Death After Death

Rock climbing was not something that Simon had spent a lot of time doing in any life, but as he got closer to the peak, he spent more and more time doing that instead of hiking. He lacked ropes and pitons, along with the skill to use them, though, so even climbing often required several attempts to find a way that was easy enough that he could do it without feeling like he was taking his life in his hands.

This high up, the nights were frigid, but at least there were no more attacks. It would seem even the rugged goatmen had no interest in fighting over the barren, craggy slopes.

The day before Simon finally found the temple carved high into the peak of Mt. Elian, he had convinced himself that he was on a wild goose chase. He’d almost succeeded in convincing himself to turn around, but he’d been on this mountain for a week now, and pure stubbornness won out.

“There’s no way that I’m leaving without seeing the top of this thing,” he told himself often enough that it became a mantra of sorts. In time, the only thing he was grateful for was that even in the endless cloud cover that kept him from viewing the top of the mountain, there was little in the way of snow or ice. The nights were cold, but the days were still warm enough that such things didn’t last long.

Still, it felt like a fruitless quest, and then, finally, after six full days, he saw it. The temple was a small thing, but it was larger and more ostentatious than it had any right to be this high up. He had no idea how the stone masons would have worked at such altitudes or how they would have been fed.

“I don’t even know how someone living there could be fed now,” he grumbled as he admired the sheer, smooth walls, along with the decorative elements like the pillars and the dome. It was an impressive work of art. He just hoped this would become more than a sightseeing trip.

Even though Simon had been able to see it for a moment, the clouds soon obscured it again, leaving him a difficult hike along a scree-choked ridgeline to get there. Still, by evening, he was scaling the last of the cliffs, and he finally arrived in the mosaic-decorated courtyard.

A woman in fine white robes was there to greet him, and even as he gasped for breath, she smiled and said, “Welcome, Simon, the Oracle is expecting you. It is rare to have any guest that does not take the hidden way. You are the first in an age.”

For a moment, Simon almost asked how she knew his name, but the second statement answered the first. If an Oracle really lives here, then knowing your name is practically a cheap party trick, he decided. So, instead, he just breathed heavily while he took it all in. Then he asked, “hidden way?”

She smiled and gestured to the far side of the courtyard, where there was a gate and a narrow path. Wordlessly in disbelief, Simon rose and staggered across the courtyard to look at it, and when he saw it winding its way down the mountain, he despaired a little. That would have been a hell of a lot easier than the way I took, he thought with a sigh.

“How could I have missed that?” he wondered aloud.

“You could not have seen it,” she answered. “Such ways are invisible to the uninitiated, which is why it is so rare for us to have any visitors at all. Now please, come with me. You must have a meal and a rest. The Oracle will see you tomorrow.”

Simon thought about protesting but instead let himself be led away. He was, truthfully, completely exhausted. I probably smell like one of those goat men, too, he thought, smirking to himself. I’ll bet a bucket of water and some soap would do wonders.

As if the woman escorting him could read his mind, she said, “After you have eaten, I will show you to the baths so you might refresh yourself.”

Simon boggled at that but said nothing. He didn’t have a chance. He was still trying to decide how a place this high up into the middle of nowhere could have baths, when they walked into the temple, and he saw the view from the far side. It took his breath away.

The temple, as he’d imagined it from a distance, was a large, two or three-story building carved into the mountainside and crowned by a dome. It had enough room for an altar and perhaps some rooms for the priests and acolytes to stay. He’d been completely wrong.

What he had seen was merely a gatehouse to a much larger complex. No, complex didn’t do it justice. What he’d found here, far from anywhere, was a town and, in a way, its own little world. It was far from crowded, but here and there, people moved among the narrow streets, and he could see other gray-robed women in the halls of the temple complex as well.

The temple was built into a volcanic caldera. At the bottom of it was a small steaming lake, which explained the constant cloud cover he’d been dealing with as he got higher. More interesting, though, were the structures and fields that ringed that lake. Around the temple entrance he’d just walked through was a tiny city clustered together. Most of the rest of the ring, though, was reserved for endless terraced fields. It was only the people working in the fields that gave the whole place a proper sense of scale.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Every one of those barely visible dots is a person, which meant they’re at least half a mile away, he thought as he leaned on the stone rail, awestruck by the view.

The priestess said nothing. Instead, she waited patiently for him to take it in before she cleared her throat and said, “Right this way. Our guest quarters are through here.”

Simon spent the rest of their short walk turning those images over in his mind. How is this not a myth they tell in Iona? Why wasn’t this in the Broken Tower’s Forbidden Library? Simon was quite sure he would have read about a tiny little paradise high up in the mountains if he’d read about it anywhere.

