The Ascent

Kopac turned his tired face upward to where the cascading rock ceased and was outlined by a pale, blue sky. A bitter, biting wind rolled down the mountainside, striking his face with an unrelenting fury. His grizzled visage was caked with dust and, in spite of the chill, marked by lines of sweat that had streamed down in a dozen places. The rough outward appearance belied a youthful interior. Kopac was only seventeen years old, a tender age according to legend. And yet, the lad had already burned up over half of his mortal days.

Burned up. Ever since the fallout five centuries earlier, the human body had slowly become frailer. Perpetually rifled by radiation from conception to casket, people living after the Fall had come to accept that life was short. It flagged under the wear and tear of a life lived on a ragged and weary Earth. The terrestrial sphere seemed to have grown tired of its inhabitants and was waiting for a chance to shut down, reset, and start the cycle of life all over again.

Of course, for Kopac, the thought of his brief mortality was still but a distant shadow. It was a normalized part of life that he had accepted years ago and wouldn’t take seriously for another decade at the least. Besides, for the energetic climber, philosophy was hardly the priority at the moment. He had to get to the top. If he could only get to the top, he could finally find rest. He turned to his left and addressed a slender figure who also stood, looking up with a similarly sweat-stained face.

“Well, Chia, do you think we can make the final ascent?” The words came out in short gasps as if spoken through pain. His compatriot stirred from deep thought. Her hair was pulled back, but several strands had escaped their bonds and were dancing in the surrounding wind.

“I don’t know if I have it in me yet, K,” came the weary reply. She put hand to forehead and simultaneously wiped away sweat and grime, leaving a streaking horizontal smear where moments before there had been an ordered chaos of vertical stripes. “I know this is our last chance to reach the top. Even so, you’re one of the oldest to even try the climb this side of the last century."

“You saying I don’t have it in me?” came the cheeky reply, “I’m not the one asking for a chance to rest.”

The comment garnered Kopac a swat from his companion, who turned and sat down on a nearby boulder, breaking off the belabored conversation in the process. After several minutes of deep breathing, she got up and stood once again, erect, committed, with a steely look of determination in her eyes. She wrapped her simple, unstained cloak closer and raised her face to the peak a hundred feet or more above them. It rose in a steeply angled cliff face that few could manage without slipping.

In fact, many had tried to do so in the past and had never returned. They had scaled the slopes for days only to be thrown back in the end by the majestic terror in calamitous ruin. A single slip of the hand, a loosening of a stone, an unusually strong gust of wind, and it was all over. No second chances.

After taking in the all-too-familiar sight, she glanced at K. Without a word, the two began the ascent with renewed vigor and the same stolid assurance that had already brought them thus far.

As Kopac began to climb again, this time bent forward on hands and knees, he found his thoughts turning inward. In spite of his proclivity for the pragmatic, his mind refused to silence itself. “Why are you here?” it asked. “What drove you to this end?” it jeered. “You know this is the end, as it has been for so many before you. A foolish desire. A reckless, youthful extravagance. Is it really worth it?”

That last thought stuck in his craw. He found himself mumbling “Yes. Yes it’s worth it,” through numb, cracked lips. He had no fear of Chia hearing him up here. The wind was too strong. Besides, she appeared to be doing a better job of actually focusing on the task at hand. She was not ten feet away as he watched her scanning the cliff, calculating her next move, her bare feet and hands clinging to the stones.

He returned to his own climbing and felt the rock cool and hard below his thin tunic and tightly wrapped mantle. Recentered, he cast about for his next move and found that he had worked himself into a tight spot. The span above him was smoother than the rest of the course and he couldn’t find a proper foothold for twenty feet or more. With a low curse, he began shifting to the right — further away from his Chia — where he hoped to find better terrain.

It was a predicament he could have avoided if he’d been paying attention. It was all too easy to let his mind drift when he climbed. He had practiced often enough in the warped and mangled trees of his homeland, hundreds of feet below. The perverted remnants of arboreal life had provided an ideal obstacle course where he had cut his teeth learning the art of the ascent.

He had always had a dozen other children romping through the woods alongside him when he climbed, with everyone trying to establish their primal claim to authority through besting their companions through escalating ape-like activity. He had often wondered why climbing had become such an essential part of his people’s way of life.

