Whispers from the Mountain's Altar
The mountain wore rain like a shroud, and the wind pressed against the rock as if it were a stubborn memory begging to be heard. I came for a story, a quiet retreat from the city’s noise, but the ascent offered something else entirely: a language spoken in rumbles and tremors, a grammar carved into stone.
On a ledge where the scree fell away into a dizzying black below, I found a fissure that bled shadows. The crevice opened into a low chamber where the air tasted of cold iron and old rain. A circle of pillars stood like skeletal trees, their surfaces etched with runes that shimmered faintly when the torchlight touched them. In the center lay an altar built from the mountain itself, a black slab crowned with ice that never melted, as if the peak kept a secret and refused to reveal it to warmer hands.
From the darkness beyond the pillars came a voice without sound, a whisper that seemed to travel through the teeth and down the spine. The whisper did not beg for attention; it commanded it, insisting that I listen as the mountain listens to everything and forgets nothing. The altar hummed with a color I cannot name, and the runes rearranged themselves in a slow, deliberate pattern—a message for those who dare to read the stones aloud. I did not dare; I merely stood, breath shallow, and let the mountain decide if I was friend or fruit.
“We are the weather you fear, the hunger you bury, the vow you wake at the edge of dawn.” The words did not come from any mouth I could locate in the chamber, but from the walls themselves, as if the rock had learned to speak through a conduit of wind and ice.
A chill pricked my skin as I uncovered the smaller offerings arranged around the altar—tiny bowls of snowglass that caught the light and released it in a thousand broken prisms. A parchment drifted from between the stones, ink smeared by some long-forgotten storm. It spoke of a rite to bind a living name to the mountain, a lineage that would rise each winter as the snow fell and the valley slept. I turned away, only to find that the circle had shifted, the runes bending toward me with a patient insistence I could not ignore.
Signs of the cult’s presence were everywhere, though subtle enough to vanish in a single breath. I noted these in a quiet inventory, a map of the mountain’s secret life:
- Footprints that vanish under the brittle crust, leaving no dust to betray their route.
- A distant bell that tolls only when the wind curls in a particular way, as if naming an old vow.
- A coppery tang on the tongue after a gust; the taste of oath and tide combined.
- Masks carved from bone and shell propped along the ledges, watching, always watching.
- A journal whose pages bloom with frost when the reader’s eyes linger too long on a line.
That night the mountain quieted, then spoke in a single, decisive hush: the decision was mine, and it would not be delayed. I left the chamber with my heart pressed flat against my ribs, nomadic whispers trailing behind me like a second skin. The peak would keep its secrets, I understood, but now I carried a fragment of them—an invitation and a warning wrapped in the same cold breath. The altar’s rumor remained, a soft chorus that would wake again with the snow, urging the uninvited to listen—or to vanish into the listening mountains themselves.