The Shattered Realm

When myths and legends warn of terrible danger, their origins are often based in truth. This, to me was a lesson learned too late, and a mistake that all eternity will not correct. Thinking that the centuries old warnings about this mountain, and those that dwell here were nothing but the romantic product of the fireside tales of the long dead, I anticipated coming here with the glee of a child at play. Were I to have read the warning signs so clearly displayed during the perilous ascent to this deadly peak, I would have changed direction and fled to safety as quickly and frantically as possible.

For long over a thousand years tales had been told of his awful furious presence. The dark and dreadful immortal spirit of a god of death whose appetite for souls and sanities knew no limit. His malice hangs over this entire land like a damp, mildewed corpse-shroud held in grey, grasping hands of fog that smother the entire earth into submission. The choking scent of death is everywhere, though when I was still sane and alive, I could see, hear, and smell nothing, walking into the jaws of doom like a blind and unthinking fool. Were I to have held the senses to notice the shadows dancing in the outskirts of my vision, or the stink of age-old decay, or the unnatural silence that strangled the land, then I, like the birds and the cattle and all other scurrying life would have fled that haunted landscape.

My first feelings of unease arose when I came to the shores of the lake. It filled the crater of an extinct volcano with its black, smooth surfaces, and was surrounded with razor-like cliffs that looked as if they could draw blood from the pale sky. I felt the threat of something dark and unseen beneath those placid waters, as the occasional ripple in the wind sent a ridge of black riding from the centre of the waters to the shore and back again. I remember hearing from legend how this lake was known as the Hollow Lake, and was so deep that no one had ever reached its bottom. The Lake remained in view as I traversed the steep surrounding cliff walls on a polished obsidian pathway.

The winds began to sing their shrieking songs on that blasted and hostile arête, their tongues of air pushing my body perilously close to the edge, threatening to take me down into the mist filled abyss below. Boulders and rocks plastered the land like broken bodies with veins of bindweed, bones of marble, and blood of granite. The mountain was alive. A living, breathing monster animated by the spirit of the dread king of old. His domain is that of the mountain mist that pulls in the lost wanderer before pulling him into the realms of hell that lurk below.

My heart pumping with exertion and growing fear, I continued onwards. The stubbornness that pervaded my nature overriding the desire to turn around and go back. I dismissed these feelings as cowardice and weakness, my pride making me unable to contemplate retreat. Even when I first heard the high pitched baying of the White Hounds that accompanied the King on his hunt I refused to change direction, dismissing their howls as the mocking, wailing laughter of the wind. When the paths began to shift from under my feet, guiding me blindly into harms way I disregarded it as bad navigation. When the wind grew angry enough to knock me sprawling to the rocky floor I saw it as nothing but poor balance. Even when I first saw the Grey King’s snarling face sneer balefully at me from a cliff face, I saw it as nothing but an unusual cut of the rock. Rationality, not the Lord of the Mountain, proved my worst enemy, for at least His Majesty gave me the privilege of warning.

The ascent to the summit became a true struggle. I was fighting the worst of the elements and the worst fears of the psyche. Even were I to reach the top, what then? The worsening weather would make the pitching of my tent impossible, night would draw in, and I would die alone and afraid in the clouds, either by plunging thousands of feet to a messy demise, or from exposure to the harsh and brutal elements.
Still I went on.

The wind at the peak was devastating. I was forced to crawl on hands and feet like a beast, to avoid being dashed against the sharp rocks that surrounded me in every direction. Then, beyond all hope I spotted a derelict stone hut lying desolately a short distance down the west face of the summit. Joy leaped into my heart, providing new warmth and life to my shivering body. Without hesitation I scrambled into the hut, and the damp darkness within. The Grey King’s bait was perfect, for in such conditions the dark entrance to his Kingdom could not be resisted.
Changing out of my wet clothes I could scarcely believe that upon setting out on my journey some three and a half hours earlier, I had stood in the pleasant and sunny warmth of a July afternoon, whereas now I was caged up in a stone shelter amidst the bowels of winter. I thought of the legend of the Grey King in his guise as the god Arawn in ancient myth, and how he manipulated the heroic Pwyll to utterly destroy Hafgan the Summer God. There is still no summer in his Realm. Here it is dead forever.
The cold loneliness and isolation of the hut and its gloomy surroundings began to manifest themselves as new fears. The air was wet and cold, permeating my dry clothes and cold flesh, and clinging to the stone floors and walls. The thin corrugated iron roof was propped up by a series of rotten beams that were held in place to the walls by tightly wound wires. The tempestuous wind outside roared like a jet engine, causing the roof and the walls to shake. I became startled as small rocks outside the gap of the doorway clattered noisily into the room. Cold gusts circulated the hut, blowing in through gaps in the walls, starkly revealing the flaws of its structure. Despite my anxieties I felt safer here than in the deadly outdoors, but by no means was the danger to prove dormant.

