Estavir fell out of the liquid into a long corridor made of dark marble, a mix of overlapping varying shades of greys occasionally lined and highlighted with what appeared to be chalk smears. All along the corridor, whose length felt difficult to estimate, there were lights hovering in a line making a path to follow. There was nowhere else to go but follow the corridor towards what eventually became an illuminated opening in the distance. The closer Estavir got, the more obvious the tendrils of the cool breeze became and the seeping chill encroached upon him was becoming visible.
As Estavir reached the end of the corridor he found himself exiting onto a snowy ledge. There was a fence around the ledge and it led the eye to a the left where it was clear a path had been carved into the side of the mountain. He looked down only to see mere meters of rock face before his vision was obscured entirely by clouds and mist. He leant over the edge to look up only to see that though he could tell the mountain was beginning to narrow significantly, above him, as was the case below him, was entirely obscured by clouds and mist.
The only way onwards was to follow the staircase carved into the side of the mountain. The walk was not particularly steep or taxing physically but there was no way to know how far ahead you still had to go and as Estavir discovered quickly, how far you had already walked. The carved road gave protection from the wind and snow but was the dullest sightseeing route; ahead and behind only rocky stairs that curved ever so slightly along the sides of the mountain. To one side the inner carved rock and outside a sea of white blinding chaos of snow and wind and ice.
He walked on for hours or minutes, he wasn't sure. Even counting the steps seemed futile as he'd lose count at the moments he was concentrating, because the stairway taunted him with a double length step or a weird interruption in the recurring pattern.
It is all very surreal, he thought as he stopped for a moment after what felt like numerous hours. Carried by the wind in that instance were the sounds of grunting and grumbling. The wind and chill made it impossible to make an estimated guess at how far ahead the noise was coming from, which made Estavir curious but weary.
He went on towards the source of the noise, finding against all odds: an old man slowly making his way up the stairs, resting his weight against the rock wall with one hand and a walking stick in the other. Estavir continued to walk toward the old man until the old man noticed him. The old man kept to himself, showed no interest in him at all and grumbling on slowly. Estavir made no eye contact and walked right past him.
The grunting and grumbling became distant slowly until finally it disappeared as he walked ever onward.
It could have been another minute or an hour later, though he was certain it felt more like hours, when again a grunting noise could be heard an undefinable distance ahead. He walked ahead only to find, in the distance, a familiar figure hunched against the wall holding a walking stick, slowly etching on along the staircase.
He made haste past the old man without making contact once more. He was determined to keep up a high tempo until he could hear no more grunting.
He walked on for what seemed like an eternity without meeting the old man again. At least that was how it felt to him at the time as it was impossible to judge time here; the sky remained a pale grey with low but consistent luminosity and the snowy gales flurrying in torrents continued to make it impossible to see more than a few meters in any direction.
He felt a sudden resurgence of fatigue, all his limbs were becoming heavy and his leg became rather inflexible.
Is the maze demanding its toll right now, of all times? Was going through his mind so vividly that for the first time since he started climbing the stairs he was becoming aware of the cold. His tempo slowed from a steady walk to a slow crawl requiring him to walk step by step, hindered by the phantom stab wounds he had completely forgotten until this moment. His tempo slowed even more as he began needing to support his weight against the inner wall with his hand, etching on step by step. He felt himself age tremendously and with his body no longer able to support its own weight, he was going to fall.
The fall felt entirely too slow.
His weight shifted from his wall-bound arm to his shoulder, leaning his upper body over his centre of gravity and felt how the weight pulled from one side of his hip to the other side as his knees slowly gave in. He reached for anything to grab onto, hoping to prevent his fall, flailing almost helplessly. To his own surprise he found something and pushed down on it with all the strength he had left. It made a loud sharp metallic noise that reverberated heavily along the staircase deafening all his senses; he snapped awake.
His fatigue lifted a little as he realised he had been sleepwalking for some time and had found his sword with which to hold his weight. What had caused him to fall, he noticed, was a step being slightly higher than expected. He looked at the step in confusion, then anger, then immediately he sighed. He decided it was probably one of those steps meant to breaks the monotonous pattern and catch him off guard; it certainly succeeded.
He straightened his clothes, feeling like that changed something in and about him. He continued the journey up the stairs with a tempo, he felt, seemed convincing that he was awake and aware.
It wasn't long before, though it would have been impossible for him to be certain how long before it had been, he met the old man again. Still walking ahead of him, still grunting and slowly making his own way up.
This time Estavir decided he would converse with him, and when he got within an earshot he shouted.
"Old man, what are you doing here? Did you come through the maze?"
The old man made no notice of the second question at all, but attempted to respond, and started coughing profusely.
"Ah, *cough* young man, you see i'm not *cough* long for this world..." The coughing became too heavy for the old man to speak any more and he dropped to the floor, and with a final heave and exhale, he had died.