Of course, he had heard the stories many times before. Ever since the Fall, humanity had degenerated. Not just their bodies, but their way of life. Where once there had been great stone metropolises that towered as high as mountains, now everyone lived in small, isolated conclaves. Pockets of dozens or at times hundreds of individuals were scattered far and wide, as they eked out a pathetic, primeval existence scavenging for food and living in prehistoric shelters.

At least, that’s what the stories said. As far as Kopac was concerned, he had never seen another village in his life. Nor could he image the cities and mighty urban centers that were supposed to have stood proud and tall before they hurled one another to the ground like so many titans locked in self-destructive combat.

True or not, that was the way of old. There were occasional relics to be found from that dated way of life. Pieces of jewelry. Discarded waste that refused to decompose. But little else. Now, life was simple. It was digestible. In many ways it was meaningless.

Truncated, restricted, and without a real future, Kopac had grown up in a society that had been forced to reinvent hope. And it had done just that. As it scraped through its daily existence, Kopac’s tribe, dwelling nestled between two great spurs of a giant mountain, had turned their faces upward for inspiration. The primitive society began to identify one thing as the honor above all else: the mountain.

As life expectancy shortened and generations multiplied, the legend of the mountain grew until it had, in and of itself, become an object of worship. It was seen as the glorious conclusion, the unchallenged victor, the end of all ends. While the panorama clearly stretched beyond in a rolling range of peaks, this was the central point of all existence for the tiny world of those who dwelt at its feet.

Many had attempted to scale the eminence, and none had returned to tell the tale. Over time, the indomitable status of the mountain waxed, until for many, the ultimate triumph was to mount its icy peak and stand, victorious at its summit. It didn’t matter what followed, be it a terrifying descent or a mythic acceptance into the arms of the mountain as an equal. All that mattered was reaching the top. And that’s what Kopac focused on now.

Foot by foot, inch by inch, the ground eeked away below the pair of climbers. As they felt their strength ebb and their fingers chill, they bent their weary minds to the ascent. And slowly, the peak grew nearer. This last stretch was hardly long. On the contrary, were it laid flat, it could have been traversed at a brisk walk in a matter of minutes. It was its vertical ultimatum that spelled defeat for so many that had come before. It was the steepness of the climb that wore down intrepid souls and ground the strong into dust.

But Kopac and his companion were made of sterner stuff than those who had come before. The pair had always led the pack amongst the wild, tree-bound tourneys of their youth. And now, they were betrothed and preparing to foster the next generation of short-lived climbers. But before they were to start this natural next step in their journey, they had decided that they must conquer the mountain. They must reach the peak and behold, side by side, the hidden secrets that it held just out of reach of the world below.

The pair labored on, step by step, and as the precipice narrowed, they found that they had once again come together. They were still breathing heavily, gasping for air with each step. Kopac looked over for a brief moment and realized that he couldn’t tell if Chia’s face was blue from the cold or the lack of air ...or both. Was his face the same? He could already feel his arms weakening.

They struggled up the final stretch, not daring even yet to hope for final victory. And then, Kopac reached out and felt it. The top stone. The edge of the cliff. He pulled himself up with desperate fingers and rolled onto his back, eyes closed, gasping, not daring to move. He noticed Chia reach the top beside him, and then he heard her gasp.

He opened his eyes and sat up. They were at the top of the summit, and the bright sky shone overhead. The wind was still strong, and it swirled the snow around them, giving the appearance of a small storm. But it wasn’t the weather that had caught their attention. It was something else. Small, earth-colored shapes scattered at odd intervals before them. They only came up to the climbers’ waists and were stock still. Kopac stood up, stiffly, and approached the nearest object at a shuffle. As he did so, he realized, with a shock, that it was a body. He could see it now, pulled up in the fetal position, arms clasped around its knees, hood over its head, an ancient, heart-shaped locket strung around its neck — no doubt a talisman. But the form didn’t move when he approached. It didn’t stir. It was frozen solid.

And with that, reality struck the two companions as if with a blow. These were the bodies of those that had come before. These were climbers who had, indeed, reached the mighty summit, only to perish in its icy grip.

Slowly they drew together. They sat in the alpine chill, arms wrapped around one another, foreheads touching, still gasping for each breath. The sun was falling through the sky, and they felt the warmth flowing out of them. Kopac found himself wondering if the others had had this much time before the end or if the fact that there were two of them was prolonging their final moments. His mind wandered once again as he clutched Chia to his bosom.

He had already shaken off the desire to panic. As his heart slowed and his joints stiffened, he had one thought on his mind. They had done it. They had conquered the mountain. They had found their new hope.