Unsleeping Patron - Nine-Miles Peak

Slamming straight into a wall of black basalt, the shale plain ended abruptly. It slammed straight into a wall of black basalt that shot upward into the grey ceiling of the world without a single degree of incline.Silas stood at the base, his head tilted back until the joint at the top of his spine clicked. The cliff face stretched beyond sight, passing through the lower cloud deck three thousand feet above and disappearing into the dense, silent void where the Miasma sat thickest.He checked his canvas pack. The Skardini Core was cold against his lumbar, heavy as a cannonball.Silas didn’t look for a winding goat path or a dry chimney in the rock. He closed his right hand into a fist, forcing the amber light beneath his skin down to his boots.Clink.A narrow, two-foot blade of solid, condensed Mind-Light sprouted horizontally from the basalt three inches above his left toe. Silas stepped onto it. Before his weight could settle, he drove his right foot upward, summoning a second golden blade out of the bare rock face six feet higher.Step by step, he began to walk up the vertical wall.It wasn’t a graceful climb. The amber blades flared into existence beneath his soles with a low, metallic thrum, holding his weight for half a second before dissolving back into grey dust behind his heels. He climbed in a steady, monotonous rhythm, his hands lightly dragging along the wet stone to steady his line, his canvas tunic flapping against his thighs in the rising draft.At three thousand meters, he broke through the first cloud deck.The air didn’t grow thin and clear as it would on an Earth peak. In the Miasma Wastes, gravity and air pressure obeyed stranger, darker laws. The higher he climbed, the heavier the fog became. The grey soot didn’t drift; it pressed against his bare chest like a wet wool blanket, forcing the air out of his windpipe until his lungs felt compressed into two dry fists behind his sternum.Sixty beats a minute. His golden heart accelerated, driving amber fluid through his veins to fight the suffocating weight.At six thousand meters, the basalt wall sloped back slightly, opening into a high-altitude valley perched like a narrow shelf between two jagged crags.Silas stepped off his last Mind-Light blade, his boots hitting a bed of cold, silver-grey moss that crackled like frozen glass beneath his soles. He fell onto one knee, his hands pressed into the sharp moss as he dragged short, whistling gasps of freezing Miasma into his throat. His lips were blue, caked with a thin layer of metallic frost.The valley was utterly silent. There was no wind here only a crushing, static pressure that made the grey moss stand straight up like iron needles.Silas dragged himself up, his eyes narrowing as he looked across the valley floor.Three miles to the north, the fog parted.It didn’t roll away under a gust; something massive had shifted in the upper atmosphere, drawing the thick grey clouds inward toward a central axis.Rising out of the valley floor was a cylinder of dark, seamless granite.It wasn’t a mountain peak formed by tectonic pressure. It was a single, colossal pillar, perfectly round, five miles in diameter, shooting straight upward into the black void above nine thousand meters. Its sides were smooth as turned iron, free of ledges, shale slides, or ice.Engraved into the curved stone face, spanning two thousand vertical yards of dark granite, were three ancient characters burned deep into the rock: 九万里.Nine Ten-Thousand Miles.The strokes weren’t carved with a tool. They looked as though a white-hot finger had dragged through the granite when the stone was still soft as tallow, leaving behind deep, glassy grooves that glowed with a faint, dying indigo luminescence.Silas stared at the characters, his tongue glued to the roof of his mouth.The pillar wasn’t stone.Deep within the dark granite, a low, rhythmic vibration rattled the silver moss beneath his boots. It came once every thirty seconds a slow, subterranean expansion that expanded the five-mile cylinder by an imperceptible fraction of an inch before contracting back into the gloom.It was breathing.A mountain-sized living anomaly, anchored into the deep bedrock of the continent, its peak piercing the cosmic void where the giant eyes and phantom fleets cruised through the dark.Silas stood on the edge of the shelf, his hand resting on the hilt of his mantis-scythe dagger, feeling the slow, ancient pulse of the pillar reverberate through his legs. The scale of the wasteland laid itself bare before him not in monsters or blood-lanterns, but in the silent, indifferent titan standing in the dark mist, completely unaware of the tiny, bald human staring at its base.Silas turned his eyes away from the indigo glyphs, pulled out the Parchment to check his radar grid, and began his descent into the quicksilver mist below.