body ache

WAKER

You picked the mountain because you wanted something tall—a place high up, yet grounded. The Pinnacle feels, arguably, taller, but it's full of secrets and a blazing blue light. It's too different. Foreign.

The Summit is different. It seems to be a dormant, or even dead, volcano, sat in a small range of gray mountains. A pine forest—a tree you never saw back home, it is wondrous and strange and has a very distinct, fresh smell—cloaks the slopes, crowds close to the lake where the siren bit you. That has healed since long. Only scars remain, little ridges where the teeth tore through your black skin. It doesn't even itch anymore.

You stand upon the Summit's lip, a crater to nothing somewhere ahead of your hooves. There's no activity, no heat, nothing; it's just a mountain now, sitting high in the sky. You draw the thin air deep into your lungs. The only warmth here comes from the sun, hidden behind a thick curtain of clouds, trapping the damp heat between it and the ground. The fresh breeze is a small relief at this altitude, though, and that's why you're standing there, you suppose.

You're tired, in many ways. You've kept running around in circles around your own mind. You feel like a coward each time you think that, maybe, it's for the best that you never find home—you feel weak and filthy. But when do you give up, anyway? It's been months. The days are changing, something's happening—a shift in seasons, you guess, but there you have it. You've been here a while, and you've not found a way out. You've tried.

Can you give up trying? Can you let it be? Will you ever be able to forgive yourself if you do?

You swallow, and shimmy upon the mountain's rim. From here, everything looks so normal, so possible, like the mountains on the far edge of your plains. They were the domain of the wailers, but once, the wailers hadn't been the murderers they became at the end. You've walked their foothills, drunk from their brooks, played on their glaciers.

Those mountains looked nothing like these, but they still remind you of home.

For anyone! Maybe one of @Tech 's kids?