Opening Invocation to The Mountain and Its Endless Climber

Hail to the hacked dead who in the darkness shriek! Hail to The Nightthief prowling in the shadow! Hail to the meatsacks tombed in leaking steel! Hail to the youth who bawl in crimson! Hail to the gored moon falling to the ground! Hail to the horizon upon whom its dragged-down corpse will shatter!

Hail to Him, and hail to his Mountain!

His Latest Lurkings Through The Bloodshed

That thief still climbed towards his peak since his heightened resolution. Without a pause, his trail marched on, without a break or stumble. Ceaselessly, the climber’d climbed, over silenced, throat-slit memories, over their broken, mass-mauled ghosts, over their tortured phantoms.

His journey had already passed the stage of death-chained monsters. He’d surged on through those sundered giants and reached the next slopes waiting higher. Above, as that half-brained ape had seered, he’d soon met a wall of soldiers, the ruined men for whom this death had been their duty, law, and sentence.

Over those wound-scarred troops, over them dismembered by his armies - over the millions by his crusade reaped, his endless climb was creeping.

Over a thousand nation’s sons in a thousand styles of gore-stained armour, over those who’d spoke a thousand tongues and swung a thousand makes of weapon - over them of a thousand sorts, his endless climb was stalking.

Over corpses drowned in ships and bowel-loose corpses shanked in trenches, over corpses bonfired black and corpses crushed by his advancements - over brave men corpsed a thousand ways, his endless climb was raking.

Packed were they as phalanx tight, each touched their brothers’ shoulders; and their stacked spears jutted from the slope like porcupinal bristles. Packed just like a barracks crushed, each slept inside their brothers’ organs - and over both spears and guts close-heaped, his endless climb was sneaking.

Up and on, his small shape sleuthed, through the piles of war-claimed soldiers, who fought to stop his life-thieved rise, and from whose hands were pried their weapons. Their clubs, spears, swords, he plucked with skill, and he turned them on their owners. Then their twice-killed ghosts, he tossed to fall to the dark below that catches all who’d crossed his path and vainly lost against him and his Mountain.

How His Knife Has Plunged into The Heart of Night

Several nights and days expired while he’d climbed these wound-hacked armies. Although no skyline clocked the time, the Mountain had passed through light and dark moods. In all directions spread a mist whose gloom-wove fabric glowed and dimmered - its colours changed like eyelids closed yet aiming at the shifting heavens.

His present timed ascent was steeped in part-blind darkness. He’d plunged the deep-set hours when sight gave way to sound and feeling. Still, he stalked without alarm, and he groped towards the far-placed summit. A creature clothed in midnight’s cloak, he lurked on, like a coyote clawing entrails.

The soldiers, butchered by his dreams, refused to rest up either. Those on the surface worked as one, to hunt that slippery nightthief. With torches held, with lightstones thrown, with flare projectiles zipping, they searched to find his lurking shade, to spy his death-mute shadow.

Wherever was his creeping found, a screamed call mapped his placement; and these warnings sped on up the slope to ready traps for ambush. The bravest troops, as once in life, latched to their target prize as martyrs; and their voices croaked, "Here on me, lads! Whack both of us with hellfire!” While arrows, spells, and darts rained down to pound their sacrificial bodies.

But by the time these volleys struck, their corpse already’d gasped its last, the climber having slit their throats and slipped back into darkness.

He and His Crawl are Blocked by an Eerie Waterfall

Amidst the midnight hunt of him, the climber glimpsed a frightening shadow.

With wraith-like speed fell from above an avalanche of blackness. It spread along the troops ahead, whose maimed ranks lit the miles with torches; and as its heavy blanket sped, their candles in the dark were snuffed out.

A quick thought came.

He rushed, he dug, he slid into a mountain crevice. His legs, his arms, he wedged within the gaps between some corpses, and he allowed their hell-pressed carcass weight to hold and clasp his body.

He gulped a breath.

The darkness struck.

