The Veil Beneath the Mountain
When the wind carries the old prayers through pine needles, the mountain’s silence begins to feel like a sentence. I arrived in the valley with a notebook full of maps and a heartbeat that counted every foot of ascent, certain that the truth would rise where the rock grew coldest.
The elders spoke of a cult hidden within the steepest halls of stone, a veil that thins when the moon swallows itself and the world forgets which road leads home. They warned me not to listen too closely to the mountains’ breath, not to follow every whisper that trails behind a storm. Yet curiosity has teeth, and mountains have mouths that never forget a trespasser.
At dusk I found the cave mouth scarred by weather and bracken, half-swallowed by moss. Inside, the air turned cooler and smelled of damp iron. The walls bore sigils that did not align with any map I owned, as if the stone itself had learned a language and chose to forget it the moment I pressed my lantern closer.
“The Mountain remembers every oath spoken in whisper,” the inscription read. “To see the veil is to forget who you were.”
Deep within, a circle of hooded figures swayed slowly around a raised stone altar. The air trembled with a language older than any wind, and the candles—if they could be called that—glowed with a pale, unnameable light that had nothing to do with flame. When they turned toward me, their faces vanished into the shadow, and their voices rose not in words but in a cadence that pressed against my bones.
- Candles flicker with no draft, shadows breathing in time with the breath of the earth.
- Stone walls hum with a color felt rather than seen, as if the rock itself were listening.
- Footsteps echo from every direction, yet I am certain I am alone—except for the eyes that watch from the dark corners.
- A low, rhythmic chant travels up from the floor, as though the mountain itself speaks through the bodies of the adherents.
The leader stepped from the circle, and the veil between rock and air trembled like a curtain in a windless room. They spoke of births and bargains, of a hunger the earth cannot name, and of a lineage I never believed could touch mine. The ritual did not invite me to join a belief; it claimed me as a witness, a participant, a memory that would not fade from the cave’s cold heart. My name surfaced from nowhere, a surname I had learned to forget, and the mirror within the stone showed me not my face but what I could become if I stayed—an echo of the cult, a whisper that could become a practice again in the mountains’ long, patient skin.
When I finally stepped back into the thin air above, the dawn wore a pale mercy. The valley looked the same, yet a thread had loosened inside me, tugging toward something beyond sight. The veil remains beneath the mountain, and sometimes I can feel it listening—the way a door listens when you forget to knock.
Some nights, the wind returns with a chorus of distant, patient prayers. The mountain does not forget, and neither do I—though now I know what it costs to look through its veil and what it takes to walk away intact.