By Professor Amethy... - On The Mountain Top -ch. 1-

I looked down. Carved into the stone floor, right where my future self had been chiseling, was a single word. It was in a script I did not recognize, but the meaning appeared in my mind fully formed, a parasite of understanding:

I pitched my final camp on a razorback ridge. My altimeter read 7,200 meters, but that is a lie. The sky was wrong. The constellations were a half-turn out of phase, and the wind carried no sound from the world below. No bird cry. No avalanche rumble. Just a low, subsonic hum that I felt in my fillings.

On the lectern, there was no book. There was a single, large, flawless crystal of what looked like quartz. But it wasn't quartz. It was too heavy. When I touched it, it was warm. And it was not clear. Deep inside, swirling like smoke in a sealed jar, were images. Not reflections. Visions. On the Mountain Top -Ch. 1- By Professor Amethy...

It took three years to bribe, sail, and crawl my way here. My Sherpa, a stoic man named Pemba who had summited Everest twice without a smile, refused to go within a league of the final approach. He called it Yul-Lha , the “Beyond-Place.” He said the stones here remember when they were bones.

I saw a city of towers built from the ribs of a creature larger than a continent. I saw a king with three mouths, each one speaking a different apocalypse. I saw a man in a modern business suit, weeping as he fed a stack of legal documents into a fire that burned violet. And I saw myself. I looked down

I am writing this now in my tent, though the tent is gone. I am sitting on bare rock, and the ink is not ink but a thin, black fluid weeping from the crystal I tucked into my jacket. Pemba was right. This is the Beyond-Place. And I have learned what the old kings learned, what the prophets heard in the silence.

Here is the first chapter of a story in the style of a found academic manuscript. Ch. 1 By Professor Amethyst Gray, Department of Comparative Thanatology, Miskatonic University My altimeter read 7,200 meters, but that is a lie

It is a pupil. And the mountain is blinking.