The Fear You Know

16. The Bind

The sky above them was a confused sky: cloudless blue to their backs, but filled with a dreary fog to their front. The air was surprisingly cold, and Eli pulled his jacket hard around his shoulders to fight off the chill squinting through the fog ahead of them with narrowed eyes. He was just beginning to make out a distant shape when they broke through the last bit of obscured vision, and out onto a rocky shale-covered slope.

There the two of them stopped, looking up, eyes wide in both awe and fear as they looked out upon the towering vista, and the massive black mountain which dwarfed its surroundings and blocked the horizon, hunched within the fog like a beggar hunches against the cold.

Despite what Eli had read about Kurshing, and even what he remembered, words could never simply do the Bind justice. It was indeed mountainous in size and in form, hundreds of feet high, with sloping sides that vanished into the surrounding hills like the roots of a tree. It towered overhead, dwarfing everything around it, and though its sides were certainly strewn with what appeared to be rock, there could be made no mistake, this thing, this creature was no mountain, and it was no rock.

There was just something about the dirt that could be seen under the stone that struck him as unnervingly organic, it was too smooth and too black, and, from this distance seemed to have the consistency of skin. He fancied that -- even from here-- he could see the subtle shifting movement of the mountain as it breathed deep and slow.

As the quiet overtook them, he swore he could even hear it. He might just have brushed the sound off as wind, but the way it came in perfect gusting intervals made him even more sure that it couldn't have been the wind.

Behind it, just through the fog, he could see the hazy outline of snow towering peaks fading into a distant background. Kurshing itself, the mountain city had sandwiched itself just between two other jutting peaks, those of which he had no doubt, belonged to the stalk, or the territories in between

These mountains crouched just, off to the right and left were covered from tip to base in glittering white snow which would have been dazzling in direct sunlight if not for the fog. Their rock was gray, and the occasional tree clung tightly to their surface. It might have been easy to ask why people had chosen to live in Kurshing when there were plenty of other viable mountains nearby, but Eli knew the deceptive truth of those slopes.

They were dangerous, full of waiting avalanches, and cold freezing wind during the nights. There were few trees, so hardly any wood, and the ice made tunneling a complete impossibility.

The sheer cliff faces made it improbable to climb as well, so the environment was nearly inhospitable.

He had known some who were skilled enough to survive there-- fearing the cold less than they did the crushing weight of Kurshing, but they were few and far between. Stuck here as they were, they were honestly trapped between three forms of gruesome death, or a life within darkness

Peter pulled his coat tight sound himself, shivering lightly as he looked up at the mountain.

It stood out even more due to its lack of snow, though Eli knew it was simply the creature's immense body heat that tended to burn away the frost.

Eli took a deep breath and made his way forward, his feet crunching over the open shale as they approached the very base of Kurshing: a slow shale covered slope that rose gradually towards the steeper face of the mountain-like surface. The closer they got the more the movement became apparent. He could see it on the slopes of the mountain as the rocks quivered and twitched with a life they shouldn't have had.

It occurred to him, halfway up the slope that no trees grew on the desolate slopes of Kurshing, and he couldn't help but feel overly exposed on the vast mountainside.