With the changeability typical of such wild and dark places, the wind ceased its constant, pain filled howling with sudden, chaotic silence. Shafts of blessed gold-forged sunlight poured forth through the doorway and iron meshed windows. I stepped outside and saw a brief but wonderful glimpse of the majestic scenery of the valleys and estuary below leading to the shining grey-blue of the distant sea. I yearned to be back down on low ground lying on a sun-kissed beach, in the midst of all that I love of the summer. But then as the winds and mist rolled back in from above, my heart returned once more to the black places lit only by the coldness of harsh truth.

Re-entering that dark chamber I felt the atmosphere change as the white mists turned to a darker grey with the beginning of sunset. Shadows lengthened on the surrounding walls of the room, and I noticed the dying light of the entrance to the hut caught the wall there in an unusual manner. I thought at first that the faces I could see in the wall were tricks of the brooding light, just as the face in the rock face I’d seen earlier was a fluke of geological erosion. When those faces refused to leave, and instead grew in number I finally began to admit my fear of the unnatural. When those faces began to speak to me I began to know outright terror.

Their conversations with me were filled with anger and hate, and were tainted with madness as they jeered and mocked me for my foolishness. They tugged and pulled at every fear known and unknown in my mind. A white headed phantom repeatedly mouthed the words ‘Love and Hate…Love and Death’ over and over again, the frozen gleam of insanity spread across it’s gawping features. A figure in black with a pallid luminescent death mask dragged my soul down into the Shattered Realm and showed me the meaning of the pain of isolation and separation. I became aware that this being was a manifestation of the spirit of Arawn himself. He was death personified, and it was he who I faced in this conflict. Putting my deep fears to one side I stood forth and looked into his terrible dead eyes.

In one hand he held the maddened, white-headed apparition, whose face I knew was that of insanity. The phantom conjured forth embarrassing and painful memories, dragging them back into life and magnifying them in amplitude as I painfully relived and regretted all my failures and regrets anew. Every worst fear and insecurity was addressed, and question in astute mental torture. I saw loved ones dying and killing, the destruction of all I held in value, and the loss of all rational thought, control, and Being itself to the black chaotic tumult of nothingness. In his other hand he held a spirit who held the keys to inspiration and enlightenment. This being would not yet speak with me. All across the wall terrible faces and images appeared, a laughing demon with glowing white eyes sprang forth from the wall, and dozens of other faces emerged in the dull light, more and more congregating as the darkness drew in. I spoke out loud and felt my voice as a shaky, terror filled, disembodied whimper. I could taste blood in my mouth, and knew that I no longer dwelt in the physical realm of the world.

The presence of the manifestation of the King of the Mountain grew and intensified as my separation from the world became complete. Satisfied with my resolve he showed me my own face in the wall, flickering from white to white in all my possible futures. My fate, he told me, was my own were I to survive his ordeal, and one of the dozens of faces I saw represented a different fate. I knew that all these faces were dead. The King knew this too, but enjoyed imparting as much pain and insanity on me as possible before he devoured me. I challenged him with all my strength, but he laughed as he tightened his grip upon me.

‘I shall show you inspiration then’, he spoke, but all he showed me was deeper and darker fears manifesting, as the faces in the wall grew in stature and became darker and more fell in appearance. The shock of these menacing demons was great enough to wake me from the empty, slack jawed non-existence of insanity, and shock my mind back into clarity. I saw them deliver their dark messages as though I were a brother to them. I heard them speak of inspiration and reward through courage and ordeal, and how such gifts were available only to those who pass through the deadliest deepest shadows of the Shattered Realm.

The demons heralded the presence of the essence of this Darkness itself that appeared to me in the wall as a female face with beautiful white skin and ivory bones curving outward from the skull. Her manner was cold and impersonal, geometrically opposite to the severe chill of Arawn’s hateful bite. A white hand of mist blew in through the doorway, clutching slowly and tightly around my heart. I became still and filled with great terror as I felt the cord of life that kept me attached to my body severing. As the moment of death came the White Hounds baying grew louder and louder, heralding the success of their master’s Wild Hunt. The last thing I saw in life was the figure of the cold dark picture of feminine beauty and destructiveness walk out of the wall and manifest herself as a living woman in the stone hut.

I proceeded to take my place in the wall, a captive fellow of those whose respect I had somehow managed to gain in this ordeal. This bond of kinsmanship is all that has saved my essence from being fed to The Grey King and his slavering Hounds, as the countless others who have met their ends here have been destroyed in the past. There is no escape, but I survive as a living presence in the Universe, and one day, one may come who has the key to this prison. And then I myself will know the freedom that eternity can offer.