Standing impassively above the open steppe of a plain yet unnamed by man stood a mountain, built tall with gray rock. It did not reach so high as to crest the heavens, but it stood at a respectable grandeur, its jagged top crowned with a thin dusting of snow. When one looks up at the sky and stares into its blue depths, they do not first think of the fact that air has weight. But it does, vacuous and empty as it is. Stacking boundlessly into the distance upon infinite pillars of itself, it bears down on roofs and shoulders, on the boughs of trees in summer and winter, infinite in quantity but nonexistent in substance.
Once, there was quiet. Soft tones spread in their hushed whispers through the heart of the land, redoubling the rock in all its inherent strength. Shelves of granite fold into one another, melding ever greater. They are simple tones, love and adulation, the raw kindness one feels towards something one has created. Already discordant notes form in the song, but not so much as to upset its continued cadence. Small lines shatter and break, pushing bits of rock down, pebbles clattering down the mountainside. Simple, simple things. To feel undesired, to come of age, they are all things duly weathered. Each man reckons in their own way, in their own time.
But first there comes helplessness. The inability to pull another from their own failures, from their own afflictions, however undeserving they may be. For a moment the landscape becomes blurry, a hand once held tightly pulling away- it is gone. A star is smothered, pitch-black, but the mountain remains. The first raindrops brush its primordial surface, tracing upon its speckled patterns lines of an order by itself devised. But stone can not rage against the mercurial wrath of wind and sky, merely remain, remain and observe. It does. Perhaps the mountain hopes that in time the heavens will quiet their battering against the ragged earth, if a mountain can hope.
Once again, a touch of silence. We are left to ponder the stillness of the hillside, the absence of deer and hare trampling flora underfoot. Was it always so dim? Was the sun's yellow light always so low and so distant, so far and lofty that it cannot be reached to and grasped in the steady hold of our own hands? Seasons and years turn, dancing about one another. Their feet find new places to stamp in rhythm, soles marking patterns against the stone they deface. But the sky is not so quiet as the ground, and it reaches down its vaunted hands to deliver itself below another time. High clouds meld, turning frigid and distant, ever soaring.
Second there is loss. It is manyfold. Not the departure of one hand but of a thousand grasps, gone limp and cold, lifeless as the stone. A new grasp may be found, a novel thing to grip and adore. But just as quickly as those before it, it slips, handhold weakening. Hail pelts the peak now, rain given form and purpose, given hostile intent and motive. But the stone merely watches. What else can it do? It was not created to raise hands, nor was it created for any purpose in and of itself. Its pitted clefts exist for the sake of existing, nothing more; so it would be judged. When one passes by a landscape, does one truly reflect on its history, on the millennia which brought it, dogged and weary, to the present? Man comments on the ephemeral beauty he sees, the pretty colors of a fading sunset or the swirling patterns of a turbulent river, never on the slow march of time, which is far beyond him.
Such a process, once begun, does not suddenly stop. The crests which lie upon our horizon do not look to the sky and beg, no more! They do not raise their thousandfold voices against their eternal degradation, nor do they move out of the way; for they are unable to, or were made unable to. They merely persist, and remain as they are, viewing, observing. When a man is pelted by rain and snow in its furor, he finds shelter, moves under the safe protections of another object. Many men find shelter under this mountain. It survives all they could not, after all, feeble blows dashed against its marbled hide. And a man's eyes does not perceive the dents, so small and meaningless, meaningless to him.
Third there is suffering. It is not manyfold, but it is everywhere. One needs not be within an event to feel its effects. Heel-marks once made, rocks once dashed, grooves once dug. Time does not erase them. Perhaps it weathers their edges, restores some semblance of old condition, but graven stone does not lie. In its craters and misshapen sections, Years beyond measure call out to those who are willing to observe their passage. Suffering is not a knife to the chest, rather it is a dull burning which eats away at the heart and soul. One encounters it not in action, but in inaction. It gnaws at the back of their mind. What if-? How come-? When ever-? Why?
Why?
Air gives birth to clouds, who from their hazy depths spawn rain and hail, snow and ice. But the ground may too thunder, from places expected come the unexpected; from lands thought stable and immovable come great movement unachievable by the sky alone. So it is that the depths of the earth stamp and shake, tossing in their strength an immense anger unlike any other. This is the bitter axe of betrayal, which carves into the back of a cliff-face, cleaving it in two. Images flash, one after the other, one after the other. A pair of green eyes, listening, supporting, drinking in, but hands also writing, scribing, remembering. Long hair and feminine curves, pulling forth into an embrace, rouged lips speaking pretty lies, pretty truths, empty fakeries. Ringed ears, a gruff stare, a beard cut short by sword-stroke: for the greater good, for the greater good. A raised hand, greedily grasping and reaching- dread comes quickly, a call of fear, but its fingers reach something in the depths outside our vision, turning red, red, redder--a lilac stare, once sheltered, now consumed in rage- a pair of snakes, twisting and twirling- silvery eyes and a frail frame- there is blackness.
A mountain, cleaved in two, is still a mountain.
A mountain, pounded by a million years of strife, is still a mountain.
A mountain, though the weight of air and sky remains on it, though the rains still fall, is still a mountain.
Perhaps it will outlast anything, anything at all, but one must wonder:
do the bones of our world not themselves wish for a momentary reprieve?
