Rohan spoke to the mountain. It answered. He was the only one that heard the answer. It was the gateway to his wasted world. For so long he had unconsciously been making his way towards this place. The tower of peace. Of stale baked buttress roots and rock reaching trees. A peaceful place within its earth roots. A fatal mountain that leant towards the sky before the anti-life society.
Everyone thought that the mountains never changed. That only things around the mountain changed - the clouds, the trees, the animals. Mountain streams were rushing somewhere and Rohan was hooked on rocks. Non-persons of the anti-life society didn't appreciate the mountain. It was said, that it hadn't even been a volcano. And that it had always been there and had never changed.
One day the mountain did. It lifted up its earth roots and tumbled away into the distance. Society had been sleeping when this happened. No-one knew that it had gone or that Rohan had followed it there. Or that Rohan had gone with the full and final knowledge that beyond this gateway was nothing. He had left the anti-life society. There would be nothing but himself within the wasted world. He had searched the ruined corridors of mountain rock to find this place.
Deeply afraid that there was nothing to find - Rohan was trembling. A barren wind pushed the first blinding sands into his eyes. He began to crawl towards the fatal mountain. It felt almost natural for him to lose balance. He leapt into the rainshadow air of his wasted world without seeing the bottom. He began to fly with rocks stuck to his arms.
Desert wind was howling past - then another girl in the peak hour crush. ROHAN, a voice from thin air with a feeble touch to his shoulder. ARE YOU OKAY? She pushed him once with her eyes and was never seen again. Rohan's eyes and darkness. It could have been anyone's voice. His mother's, his fantasy lover's, his sister's, a traveller's. The voice could have been from his own mind only.
ROHAN, the voice came. IS THERE ANYTHING I CAN DO? No. Rohan answered and the voice of self thundered and echoed through the stretched and barren caverns of his mind. A few rocks crumbled into dust. NO, he said and something still living, still existing within those caverns, heard the echo and stirred. Something more terrifying than the complete disappearance of the near distant physical world.
It made itself physically available to him. It closed off all his routes of escape. It followed him into the wasted world.
