Prologue - WHEN THE MOUNTAIN BLEEDS
811 Words
Prologue — WHEN THE MOUNTAIN BLEEDS
The first thing Ravenkot remembered was pain.
Not the sharp bite of battle.
Not the clean ache of sacrifice.
This was rot-deep, festering—the kind that outlasted screams and turned bone to ash.
The mountain did not sleep.
It endured.
Its roots knotted stone to marrow, stitching shut wounds that wept forever. Rivers carried memories downhill. Winds bore warnings across jagged ridges.
Here, creatures tasted fear before hunger.
Even shadows learned when to flee.
Beneath the spine of Ravenkot, something waited.
Not dead.
Not dreaming.
Chained.
The prison lay deeper than shrines, deeper than graves—carved from living rock, sealed with sigils scorched by claws dipped in forbidden blood.
The air tasted of iron, ash, and a scream that had never quite died.
The Sleeper stirred.
Not fully. Just enough.
A pulse rolled through the stone—slow, vast, wrong.
The mountain flinched.
Invisible caverns cracked like ribs.
Above, a hillside vanished into fog without a sound.
It remembered its body.
Remembered tearing wings from the sky. Remembered mountains kneeling.
The runes flared, furious, then guttered.
The seal thinned.
Abhay felt it before the stone cried out.
He stood at the edge of the inner sanctum, where the mountain gaped like an unhealed wound.
Darkness pressed in, thick enough to choke lungs, heavy enough to crush magic.
Abhay breathed easily. His wings stretched wall to wall—black-veined, edges honed for execution, not flight.
Claws bare.
Boots crusted with things long dead.
He pressed one hand to his heart.
The mountain answered.
Power surged—raw, brutal, ancient.
It claimed him without asking.
The bond seared through bone and vein, a brand etched into his soul.
He was not its king.
He was its blade.
“You’re moving,” Abhay said, voice low and lethal. “That wasn’t permitted.”
The darkness laughed.
Not sound.
Pressure.
A vision forced itself into his skull: forests devoured by flame, blood cascading like rain, peaks shattering beneath one deliberate step.
The Sleeper remembered.
Abhay’s jaw clenched.
Wings flexed—a blade twitching for blood.
“You were broken,” he said. “Bound. You don’t get to test the chains.”
A hairline fracture split a sigil.
Black blood steamed as it met stone.
The Sleeper pushed. Abhay struck.
Claw met rune. Power detonated.
The cavern shrieked as magic slammed the crack shut. Blood vaporized.
Stone groaned—but held.
For now.
Abhay exhaled through gritted teeth.
“You wake,” he whispered, “and I carve what remains into dust.”
A pause.
Then pleasure, thick and coiling.
“You won’t,” the Sleeper purred, voice sliding through rock like venom in veins. “You never do.”
Abhay’s eyes burned crimson. “Try me.”
The mountain quaked harder.
Above, far from the sanctum, something intruded. A wrongness—soft, clumsy, human.
Footsteps where silence reigned. Breath too fragile for this depth.
A pulse that should not survive the climb.
The mountain hesitated.
That hesitation was fatal.
The Sleeper felt it. Interest sharpened to a blade.
“Something came,” it murmured.“Something breakable.”
Abhay spun, gaze piercing upward through miles of stone and root. “No.”
Winds twisted.
Paths folded.
Ravens scattered in black screams.
Ancient wards flickered, unsteady.
A human had crossed the threshold.
Not summoned.
Not offered.
Chosen by accident.
The Sleeper pressed against its bonds, laughter rising—ugly, hungry.
“You feel it too,” it said. “That pull.
That fracture.”
Abhay’s wings snapped wide, slicing air.
Power hammered the seals like a verdict.
“You don’t touch them,” he snarled. “You don’t look.”
The laughter died.
For the first time in centuries, the Sleeper listened.“Why?”
Abhay gave no answer.
He didn’t have one yet.
He only knew the mountain as judgment, “you don’t just end Ravenkot. You rip the world open. Humans die first. Then everything.”
Agreement rippled through the stone.
Not surrender.
“Then stop me,” the Sleeper whispered.“Before I remember how.”
Abhay’s fist clenched.
The mountain surged, shoving him back—away from the prison, away from the urge to end it now.
Stone sealed with a thunderclap, locking the sanctum away.
He stood alone in the shadowed passage, breath steady, controlled.
The pull from above burned brighter. Human. Fragile. Unaware.
“i***t,” he muttered. He turned and began to climb.
Above, snow fell out of season.
Trees groaned under sudden frost.
Animals fled downhill, eyes rolling white.
Somewhere on a path that should not exist—a human laughed.
The Sleeper smiled without a mouth. Because the mountain had finally erred. And errors bled.
The air smelled of iron.
Of snow.
Of something waiting.
And somewhere deep inside, a pulse throbbed—the beginning of reckoning.
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- Writer