A dense black wall submerged him, and his back was smacked by falling troops picked up like flood-swept termites. The fluid, he knew by touch alone, he whose wars had disgorged seas' full. Of red hot blood, it was composed, of that vicious, viscous seepage. A torrent’s worth was raining down upon his gut-crown headdress. From toe to skull, it clasped his clothes, with its cloying, filth-damp texture. For minutes flowed this flood of blood, its red-stained torrent unabating, long after the last fall-dumped troops had ceased to thump his shoulders. So long it poured, he searched for breath by wedging his head into the hillside, and a half-tongued guardsman crushed within screamed against his sucking cheeks and almost chewed an earlobe. Instead of test the wet-pressed weight, he tried to circumvent it. He groped the dead behind the veil; by their axe-blown wounds, he sideways scrambled. Along this path, he dove and gasped short breaths within the Mountain. The dead men’s oxygen, he stole; their lungs, he once more plundered; and although they fought to wrest it back, they could not stop his ransack. After circling many miles, he’d failed to find the fall’s cessation. So, between some dead, he locked his legs and pushed out to scout the summit. Through the veil’s wet weight, he shoved his head while his torso and neck were pummelled.

On a dark ridge far above, he glimpsed a gloomy image.

The Blood-Soaked Shade is Welcomed by A Funeral Procession

Atop the cataract’s crest was stood a row of ghostly phantoms, a soft-skinned line of silhouettes exotic to this warzone.

From high, they howled, a ring of girls, in dark-grey dress for funeral. Wives, dead, mothers, dead, who wailed their war-reaped grooms and children. They mourned the scourge who’d stole their lives, whose black-stained hand withholds their menfolk. And so large was their hearts’ distress, they shed this vein-bled torrent - from their eyes and slit wrists flowed the blood that rained upon the climber.

In a chorus of ghost-griefed despair, they addressed the fiend beneath them: “Why, you evening-prowling shade, why must you scale our loved ones?! Why further scorn their mangled flesh?! Why haunt them after sunset?! Release their sleepless souls and ours who howl upon your midnight Mountain!”

To them, the climber jarred his sorry jaw no longer barbwire clamped shut; to the war-wives grieving knights forgot, he gave repentant answer: “These men you miss are nothing now. Their souls, I can retain no more than ashes washed by rain, than rays of moonlight lost to dawnbreak. To free them from my nightmare hell, you need only soothe your heads, and your starlit wake, I’ll climb beyond, beyond these lunar memories."

To this, the grief-torn women growled, with histrionic volume, to this creepy shade who lashed his tongue with black-cloaked lies and insult: “What you seek, you hoax-speeched crow, is a further murder orgy! If you could touch our star-safe Moon, you’d cut Her tender throat, you’d lacerate Her lungs, and you'd mount Her skull for glory! Should we let you skip beyond, beyond this cliff of teardrops, you’d smash Her shimmering face and paint the heavens with Her bloodrops! Her light-extinguished corpse, you’d lay to linger on this Boneheap, while us, Her home-stripped children snuffed, would howl beneath Her heavy sadness!"

He Cuts Their Conversation Short and The Moon's Bulwark is Summoned for Vengeance

The climber saw no end in reasoning with these war-brides further; for between these friends’ weak souls and his could pass no close communion.

A serpent versed in strife alone, he slithered back inside the bloodfall, and rejoined their kindred troops despoiled, who knew the truer-spoken knifetalk.

An archer who’d been crushed within, whose legs were minced spaghetti, gave the teen a hateful hail by in his eyeballs spitting.

With a hateful word returned in kind, the climber shanked the bowman’s throat; and from their hand’s death-opened clasp, he yanked the soldier’s weapon.

With that man’s pinched bow, he popped back out and soothed the weeping widows. Seven arrows, he flung at them, and he struck their heart-held anguish.

Then the hushed wives fell, like shooting stars who tumble from the silenced past. Their mute forms plunged as they once had done when leaping from their siege-lost ramparts.

The wives beside these heart-pierced ghosts, they cried an anguished chorus. They shrieked like cracking ice, like banshees tortured in a nightstorm. "Her daughters will rise!”, they poured, “to make you sink, you ink-veined scourge, for seven cyclic lifetimes! Our Moon’s sons will once more rise, to make you sink, you ink-veined scourge, for seven cyclic lifetimes! Arise, ye grooms and sons at rest! Arise, Moon’s Sleeping Bulwark! Catch this deathsong’s prowling thief, and fling him from the far horizon!"

At the wounded women’s baleful summons, a deep-groaned rumble answered; a titan seemed to speak within the Mountain’s mass-grave stomach.

