A New Night

The Climb

Under the occasional moonlight and stars occluded by heavy black clouds overhead, my situation weighed on my nerves and the pit of nausea where my stomach should have been. However much imposing fear I had felt within the densest part of the jungle, I now felt it exponentially more without Romalla around—asking obnoxious questions, making fun of me, and keeping me company in a way that was uniquely her own.

The ghost of sickly chills played on my metal body. I wasn’t sure, but this pseudo-illness seemed worse than if I had really felt it. It made me feel like a monster … and for two reasons. First, there was the dysphoric reminder of the machinery that had replaced so much of my humanity. Then there was the added guilt—the insult I felt I was paying Romalla for being unable to muster up real physical signs of worry.

Humanity …

Was I lying to myself? Trying to convince myself that I was still a person and not an uncaring machine? Except I clearly was not a very good machine … a good god … or a good friend. Any of these identities would have let me figure out how to resolve their problems directly. A computer could have calculated the most probably move to save her. A god would have never left her in the clutches of murderers. And a friend … a friend would have felt the courage to have fought.

Meanwhile, the abomination that was me was just … leaving her. Running away like I had from the Night People—all to do the bidding of those who terrified me.

But I had no guarantee that the Hunters or the Golems would honor their promises. Even if they would, I didn’t honestly know that I could figure things out with this Hunter of the Mountain or that the Triumvirate would help us. What if I got up there and the Sky City was empty? Or if there was no Hunter of the Mountain, and the Hunters were just sending me out for their entertainment?

Then there were the longer-term problems that I pushed to the furthest reassesses of my mind. They poked their head up only when I was at my least prepared and reeked of my own selfishness.

Even if everything turned out like they were supposed to, I wouldn’t have a happy ending. Even if I rescued Romalla and the Triumvirate was willing to help us, I doubted that they would be able to make me human again. And afterward … I couldn’t stay with Romalla forever. She would one day have to return to lead her people, and eventually, she would die. I would walk the world alone forever, no matter what happened.

In a moment of melodrama that was the only thing I felt allowed, I paused and screamed as loudly as I could into the empty night. However, that was all I afforded myself before walking frantically again. Like the tide, these thoughts swelled within and folded in on one another in an endless loop as I walked for hours.

Like all the pain I had felt up till now, numbness mercifully set in without my knowing. The sky went from black to gray. The trees continued to thin, giving way to more rocky outcroppings.

I eventually found myself without flat land to traverse; only the mountains remained. I paused for just a moment. The colossal mountain towered nearly as high as to touch the Sky City. They were begrudgingly impressive. What was more, they looked vaguely ... familiar. Like I had once seen it in a photograph. Deja vu, I supposed. I shook my head and continued walking.

From there, I began to walk up hills and descend through valleys. The thick foliage around me had been reduced to thin shrubs and flowery succulents. Looking up, I could see that this small amount of vegetation was all that was left until the white snow caps. This would have encouraged my progress, but the trail ahead of me was deceptively long. I hiked for a while, thinking each hill would be at the foot of the tallest mountain. Each time I reached the top, however, I would again realize that it was just one of many more.

I arrived at the actual foot of the mountain by the time the sun was directly overhead. The air had grown hot, and a sickly-sweet smell drifted on the breeze. I knew when I had reached my destination because, suddenly, I could see straight up a cliff face for thousands of feet into the air and there was nowhere to hike on foot.

Awful and terrifying as this sight was, I was surprised to find that the heights ahead of me were not the most horrific thing there. At first, I thought there was merely a collection of dusty and misshapen rocks at the bottom of the mountain. Then, as my last step was met by a sickening crunch, I felt the sensation of gagging and then looked closer.

A long line of skeletons and rotting bodies littered the ground around me. And they weren’t just in that location. Corpses lined the mountain—wherever there was a crevice they could not easily roll down further. Most belonged to animals I did not recognize, some fruit bats, and even the enormous serpents. It was difficult to recognize them because they seemed to have been ... torn apart cleanly—without any remaining flesh. But there were also the bodies of many Hunters, all with meat still on their bones except for what bugs and birds had clearly chewed at.

