elbows, gravel tearing at the skin. The cold wind stung his wounds, but it barely reached the bone. Everything hurt, but nothing shocked him anymore.
From somewhere in the back of his head, voices rose. Familiar tones, calling names he didn't recognize. One voice—warm, pleading. Another—mocking, but caring. They didn't belong here. They echoed like ghosts from a life too distant to remember. He tried to hold onto them. But even that felt exhausting.
He lay there in the dark of the cave's mouth, blinking slowly. His body curled into itself.
The climb had broken him. Not just the last one. All of it. The truth was simple, and it gutted him more than the wounds.
He was still the same. All the resolve in the world had not changed the fact that his flesh had belonged to a boy who wasted his years in sleep and silence. A boy who never trained, never fought, never prepared. A boy who thought that one month's hardship was enough to outrun a lifetime of sloth.
He had learned the river's truths. He had faced the dead. He had spoken to a queen of shadows and walked away alive. But all of that knowledge did nothing against what waited above.
Because the mountain didn't care who he was.
He didn't scream. Didn't cry. He simply allowed it. Allowed the cold to reach his skin. Allowed the shadows to blur the lines of his body. Allowed the weight to win.
He slipped.
A final, silent step—his foot missed a rock. His knee folded. His shoulder twisted against the stone. There was no scream, no desperate grab.
Only wind. And gravity.
His body tumbled, arms limp, head snapping against the stone. His shirt fluttered loose. Blood kissed the air in a fine mist.
And then—
Silence.
The boy who had climbed died, if not in body, then in purpose.
His hands had reached. His will had fought. His eyes had stared toward a tree he couldn't touch.
And when he fell, the mountain did not watch.
It simply stood.
And there it was.
The end.
His body slipped—not from a single error of grip or shift of stone, but from the weight of his own surrender. His mind had curled into itself, his will extinguished. A slow descent began. Not a plummet, but a helpless, weary slide. The body didn't resist. It no longer had reason to.
This should have been the moment.
The death of the boy.
The extinguishing of a soul, slow and uneventful.
He'd dreamed of significance, of clawing back meaning. And yet here he was, slipping into shadow like nothing at all.
His soul... grew quiet.
It did not scream. It did not fight.
It simply... loosened its grip.
And in that sudden absence—like breath leaving a hollowed chest—something else stirred.
The curse.
The curse was never meant to be gentle. It was stitched from wrath, from regret, from rot and remembrance. A binding older than language. The Queen had imbued him not with a gift, but with a burden—three foreign souls, long drowned and long silent, anchored to his frame like anchors to a shipwreck.
They had been dormant.
But now... in the hush of the original tenant's silence, a crack had opened.
And something slipped through.
It wasn't the strongest of them. No—it was the smallest echo. A flicker. A remnant of someone who had once cared about living. Someone who had once longed for sunlit peaks, for soft food and dry shelter and someone to wait for them at the end of it all.
It wasn't even the full soul. Just a pulse of it. A handprint left on the wall of a dream.
But it was enough.
The boy's fingers twitched. A broken, bloodied hand found the edge of a ledge.
Then another.
No mind drove it. No intention. Just survival, primal and stripped bare of ego.
The body resumed its climb.
It was not graceful. It was not defiant. It was mechanical. Hollow. A puppet dragged by ghostlight.
His lips parted only to release breath. No words, no thoughts, no protest. His legs moved like wet sticks jammed into the side of a cliff. His eyes barely opened. The pain did not reach him anymore—no soul sat fully inside to feel it.
Skin peeled open. Nails cracked. Blood smeared stone.
He climbed.
And higher still.
A full hour passed, then another. The rocks changed texture. The wind stopped clawing. The summit took shape.
He did not see it.
But the body reached it.
At the top, where the stones leveled and the mountain finally surrendered to a narrow stretch of dark soil, the cursed flesh collapsed. Just a heap of boy and blood and breath. Half a mile ahead, past wind-gnarled roots and tall dry grass, the golden tree pulsed like a wound in the sky.
He didn't move.
He couldn't.
The soul that climbed had already returned to sleep.
And the boy's own… had yet to return.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I woke up, this time, under a clouded sky.
But no matter how thick the veil above, the light bled through. That same golden light—quiet, warm, and cruel—spilled over the land like a truth that couldn't be buried. It pressed into my skin, filled my eyes, clung to my breath. I blinked up at it, dazed.
My body was still.
I reached for my forehead with fingers that barely listened. Dirt clung to me. My back ached. My chest rose, shallow and slow. I turned my face to the side and smelled something faint and strange—floral. Sweet, but not gentle. Sharp, like memory.
I looked around without getting up.
Petals. Dozens. Hundreds. Light purple ones with little white tips. Katros. The real thing. I knew their scent from the pressings the old man had dried near the stove. But this was different. These weren't wilted or preserved—they were alive, growing, breathing. They littered the ground in bursts, softening the stone and dirt beneath me. As if something had chosen this patch for me to lie in.