Eventually, even after his guide left him in an undecorated cell and told him that dinner would be brought to him shortly, one question overrode all of the others. If I didn’t know about this, then what other secrets are still hiding out there, waiting to be found?

This time, he didn’t even mean things he knew about, even if he didn’t know anything about them, like vampires or dragons. What mysteries lay beyond all of those places. Even after they brought him a simple meal of couscous and chicken skewers along with a jug of strong white wine, he spent a lot of time pondering that. The spiced meat was better than any of the tough roasted meat that he’d had in days, but even that was not enough to make him think about the wider world.

He knew of five countries and only two or three of them in detail, but there was a whole world out there that he didn’t know anything about, and if something like this could exist smack-dab in one of the places he thought he knew best, then he really knew nothing about this world. It was a humbling thought but an exciting one, too, and he was drunk on both when the woman came back and took his tray before escorting him to take a bath.

Simon tried a few questions on the way, but most of them were rebuffed. “What’s this place called exactly?” and “How come no one knows about this place?” were met with cryptic lines like “The best secrets are always the most well-kept.” Likewise, when he asked about Ionia or the curse, she answered more directly. “I’m afraid that those are questions for the oracle, not for me.”

Simon was satisfied with neither, but it was clear that she wasn’t going to tell him much of anything, and he felt no need to force the issue yet. So far, he’d been here for only a couple of hours, and he’d been well-fed and well-treated. He hadn’t even seen a guard, but he was sure that a place like this had a way to deal with unwelcome guests, and he had no desire to find out what that was. The last thing he wanted to do was find himself blacklisted from Shangri-la or whatever this place was.

He wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting from a bath in a place that was a strange mixture of spartan and luxury, but it certainly wasn’t this. The baths were an open-air set of steaming pools that hugged the edges of the cliff they were on in a way that made them look both elegant and precarious. The priestess made no move to leave and instead stripped and entered the water before he’d even gotten his armor off.

“You dress very strangely,” she told him when he finally submerged up to his chest in the warm bathwater of the place.

“I like the togas, but they aren’t so good for mountain climbing,” he quipped, trying not to pay attention to the other knots of people scattered throughout the expansive pools. Ignoring her beauty was hard when so much of her bronze skin was on display, but he did his best. She wouldn’t answer questions about the place they were, but in time, Simon figured out that she would answer questions about herself, which seemed like a roundabout loophole to find out more about the place.

The priestess’s name was Diara, and she had never left her mountain peak. “I dream of doing so sometimes, but I know that my place is here.” He learned about what she ate and a bit about how she lived her life. She wasn’t entirely incurious either, so when she asked him questions, Simon happily told her about his life, though she mostly stuck to questions about boats and beaches.

“I have seen the sea many times,” she explained, “but it is a place I will never touch, and I find it strange that people can live on it for most of their lives.”

Simon learned that they had little in the way of fish here because the volcanic lake was too hot for such things. Instead, they made do with chicken, goat, and several grain crops. Honestly, it seemed like a nice life to him. It was certainly nicer than the Broken Tower, even if it had a similarly culty vibe about it. He was sure there was a library here somewhere that he would have loved to devour, but he knew asking about it would get him nowhere, so he didn’t try. Instead, he enjoyed the nighttime view of the stars above the caldera while he tried not to enjoy the other nighttime view sitting in the water so near him.

Eventually, when he went to get redressed, he found that his clothes had been taken and replaced with a robe not so dissimilar from hers, though it was brown instead of gray. Does brown mean male or outsider, he wondered.

“Your clothes have been taken to be washed,” Diara explained. “They will be returned to you tomorrow.”

He nodded, not even caring that they’d taken his weapon and armor with them. If this was a trap, this was exactly how they’d lull him into a false sense of security, but if it wasn’t, well, he knew as well as they did that his clothes were rancid, and he would certainly appreciate a laundry service. He’d only really expected a lone hermit or something at the top of the peak, so as far as he was concerned, all of this was above and beyond.

When they reached his cell, the priestess lingered a moment and then asked, “Do you wish for me to stay?” she asked, nodding to the bed. “The mountain can be a very cold place at night.”

“I’ll be fine, thank you,” he said, trying not to be rude as he rebuffed her offer. Temple prostitution wasn’t his thing, no matter how good the dark-haired beauty looked naked. The only woman he had an interest in sharing his bed with right now was Elthena, and that moment was still years away, if it ever came at all.

She smiled at that, then nodded and left, leaving him to wonder if whatever just happened was a test or not. “If it was, did I pass or fail,” he wondered aloud as he lay there and stared up at his dark ceiling.