I knelt and heaved a few times—knowing nothing would come out but feeling physically compelled to do it all the same.

I had to force myself to look away. I had to do this—there was no time for me being … weak. At least, I knew that’s what the Hunters would have called these emotions. And, like it or not, their words had weaseled into my mind, and I had difficulty discounting them as false or toxic.

Finding a place where the rock had many cracks and natural handholds didn’t take long. Of course, it was where the most Hunter bodies were piled up. They too would have seen this as the best route up and tried to climb it. It made me nauseous to think about. I had to take several breaths and force my trembling hands to begin the climb.

-O-

Pulling myself up the mountain using the cracks and natural handholds was easy for the first few hours, despite my extracted claws not penetrating the stone. Without any natural limits to my endurance and lacking any sort of pain from fleshy fingers, lifting myself by small divots and cracks in the cliff felt as easy as climbing a ladder. My legs never got sore, and I was never out of breath. This ease was an admitted consolation as I struggled with the elevation and my disdain for it.

I did not look down or even up very much, so most of my view was limited to rock and more rock. The wind was gentle for the most part, though it whipped about here or there. And I felt the sun reflected off my metallic body by the pleasant sensation of warmth and energy, which fed into my body faster than it had in a few days.

Hours passed, and the sun sunk deeper into the horizon.

I told myself I had to be a few thousand feet in the air. This was when I got too comfortable and made the thoughtless, foolish, idiotic, horrific, disdainful, unfortunate, and perhaps even tragic mistake of looking up.

My body went cold as I saw how close I was to the top of the mountain. I was close enough to see a cement pillar rising from the mountain’s peak. From it, a thin cable ran almost horizontally up to the circular platform that held the Sky City. That meant I was nearly as high as the Sky City … much higher than the Wall. This was enough to make me feel very dizzy.

I forced myself to look at the rock in front of me. Then … I heard a rumbling. Again, I forced myself to look up.

What looked like a cloud of dust was rapidly descending toward me. Then I saw the accompanying avalanche of boulders, stones, and bones all crashing toward me in what felt like, for one horrifying second, that it was coming in deathly slow-motion.

Remembering some wall-crawling superhero from my vague recollections, I desperately turned my body horizontally and leaped with both my clawed fingers and toes. But, without any super-powered jumping or abilities to defy gravity, I was only barely able to avoid a horrific death by boulder. As a bonus, I was now … falling.

It was every worst nightmare I’d ever had about heights—falling and flailing helplessly—seeing the ground below coming to meet me much quicker than I had ever wanted to see it.

By the combined forces of luck and raw terror, I managed to grasp part of the mountain that was softer stone than the impenetrable rock from before. One of my clawed fingers slowed my descent enough that I could hold on when my clawed grasped solid rock. My body slammed with a metallic clank against the face of the mountain. I immediately sunk my other fingers and toes into any divots I could find and froze. Had another avalanche of rocks come, I don’t think I would have been able to jump again. But everything remained still.

It took a long time before I could force myself to move. Even when I could, it was all I could do to ensure my hands and feet had a solid grasp on something. Another while passed before the dread of remaining on that mountain forever became more powerful than my fear of moving. With my first movement towards reaching for a higher hold of the mountain, my arm rattled frantically against the stone. This shaking did not stop as I continued to climb.

From that point onward, I aimed my climbing to always be under protruding rocks and ledges. To my horror and aid, this was made easier by the dry blood smears that told me where not to climb. More hours passed before I heard another approaching cloud of dust. I pressed my body as close to the rock as possible.

As my field of vision was engulfed in a cloud of dust, I felt pebbles hit my back with accompanying pinging sounds. Then there were whooshes as large stone objects narrowly missed me. When it was all over, moving was only a little less challenging than before.

After that, I think that the Hunter of the Mountain finally figured out my strategy. The avalanches ceased altogether for the last two hours of the journey. This was ironic, as the cold, ice, and snow had all become more prominent.

Then, I finally reached a ledge.