Book One – Chapter 18

“I have waited patiently,” the shaman whispered, and all of her petals whispered with her. “Grant me an Orcalce, Yu.”

It was the moment the HUNGER broke open. It did not subside; it ruptured itself, tearing its own scream into shreds of sound, until another voice rose from beneath; a voice that was older than the greed, deeper than the craving, and so much more inexorable than either. It was a voice that had always been.

And now, for the first time, Yu recognised it. He had heard it on the Snowtrail, drifting across the passes, reverberating in caverns, dissolving into the wind that broke upon the peaks. He had heard it not once but endlessly. It was a voice that had never spoken to him, not to any singular listener, but to the mountain entire. It spread through frozen seams, grafted itself into ice and stone, and buried deeper than witch runes. Stranger than the delirious songs of sprites, more primal than the rage of beasts, more ancient than the alien phantom whispers that no other wanderer but Yu had perceived.

And because it was ceaseless, because it was boundless, Yu had been deceived. He had thought it elemental, the residue of nature itself, something immune to containment in any single frame of mind. Because it had no beginning and no end, he had mistaken it for the Albweiss itself; the current beneath all sound, the mountain’s own eternal voice.

But it had never been the Albweiss. Never stone. Never storm. Never the mountain’s breath. It had always been her.

And now he heard the cadences by which her essence declared itself.  
  

PRIDE.

POWER.

PURPOSE.

 
Yet even these were only husks — syllabic scaffolding for unbearable concepts of existence. Her true existence lay not in words, in the same way that the true voice was not sound but pressure. It pressed not into Yu’s ears but into the coherence of his thought and instinct.

And Yu realised, with the destitution of madness, that the HUNGER which had so overwhelmed and terrified him, was nothing beside this. It was no more than the faintest of echoes of the true voice, barely skimming the surface off its insurmountable depth. The true voice was not hunger, nor greed, not even will. It was strata. It was hierarchy. It was the foundation of a singular existence beyond anything he had ever heard or felt.

PRIDE, not as emotion but as a decree.
POWER, not as possession but as a matter of course.
PURPOSE, not as choice but as principle.

And now, the body that contained it all turned.

For this instance, the voice abandoned the mountain. It withdrew from caverns and peaks. It unwound from the seams of ice. And the core of every cry it had ever cast over the boundless ridges, of every tremor it had ever driven through the Albweiss stone, of every breath of will it had ever seeded into the world’s oldest silence — this immensity that had seemed to belong to the Albweiss itself now contracted, condensed, and faced down on Yu alone.
 

I am

And always was

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