With warhorns cacophoning inside, the slope beneath the climber shuffled, as the soldiers coffined behind the fall came free in a sudden landslide. Yet their dislodged corpses did not slip into the void below of dark mist. With brave-souled might, they joined their limbs and left their grave united.

The falling blood-shed curtain split, its tear-soaked torrent parted, as from the mountainside came forth a head like the moon surmounting the horizon.

A golem gouged from out the slope, with giant arms of slain men. And its shoulders rose to cloak the sky, upon giant legs of slain men.

The bloodfall soaked its corpse-sewn frame, this titan formed of soldiers, whose trench-ripped parts together clumped to build one organism. Their troops' weapons barbed like hedgehog hairs; their shields were dressed with lunar crescents. The beast's head was of a tarsier shape, with great big eyes protruding; and its towering human body shone as naked as a newborn.

This beast—The Bulkwark of The Moon—it punched the corpse-piled Mountain, and scooped a thousand bowmen out to add them to its elbows. With its legs, of armoured flesh, it kneed the corpse-heaped Mountain, and scraped two thousand spearmen out to add them to its shinbones. These scrounged dead soldiers crawled its skin, like cadaver-swarming beetles. And as they found their place, they linked their arms; their sword-slashed veins, they stitched as one; and they wove their gut-enflowering entrails.

The Shade and The Bulwark Redream Their Conflict

The beast towards the teen then stooped, and his size-dwarfed shape, it pummelled. Its mile-long arm, composed of troops, descended like a comet.

The climber, eclipsed, leapt down quick.

He slipped the crashing knuckles while the slope-trapped men he’d held were mashed, were crushed into a crater.

A boulder tumbled past his head, of their pulverised bonesteelorgans.

Yet the climber could have slipped aside from six-hundred such bombardments while the soldiers swinging from its limbs flung hate at every pass by. With fear-numbed poise, he read the beast, like an owl concealed by darkness; and his head, bestrewn with the gut-weaved crown, sized up the harmless golem.

Then to this fleshgiant built of mangled men, he gave a menaced whisper: “You, Her moon-prized shield, who failed to swerve my fist while living, your strength since then has waned with time, your arms rust-lamed, your armies rotted. My dead-set friend denied by fate, your guard, I’ve already broken. My vermin scourge defiled your walls, they crawled your gore-fouled streets, they sniffed your wives in their hiding nooks, and they gnawed your shrieking children. So why fight twice my climber’s wrath? Why temp once more the dagger? Why reprise this sure-fired loss? Why vainly stir? Why vainly toss through an ancient, vanquished nightmare?"

But the golem’s mind unmoved, its giant fists of flesh kept hammering.

After its next poor-guided punch, the climber leapt and clamped on.

He fought its knuckle’s mad-faced troops, who groped to hug and choke him, whose clasping hands soon came unloosed when his dagger tranquilised them.

Up the golem’s wrist, his young shade crept, up its gore-paved forearm. And those beggars who his black hands tugged, he slept and chucked to the dark below, to the Mountain’s midnight silence.

Up its arm, the young stoat stealthed, up its soul-croaked shoulder. And those who howled for mercy’s end, he disembowelled and fed the dark of the Mountain’s midnight silence.

Atop the golem’s monstrous head, his small shade danced evasive, dodging while it failed to slap, to splat him like a blowfly.

While lurching so, he worked his knife, to shank the soldiers of its hairline. Each fighting back, each stabbed, he tossed, and he dug himself a gravesite. Corpse by corpse, he carved his way; into its head, he tunnelled. Then he squirmed into this opening cave, into the warmth of a troop-walled oven. Into the hot-stenched sweat, he crawled, into the clasping metal meat, into the clawing death-breathed offal, while behind him seeped the bloodfall’s tears to lubricate his slithering. In the slick moist dark, the soldiers begged and clutched his arms, throat, face, and ankles. But he stilled their quivering hands with his sleep-delivering knifethrusts. Others spat out vengeful shouts while twisting with their weapons. But he cooled their heated hearts with his ice-delivering knifethrusts.

He Meets a Forgotten Face within The Seeping Darkness

Within the fleshbeast’s centre skull, the climber found a cavern. Into this hollow space, he creeped, and tossed a stolen Lightstone. Its flickering glow lit up a man, awaiting the arrival. Inside the black-cloaked caved, he’d hid, stiff and isolated.

