Where the Dying Go
The Himalayas.
A name that didn't simply refer to mountains—it consumed them. As though the earth had protested, piercing the skies with sharp peaks that even the clouds did not dare to own. Quiet reigned here, not as vacuity, but as a vibrant, stifling entity. Weighty. Ageless. So deafening in its quietude that it overwhelmed anything mortal.
Wind howled down from the white spires like a spirit that had never ceased to grieve. Even sunlight, when it found a path through cloud gaps, was pale and doubtful—a trespasser in this icy realm.
And yet, somebody was ascending.
Not a monk. Not a soldier. Not an adventurer. Just a man—young, freezing, and too proud to fall to his knees before the inevitable.
Loret.
Twenty-five. Half-frozen. Alone.
He trudged like a man pulling his own coffin through the snow—one brutal step at a time. His padded coat, black striped with orange, was cumbersome but anything but storm-proof. His oxygen mask wheezed with every breath, a metallic hiss that never quite filled his lungs.
But he didn't stop.
Wouldn't stop.
Thermal gloves encased his hands, but they shuddered as he drove his boot into another drift of knee-deep snow. He ached all over—legs, ribs, even his teeth. The cold seeped so deep into him that his gums pulsed with pain.
Onward.
He hadn't brought himself here to see the view. He wasn't seeking a peak or renown. Conquest didn't interest him. Courage less.
He was here looking for a life.
And perhaps—perhaps not—die for nothing.
The storm intensified, wind cutting sideways, horizontal curtains of snow making the world a blind, infinite white. He continued to move. Jaw grinding. Shoulders slumped. Every step a private battle against his own deteriorating body.
"Keep going," he grunted into the mask, the words misting within it. "You stop, you freeze."
The voice in his mind did not sound like his. It sounded older. Emptier.
He released a harsh laugh. "Don't have long to freeze anyway."
Stopping on a steep slope, his knees trembled beneath him. The blizzard intensified, smothering the horizon down to ragged feet. Nevertheless, he pushed on. One more step. Always one more.
He was accustomed to solitude. Always had been. The orphanage wasn't mean, but it was quiet. He spent his childhood in a environment of changing caretakers and regulations, where birthdays went by without cake and candle. The other children arrived and departed—adopted, transferred, or just simply gone one morning without saying goodbye. Attachment was something he learned not to have early.
At fourteen, he prepared his own meals. At sixteen, he was putting away dusty tomes in a cluttered shop, reading in the hours when no one visited. At nineteen, he was bussing out of a hostel, renting by the hour, scrapping his way through college.
Then, briefly, luck smiled.
He found a real job at twenty. Full pay. Big tech company. Glass walls reflecting the city skyline, coffee from the cafeteria, managers who shook his hand with the same hand they used to send midnight ultimatums. He worked that ladder too—coding, debugging, pounding through twelve-hour days.
Until it all started to crack.
When he was twenty-five, his body began to betray him. It started with a twitch in his fingers. Then headaches. Then the fog. Then the blood work. Then the doctors.
It began small—bland fatigue, merely a nuisance. He convinced himself everyone was tired. The doctor concurred, diagnosed it as stress, prescribed him pills, and advised him to rest. So he did.
But the end came back—stinging, biting, as though a knife was shattering his skull from the inside out. His joints throbbed with a dull, unrelenting ache. Memories slid away on bits, unraveling like used film strips. Even his hands, once firm, now shook for no reason.
He returned to the hospital.
This time, the tests did not deceive. The doctor's face had altered—vanished the easy smile, replaced by something somber. The scans were not normal, revealing furious internal deterioration. His organs were being eroded decades before his actual age.
"Your biological age is… fifty-two," said the doctor, voice firm but cracked. "We've never encountered anything quite like it. We'll do everything in our power…"
They attempted to explain, but the words made it worse. "We don't know what it is," they said. "Some form of accelerated degeneration. Your cells are… aging."
His body was deteriorating at twice the rate it should have. Muscles weakening. Organs slowing. It wasn't the type of death people anticipated—it was as if his life was being erased piece by piece.
Surgeries came next. Drugs. Therapy. Each had sucked more money out of the last. As his body wasted away from the inside out, his career slipped away from him. His savings next. His future fell with the same inexorable quiet as his health.
The verdict arrived soon enough.
"At best… seven months."
Seven months. That had been five months ago. By now, he should have been in a hospice bed, or wasting away in some dim apartment, waiting for the end.
