The Balcony, Part 2
Read the first part of the story here!
A high wind gathers up her skirts and wraps them tight about her legs, tears through the braid of her hair and pulls loose the locks of mahogany brown. She raises a hand to shield her eyes. To her right, a crumbling path hewn from rock rises to the heavens in a slow crawl up the mountainside. To her left is a sheer drop.
Mist envelops the cliffside. It is impossible to see how far below lies the ground. She leans out over the balcony and squints up into the too-bright clouds. There is something unnatural atop the mountain, little more than a silhouette against the sky.
The climb is not an easy one. Loose shale digs into her bare feet and not for the first time does she wish for hardy boots. She would make quick work of this mountain then. Alas, her feet are unprotected, and she is slowed by the need to avoid the sharper rocks. She leaves a light trail of blood in her wake, despite her care.
The wind grows more vicious the higher she climbs. She is wrapped up in it even when she ducks behind an outcropping of rock to spend a few moments out of its sharp fangs, for the wind simply changes direction to follow her. She grits her teeth against its bite.
As always, the world flickers. The mountainside is a calm, summery meadow, a violent rapid that threatens to wash her away, a windswept sand dune throwing grit in her eyes. The sheer drop changes from side to side. On more than one occasion, her toes feel the abrupt edge beneath them, and she pauses to re-affirm her position on the mountain.
She reaches the summit with hands blue from the cold. Her head aches with it. There is no view to speak of up here; only clouds – the peak and she both wrapped in endless white that is somehow both close and impossibly far at the same time. The silhouette has features now. A colossal statue looms over her. A forgotten god? A famous warlord? A prophet from another time?
His carved beard is made longer by sharp icicles. One detaches from the stone face as she approaches and shatters at her feet. He holds aloft the hilt of a sword whose blade lies in broken shards around his feet. A crown upon his head looks to be home to a falcon of some kind. She can see the nest poking out between stone spikes.
What catches her attention most is the faint glow from behind the hand he holds to his armoured chest. Warm light spills from between his fingers. Today’s unattainable prize.
She reaches out a hand to touch the heavy boot to her right. There is no obvious path to his chest, and the stone beneath her fingers is slick with ice. She would fall to her death before she reached his knees. There is no way for her to claim her prize. Once again freedom stands before her, and she is unable to take it.
Defeat lowers her to the ground. She kneels in the thin layer of slow that makes the earth as white as the sky. Cold burrows deeper into her bones. She closes her eyes and pours all of her energy into imagining the mountainside, the snow, the statue, the cold. She imagines the warm glow growing brighter as the stone giant brings his hand away from his chest and holds it out for her to see. The image is so clear in her mind that she almost convinces herself it is real.
Then comes the sound of stone grinding against stone. She looks and sees the statue move – not in her mind now but right in front of her, the giant’s hand coming near. He looks about to kneel.
A flash of light has her shielding her eyes. A man of flesh and bone stands before her, the light from the statue looming over his shoulder now clenched in his own fist. Anger twists his features.
“No,” he roars, and hurls her prize off the mountainside. “You and I are not yet done.”
She screams. Madness and desperation have her running after the light, off the mountain. She does not fall. Instead, she slams into the rail of her cursed balcony and finds herself in a different world.
Her quest for freedom begins again.