The peak.
Gusts of wind howled in my ears.
The cold touch tearing and burrowing itself deep into the layers of my alpaca fur coat. I batted my dust covered eyelashes and gripped my rope tighter than before. The print of the rope became indented into my weathered fingers. My rope had started to fray and show its lack of durability. Would I even be quick enough to summit?
I was halfway to the peak but it felt as if this mountain of rock and ice was connected to me. I felt as though I’d spent an eternity with her. She was a beautiful formation that stunned even the blind with her sheer mass and greatness in an ethereal sense. Her coats of an almost luminescent shade of jade shone in the sun’s gaze. Nearing the peak is when her elegance and refinement really showed itself to the small few that were brave enough to climb.
I reached into my yellow sack of chalk which sat on a carabiner below my waist, and coated my hands in their entirety in the white powder.
“Do you know what they’ll think?” a gravelly, monotonous voice croaked to me from behind my back.
When I turned, there was nothing.
Then, an ominous and foreboding figure appeared below me next to my relay line. His presence did not seem clear with the sun’s rays shining, but nonetheless his aura scared me. This aura which permeated my thoughts of achievement and accomplishment with pure unmistakable dread.
A sharp pain ran through my left arm right down to my fingertips until they became numb with a piercing pain, my breath became shortened and my vision became clouded.Sweat started to affect the chalk’s grasp on the rope as the shadow became closer and closer to me.
“You won’t make it you know, everything you’ve done was for nothing.” He was wearing everything that I was wearing, the same alpaca fur coat, the same navy blue pants but a face different from mine, damaged and frail. An almost weakness came about him, not appearing what he once seemed.
However this did not stop him. He wrapped himself around me like a blanket of darkness, choking and holding me until…
I saw white. Gates of gold and quartz surrounded me on a vast plain of isolation with no ceiling and no floor. I floated there, in the vast nothingness.
All that was around me was a phoenix feather, its flame-like colour juxtaposing with the surroundings.The closer it came to the floor, the darker the world came. My breath was the only thing helping it float. I panted and relaxed my breath until the feather flew higher than the boundary, higher than I could see until pure relaxation was bestowed upon me. As soon as it left my sight darkness pierced out of my body and the pain was no longer felt.
Darkness filled the void until I opened my eyes.