His armour was a uniform befitting a young swordsman, but his worn-down face was trenched with age, with war’s youth-ravaged wrinkles. This man—matured beyond his years—had been a world-known general, a savant who’d steered his valiant men, who’d shield his moon-blessed country.

In death, still to his role attached, he was bonded to his half-dead army. His legs sank in the flesh-formed ground, and his raised arms held the cavern’s ceiling. To the naked skin of both these limbs was sewn a crimson criss-cross, a web whose threads of pulsing veins connected with his soldier’s maimed souls.

His aged eyes closed to lead this beast, they split to size the entering stranger.

In the dark beyond the cast-in light, he stared right back, a gut-crowned spectre.

The flesh-trapped general sighed with an wretched-hearted sorrow, as one who’d known the climb’s tough price, who’d seen and done the rape of nations. “So this time, as well,” the old man said, “my soul, himself The Shade eclipses. Very well. I did my watch. Gift me the next noose of crimson, boy. Gift me the new moon’s lightless silence.”

These words poured thick and wet, garbled by a viscous liquid, for the ghost’s aged throat was scored with a gaping, dripping necklace.

His Hand Recollects The Warm Sensation of Victory

“No,” his foe replied, emerging from the cold, black darkness, “there is no second chance at death, only the first’s yet-scattered ashes.”

With a headsman’s corpse-bored yawn, he approached the forlorn phantom. He seized a war-bleached shock of hair, and to the throat, he pressed his dagger.

Steadily, he worked its edge, sawing skin, bone, flesh, and cartilage, while the knife’s rasping groan was drowned by the swine-like squeals and howls from the helpless soldiers watching.

Blood flowed from the man’s sliced neck and from the troops to which his veins connected. His growing wound spilled forth their red, like from a dam-collapsing river. Like a springtide swelled by the moon aligned, its flooding overran the cavern.

Those men whose corpses filled the walls turned pale and grey as twilight. Their cries for mercy dwindled out - dark, soft, silent as the twilight.

Their drained eyes drooped to the tempting weight, to death’s inviting slumber. And their youthful grip, they lost, the group strength which bound them to their brothers. Their pale-skinned corpses slipped, and they fell from the cave’s collapsing ceiling. The floor—made damp with waste-deep blood—sank in, yawned, and swallowed.

The Bulwark Of The Moon Disintegrates and The Shade Confronts The Isolated Widows

Outside The Bulwark’s cave-dug head, the Moon’s loved golem languished, then its son-shaped segments came undone like a corpse devoured by jackals. Its bones were stripped by unseen jaws, who tore apart its troop-formed muscles; and its skin and organs spilled and poured into the dark below that catches all the children whose hacked bodies built this Hill of Loss, this Mountain.

From its crumbling skull, there leapt a silhouette-steeped figure, as the climber jumped to the Mountain edge and cleft the crimson bloodfall.

Within one arm, he bore a prize, the general’s gore-halved head and body; and these dagger-rendered parts, he showed the weeping wives and widows. “I show you now the sunlit end,” he boast, “for those who block my summit! My ascent is no less fate assured than the dawn that scales the skyline!"

The wives, who’d watched their groomsmen die, pulled out their hair and nails in torment. The sonless mothers pulled out knives to amputate their breasts once suckled.

“Alas!” their self-maimed banshees howled. “The Shade-Steeped One repeats his insult! Our Nation’s Shield, his black hand cleaves, and next Our Moon, he’ll strangle!”

Their sweet laments—life’s sweetest fuel—instilled the climber’s arms with power. He flung the general’s severed head, straight at the howling widows. With speed, this gruesome missile flew, it soared the mile-wide distance. And it smacked the general’s own slewn wife then burst her into nothing.

As her shattered droplets joined the fall to wash her husband’s hitman, the spouse-stained climber warned the rest: "Now move, or face My same kind mercy.”

He Butchers Himself New Instruments to Ascend Their Sorrow

The women wept with extra grief for their men a second lifetime slaughtered; and their blood, that from their eyeballs seeped, flowed thick and fast and stronger.

The climber, trained by the flesh-giant fight, escaped into a Mountain hollow. Like a snake, he dug into the cliff, he stabbed out himself a cave, into whose yawning dark, he crawled and dragged the head-chopped general.