Was I dead?
I lifted one hand and touched my side. Then my neck. My legs. No pain. No bleeding. No splintered bone. Just skin. Warm, untouched.
I closed my eyes and tried to remember. Climbing. That damn cliff. My fingers tearing open. The poison in my mouth. My lungs burning. I had fallen, hadn't I? I remembered the wind scraping my ears, my thoughts flickering like a dying candle, and then—
I tapped my forehead gently. My thoughts felt loose, unspooled.
There was only one way to know. I pushed myself up slowly, shifting until I sat upright, the dirt sticking to my back. My body moved like it had never known pain at all. It felt wrong.
I looked around.
The plateau I was on was wide and uneven. Flat in some places, sloping gently in others. In front of me, I saw the edge from which I must've arrived—or fallen. Rocks lined its rim like teeth. And behind me...
I turned.
And there it was.
The golden tree.
Its bark pulsed like veins beneath skin, lit from within. Its canopy stretched into the sky like a second sun, its leaves scattering like embers too heavy to rise. It burned without fire. It moved without wind. And it was higher than I remembered. Much higher.
It radiated. Not just light—but gravity. Intention. Like it had been watching all along, waiting.
And yet, here I was.
I had come all the way. After everything. The sickness. The mountain. The fall. The ghosts. The hunger. The old man's warnings. The voice in my head. The fading grip of whoever I used to be.
But I was here.
Alive. Whole.
I should've felt triumphant. Or terrified. Or anything.
But all I felt was stillness.
As if I'd stepped into the eye of some eternal storm, and now the world held its breath.
I looked around, trying to see if someone—or something—was nearby. Waking up in a bed of katros petals didn't feel natural. The scent lingered in the air, faint but unmistakable. Someone had placed me here. Someone had brought me back.
Just a few steps ahead, directly in line with the golden tree, I noticed three large stones. They were arranged in a way that immediately drew the eye—too deliberate to be random.
I rose to my feet slowly. My shirt was missing, though my pants were dry and cool. Strange. I should've been soaked. I should've been aching. I ran my hands over my body, expecting wounds, bruises, torn skin—anything. But there was nothing. No cuts, no swelling, no pain. Everything was intact. Whole. As if someone had erased the damage from my flesh. Or as if it had never happened at all.
A spell? Some kind of miracle?
I wasn't scared. I should have been. But there was no panic in me—just a stillness, like the quiet that comes after a storm has passed. My head was clear. Thoughts came easily, calmly, without crowding over one another. It was like waking up from a long, dreamless sleep.
I moved toward the stones.
Worrying wouldn't help now. It would only slow me down.
When I reached them, I saw the shape more clearly—two stones beneath, side by side, and one laid across them like a lid or a crown. A simple, almost ancient formation. The kind of thing you'd build when you had no tools, only hands and time. The golden light of the tree had made it hard to notice at first, but I was glad I saw it.
I knelt before the stones and leaned in.
There was writing.
Faint, etched with something dull, maybe a rock. But still there.
wait
i will come
I stared at it for a long while.
And then, without meaning to, I smiled.
The old man had been here. He must have gone back. Maybe he thought I wouldn't make it—maybe he thought I'd given up.
He'd left a message. Asked me to wait.
I raised my leg slowly and nudged the stones with my foot. The top one slid, teetered, then collapsed onto the others with a soft thud. I made it look like the wind had done it. Like I'd never seen the words. Like I'd just woken up to a scatter of petals and a ruined pile of stone.
If he ever came back… if he ever checked—he wouldn't know I'd read it.
I had no idea how many days I'd been asleep. Two? Five? Ten?
But I knew one thing—I was late.
I stood still for a moment, breathing in the scent of katros, letting the golden light soak into my skin. It was quiet here. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that tempts you to stay just a little longer. To rest. To wait.
But I couldn't afford to.
I have to finish what I started.
Before the old man returns. Before I see him again.
Because seeing him… that would only make it harder.
I approached the tree. It wasn't far now—just a short walk, a few quiet steps across flattened grass and scattered petals. But with each step, it grew impossibly taller, wider, grander. It was like walking toward the sun—something too large, too overwhelming to truly see, and yet impossible to look away from.
My mind, strangely, had gone quiet. Or maybe, clear.
Now that the panic was gone, the pain erased, and the weight on my chest had lifted, I could actually think. For the first time in days—or weeks—I had the space to ask myself the questions I had buried beneath exhaustion and instinct.
Why am I doing this?
What do I really expect to find at the end of this road?
What could this tree—this monument—possibly offer me?
There were no answers. Only questions that clung like fog to the inside of my skull.
