He was climbing a mountain.
There was, but a moment ago, the soft sound of summer thunder,
And the tender drift of curling winds.
A voice, that knew no constraint of time or place.
It spoke as if it had always done so, as if it were all at once memory and potential.
Its sentence had no end, its syllables outlasting empires.
It made him pang for the world he once new.
But it was far away, for now,
He was climbing a mountain.
Upon the way, one traveler found another
One took refuge from the climb, his hands bloodied, his will broken
The other sat perched on a cliff edge, never facing his cohort, never truly meeting
The climb is far from easy, called the bloody man.
Come, let us eat together and tend our wounds.
The man of the cliff did not answer, not immediately.
His gaze was fixed upon the implacable horizon,
Its forms were grains of reality, blowing across the plains of perception
To look at one was to see no other, for this is how it is.
"We do not wound," he answered at the last.
Will you not face me, called the man with bandaged hands
That shifting sky is nothing but the wastes of life
The knowledge it holds is not for us to know
For we are the ones who climb.
The cliff's man remained silent, for he grew weary of climbers
You are not the first he thought, and you surely will not be the last
For the climbers had minds for not but the mountain
They are born to seek its peak.
Before him were the storms of life
Where beings of light roared across the world
Their lives ended within a blink
Each one, shimmering like unclouded stars against the silky black of night
Each a triumph of failure, for even in death no fall awaited them
They knew only ascent
Perhaps that was what the climbers sought?
Perhaps they wished to be as they?
But the cliff, he knew, was the end of all things
Its precipice, the boundary of the divine
It was the only true ascent, it was all that he could crave.
The climber had lingered here long enough
And it was time to send him on his way
"We do not hear the Nightingale."
The man with the mended will had no time for puzzles
To the sands with you, may the winds take you to your beloved rifts of chance
There's a mountain that needs climbing, for why else is it here?
Whilst you are betroth to destiny's stir, to the sky's delight,
I have known the beauty of her touch, the loving warmth of her breath
She is not to be watched, she is to be held, to be kissed, to be yours.
He turned his back to the cliff and its watchman
He had been sated by his stay, but it would be folly to remain
He was climbing a mountain