But instead… he was here.
Night fell around him. He wasn't crying. He wasn't screaming. He simply sat in stillness, as if something inside him had gone quiet and cold.
By morning he would make his choice.
He wouldn't die that way—quiet, unnoticeable, forgotten. A man who never was loved, never kissed, never really had a friend. He would not perish as an old, tainted document on a junked hard drive. If his life was over, he wanted it to count.
That was when he went back to the one thing that had ever given him meaning—language.
At college, Loret had been fixated on dead languages. Latin. Old Norse. Sanskrit. Proto-Tamil. Some obscure tribal language used by a few villagers in some forgotten forest. He read them all, spending days lost in musty libraries, deciphering scriptures most people referred to as worthless.
One day, among the dry, half-burned Sanskrit scroll from a destroyed monastery, he discovered something other. A piece of a passage—barely legible enough to discern its meaning:
"Where the dying walk to be born anew."
Attached were coordinates. Rough. Ambiguous. But one of them corresponded to a place deep within the Himalayas—not the summit of Everest, but some place concealed, off any map-made path.
It was crazy. Crazy. Crazy. But it was all he had left to cling to.
He didn't care if it made no sense. At least it was something—a reason to leave, a last attempt at not disappearing like an ancient relic.
With what little money he had, he purchased cold-climate equipment, climbing passes, and a plane ticket. He even hired a guide—who left him two days ago when the storm blew in.
Now he was alone. Alone and the mountain. And the storm.
His oxygen tank hissed, more slowly now, the warning light pulsing red.
"Almost out," he spoke softly to himself.
The storm couldn't care. The wind just howled louder.
His legs ached. His lips cracked and bled under the mask. Snow had invaded his boots, freezing his toes. His heart beat too quickly, but he kept going.
Until it happened.
He stepped—and the earth was gone.
His boot came down on a crust of frozen snow, and under that, the slope fell away abruptly. The ground here was rough, irregular. One misstep and—
Crack.
The ice moved.
Too late.
His boot slipped, sending him headfirst. His arms flailed for purchase, but the snow broke away. He landed hard on the slope, fingers raking for hold, only to bring loose ice down along with him. His knee buckled. His body careened forward, crashing. Snow blazed into sky. He rolled, crashed against a broken boulder, bounced, spun.
No scream—only the roar of blood thrashing in his ears.
Thud.
White to white, horizon to nothing. His oxygen mask ripped loose.
He did not scream.
He merely thought—
So this is it.
And then. the fall ended.
Thump.
He hit hard—not on snow, not on splintered rock, but on something flat and hard. The scream of the wind was gone in an instant, replaced by a heavy, unnatural quiet. It was not soft, but it did not kill him either.
Low, a groan escaped his throat when he coughed, the noise grating in the silence. His oxygen mask hung off one strap, half-torn and hanging loose, and his splintered goggles stuck uncomfortably to his face. He blinked away the pain in his eyes… and saw it.
The earth beneath him was no longer white with snow but pale stone—flat, smooth, and almost polished in spite of the frost and patches of tenacious lichen hanging to its surface. It was too perfect, too intentional, something that had been crafted by human hands a long time ago.
Straining up with his hands, his legs shook. Behind him was a slope so steep it could have been a cliff, the route obliterated by his tumble. Before him, the mountain showed a crack of blackness—thin, tall, and crenellated like an open scar in the rock.
Odd symbols were etched around the edges, their significance lost to the ages. Maybe no one had ever read them for centuries. The air was different here; wind never reached this location, and the chill that had been gnawing in his bones seemed to falter at the door. From somewhere far inside that golden space, warmth seeped out toward him, soft but unmistakable.
He stood still, every sense on high alert. Something sensed him. Not the familiar sense of eyes watching, but in that uncomfortable way an empty room can feel. not empty at all.
He did not have the courage to shatter the silence. He just stood there, breathing shallow breaths, until—slowly, as if caressing the edge of a dying dream—he inched forward. His hand rustled against the carved stone entrance. The heat was tangible. Not imagined. Not make-believe.
Stepping across the threshold, the gloom seemed to yawn like a mouth, devouring him whole, but not with hostility. It was… inviting. For the first time in months, the tight ball of fear within him relaxed. He wasn't scared—not of dying, not of what came after.
Loret walked further into the mountain.
And the mountain shut behind him.