A grating noise soon echoed out like a burrowed rodent nibbling.

In the dark, the young man’s gut-crowned shade, it worked an inspiration. He whittled new a climbing set to withstand the tear-shed torrent. With weapons pinched from nearby troops, his hands hacked up the headless marshal.

From the legs that’d crest the world’s warfields, he fashioned fitting crampons. From the arms that once commanded strength, he pared two fresh pickaxes. Each tool, he made with expert skill, with an eye read well in craft and practice. Then the teen adorned the finished set and stalked back out to face the bloodshed.

Armed thus, he resumed his morbid climb, against the tear-poured torrent. Its weight, his bone-shaped axes fought, their points impaled the wall of dead behind the bloodfall’s curtain. Corpse by pick-stabbed corpse, he rose, soldier by boot-spiked soldier. And the widows blanched with ghost-white fright, at his shadow rising drenched in crimson.

The Immortal Shade Forgets a Few More Memories Before Receiving His Curse

When he reached the mournful crest, the women clawed his gore-soaked clothing. “You night-stalking shade!” they wailed. “Why did you kill our sons and husbands?! Why bury us who weep the red upon your dream-bled Mountain?! Why must you creep towards the sky?! Why scar the stars with ceaseless violence?!”

To their song of grief, he spoke, to their sad-touched clutching. “No longer do my reasons know by what once this heart did flutter. They empty from my care-weighed head like dreams forgot by morning.” While speaking thus, he stabbed the wives and fed the void their knife-reamed corpses.

The wives fought back by prying arms from the slope-crammed troops around them. They mobbed him with the blood-howled fright of when their towns had toppled. But what hope had they against this threat, whose black hand’d cleft their husbands? No more could they scare off this shade than a man can scare the sunset.

Their soft-fleshed droves, the nightfiend mowed, as had once his mighty legions. These flower stalks, his knife flicks snipped, like the troops who’d stormed their cities.

His spree continued many hours until the morning’s misty sunrise. The dawn light found him showered red and with the final girl he’d murdered.

This last one stabbed—stabbed in her eyes—he tried give a rapid send-off. But when he yanked the lodged knife free and tossed her lifeless corpse, she gasped as woken from a dream and clasped him with a tight reproachment.

Her fingers bound his face with the vice-like might of mortal anguish. His strength was dwarfed like a newborn choked by a mother freshly widowed. She held his tantrum in her hug while her cheek his knife jack-hammered. And into his infant stare, she gazed and poured tears from her punctured sockets.

The climber wriggled to and fro to snap his head from the tear-flowed transfer. But the dying warbride bound him fast, and her fingers pried his eyelids open. She was like a fowl who vomits meat into its child’s greed-stretched gullet; from her knife-fouled wounds that gushed and oozed, she fed his eyes a sticky coating.

Unblinking through the blinding blood, the climber sawed her wristbones. Through her famine-slendered sticks, he churned his death-bent dagger. Unblinking through the blinding blood, his knifework snipped the final sinew. Then the war-hurt wench, he shoved and launched to the dark below that catches all bright lovers by his shadow snuffed and stacked upon his Mountain.

As he ripped off from his cheeks her severed hands still clinging, he glimpsed the dead bitch in descent, who shrilly laughed and taunted.

“Our same eclipse, you’ll never face, o endless climbing cutthroat! But you shall shiver nonetheless when you sight your love’s own dimmer!”

A farm somewhere, the early a.m. hours.

Next to a dishevelled bed, a young man stood staring vacantly at the carpet. His unblinking vision was fixated on a square of moonlight passing through a window and the shadow of a tree twitching within it like a fresh-stabbed body. A fist, positioned discreetly by his side, used a relaxed grip to hold a handle of air. Around him, a television, a table lamp, and several other objects lay broken.

With a blink, his senses returned. He glanced around himself for a second, just enough to recall his location. His messy room invoked no new thoughts.

He looked outside. The dawn had been a false one. The night was still dark, still had many hours to go.

Silently, he crept back into bed, and he spread himself out across the coolness of the sweat-dampened sheets.

“Again,” he whispered, closing his eyelids once more.

Opening Invocation to The Mountain and Its Endless Climber

Hail to the trapped ones who twitch amongst the vines! Hail to The Blacktail strangling their torsos! Hail to…