As I neared the base of the spire, Beneath the bark, hidden just below the shimmer of golden light, was rot. The tree, for all its majesty, stood on a bed of decay. I hadn't noticed it at first—maybe I didn't want to—but now, from this angle, I could see the bodies. Some were no more than skeletons tangled in roots, their bones split open as if drained. Others were fresher, with skin graying and bloated, limbs half-swallowed by the earth. Torn clothes, slack jaws, missing eyes. They hadn't died peacefully. Some still wore fragments of armor, symbols of worlds I couldn't recognize. The bark at the base twisted around them like greedy fingers. I could almost feel the hunger in it. And there, among the rot, a few flowers bloomed—small, purple, with white-tipped petals. Katros. Growing from the corpses.
I saw remnants of something older—stone pillars scattered around in a loose, broken arrangement. Slabs of stone and weathered steps, almost like the remnants of an old gathering place. Maybe a ritual site, or a camp. But the moss growing over them, the dirt pooled in their cracks, made it obvious that no one had used them in a long time.
Except—one.
One of the larger stones was different. Clean. Dustless. Dry, even as the rest of the stonework was dark and damp from dew or old rain.
Someone had sat here recently.
Maybe the old man.
Maybe someone else.
I walked toward it slowly and lowered myself down, resting against its cool, smooth surface. It faced the tree directly. The spire of gold rising endlessly into the sky, without branches, without leaves near the bottom, just its vast trunk stretching toward something I couldn't see.
I sat quietly for a while, the silence between me and the tree thick and still. It was awkward, in a strange way. As if I'd finally arrived somewhere I was never meant to reach. As if I had made it to the last page of a book I didn't remember starting.
I'd done it. I had come all the way here.
The journey had torn me apart. At least, it should have.
But the truth was—I wasn't the same. I didn't feel like myself anymore.
My body didn't even feel like mine.
I looked up at the tree, golden light catching in my eyes, and breathed slowly. Then I spoke, barely louder than a whisper.
"Hey," I said, to the tree. "You've been calling me, haven't you? Well… here I am."
My voice cracked just a little. Not from sadness. Just from how long it had been since I'd spoken honestly.
"I don't know why I came to this world. I don't remember everything. I think I died. Once, maybe more than once. I'm not even sure anymore."
My fingers curled against the edge of the stone seat. The bark of the tree, even from here, looked endless. Shimmering.
"I came here because I felt the pull. I followed it. All the way back to the place where it started."
The place I first woke up.
The place where something—or someone—decided I had a path. Even if I didn't know what it was.
I half expected some answer from the tree.
Some movement, some shift. A voice carried by the wind, a sign carved into the bark, a single golden fruit dropped gently at my feet.
Some proof that this wasn't all in vain.
I waited.
And waited.
But nothing came.
The tree stood still in its towering silence. Its massive branches stirred faintly—swaying not from intent, but from wind. The golden light pulsed faintly through the bark like a heartbeat I could not feel. And above, the sky thickened with clouds—gray and swollen, heavy like the air before a storm.
It would rain soon.
Hopefully not acid, I muttered inwardly, only half joking.
Still I watched. Still I hoped.
But nothing. No answers. No visions. No miracles.
Just a boy sitting beneath a tree, expecting the tree to speak.
How foolish.
How utterly foolish.
I closed my eyes and lowered my head, one hand pressed against my forehead. My fingers were cold. My thoughts were growing darker, slower, heavier. Something in me was slipping again. That slow descent into hopelessness that always crept in when the silence lingered too long.
What if this is it?
What if there's nothing more?
What if I've come all this way not to begin something—but to end it?
That was the fear. The one I hadn't voiced. The one that lived in the back of my skull since I first saw the peak of this place.
What if this wasn't the start of a great journey?
What if it was the last chapter?
What if all this—the pain, the road, the collapse and the climb—was just a slow death dressed in mystery?
I exhaled shakily. My chest felt hollow. I was sinking again.
I've forgotten everything.
Who I was. My name. If I had people who loved me. If I had enemies. If I had a home.
It's all gone.
I don't even know if I want it back.
All I know is this feeling—this pull—and this damn tree.
And still it said nothing.
A part of me wanted to laugh. Another part wanted to curl up beneath the stone and disappear. Just dissolve into the moss like the ones before me. The ones whose bodies fed the roots. Maybe they were smarter than I was. Maybe they understood that the silence was the answer.
I closed my eyes again.
No more hope. No more pretending. No more stupid belief in destiny.
Then—light.
A flicker of it, gentle and white, not gold.
In front of me.
I almost didn't open my eyes. Almost told myself it was just lightning behind the clouds, or a trick of my exhausted brain.
No more false hope.
But still… I hesitated. My heart paused mid-beat.
And then I heard it.
A voice. Small. Gentle.
"Are you going to climb it?"
My eyes fluttered open. A sharp breath escaped me.
The weight that had been pressing down on my chest loosened, just a little. Something deeper than instinct told me to rise.
Open your eyes.
Hope again.
Just once more.
I lifted my head.
And there—standing between me and the base of the golden tree—was a boy.