That really wasn't long, Estavir thought with a smile; which he did feel bad for immediately.
The old man did not move, did not breathe, did not respond to being poked with the tip of his shoes. Feeling there was nothing more he could do, Estavir decided to keep walking up the staircase. He walked on for what could have been minutes or hours, his ability to estimate time had not improved at all, but once again the old man was limping ahead of him. As the old man noticed Estavir come up behind him he continued the conversation that was interrupted by his earlier sudden death as if it hadn't happened.
"*Cough* for this world, so I am *cough cough* traveling up to the top..." and once again the old man's breathing could not keep up and the old man collapsed.
This is going to be a long story, Estavir though, both annoyed and taken aback by the arduousness of this situation.
This conversation went on for an actual eternity now, in this interrupted manner, little by little. Neither Estavir nor the old man truly knew how long the climb up would be and the path had not seemed to change. After many, many interruptions the old man finished telling his story.
The old man had been told through his dreams that he would die soon and that he should prepare himself. The dream didn't tell him how to prepare, however, and all the old man really wanted at this point was to be by his wife in death; and she was buried near the top of the mountain. He would reach the top no matter what, even if he had to climb it by himself, alone.
Estavir was walking up by himself again; the old man had just died on the path behind him after finishing his story. This time it felt like days before meeting the old man again. A long slow, windy cold walk up a staircase that never ends. Estavir was sure he fell asleep at least twice before he met the old man again.
This time however, the old man didn't talk, or even acknowledged his existence, reminding him of what felt like an eternity ago, at the very beginning of their shared journey up these stairs.
Suspiciously he walked on past the old man, walking up for only mere moments before finding him again just before he had made a full walk around the mountain.
Estavir tried talking to the old man again and the his routine started up again; attempting, a few words at a time and interrupted constantly by coughing and dying, to tell Estavir his story from the very beginning as if they had never met. An eternity later the old man reached the end of his tale once more and, quite predictably at this point, died one final death. Estavir wasn't going to let the cycle continue.
"I..." he said out loud and feeling awkward about it, he was addressing a corpse after all, "... I promise you that you will lie next to your wife for the rest of time. I'll make sure of it."
Estavir picked up the old man's body, quite surprised to find he was far lighter than he seemed. He carried the old man on his back, barely hindered by the weight.
He walked for hours up the now narrowing curve of the carved staircase except this time, he was quite certain hours had passed.
He met no one, heard no grunting noises along his journey; all he could hear for hours was the wind blowing the snow into utter chaos all around him.
He did notice, however, throughout the well defined hours, that the path was curving harder and quicker than he had noticed all climb long. Moreover, the wind was picking up, but the snow was in fact, letting up. Before long he found himself entirely above the misty chaos of wind and snow, and the ridge above his head began to recede towards the mountain itself.
Eventually he reached what seemed like an open plateau, there was still more mountain ahead, but the top was now visible only a few more hundred meters up and ahead. He walked onto the plateau, the old man still on his back, still incredibly light.
At the end of the plateau, before the mountain continued, he saw a golden glow. He walked towards it but saw no gate, instead the glow surrounded a gravestone. The gravestone was large, cubic and simple; it had no decorations that he could see. It did have some writing Estavir could not read, but suspected, correctly, from the layout of the text that the writing marked two names. He put the old man down onto the tombstone and the golden glow intensified, lighting up one of the two names. The glow became so intense Estavir was blinded temporarily.
When his sight returned the body of the old man had disappeared, as had the glow surrounding the stone. The gravestone instead emitted a dark smoke that conglomerated into a third distinguishable shadow creature. As it materialised Estavir prepared to draw his sword, but the arm of the materialising shadow waved him that this was unnecessary. Despite this, Estavir kept his hand on his sword, though it remained sheathed.
"From the soil he came and to the soil he returned, as he did long ago and will forever more. What are past, present and future; only life exists separate from the unity of time.
Did you know or simply hope?"
"What has all this been about, you can't expect me to believe that you and your others have no malicious intent towards me after all you have done to me!" Estavir exclaimed.
The third shadowy figure laughed, though specifically, not maliciously.
"The gate to the top is over that way," the shadowy figure pointed over towards the mountain top, on whose top a golden glow could be seen radiating streams in all directions, curving down the mountain sides like smoke, "Look at the gravestone once more and you will know I speak true."
Estavir did look at the grave and to his surprise the name of the old man, which had glowed so bright was readable to him, and his grip on his sword loosened.
The shadowy figure folded itself inwards and its words echoed across the plateau:
"The illusion of time has been broken, wouldn't you agree?"
With the shadow was gone Estavir could notice the wind around him once again. He held his hands together and whispered a prayer to himself, took his dagger from his breast pocket and placed it on top of the grave stone.
Slowly and silently he walked to the end of the plateau and started climbing the last few hundred meters towards the golden top of the mountain Sensan-Ghi.