Upon its tortured slopes, the chorus never ended. The many gaping maws pleading to an uncaring void, eyes searching the sundered heavens for answers forever unknown. Grey stretched skin and bone jutting, a forest of pain never ending. This was The Mountain.
Paradoxically it was the smell that reached us first, rather than the sound. A heavy fetid scent, it fell on the village suffocating in its wake. It smelt of rot, of metal. Its presence corrupted the air, making the once cool mountain air oily and dark, the skies once the purest blue now tinged a dusky orange. The breeze once bringing the scent of pine and grass, now filled our noses with rotten meat and forgotten machinery. The village was affected as well, the livestock grew sick and our women gave birth to broken monstrosities, often filling their tortured lungs with single breaths before collapsing under their own growths. Every day the smog only grew stronger, making even the strongest of the village warriors pale and sullen, the mountain range silent as the smell choked out all life. After what felt like an eternity, came the noise.
At first we thought it was a storm. A quiet rumble, the peaks whispering as the sound swirled around them. But the noise grew louder and louder, the whispering picking to a scream, a tortured sound from the deepest pits, cowing all storms that came before. Birds rose from the range, chirping in fear before being swallowed by the noise, fleeing in the hundreds. We should have followed their example, but we had been living in these mountains for generations, fought wars with rival tribes to lay claim to this land. We would not leave without a fight, and that pride cost us dearly. The screaming unending, the scent permeating our clothes, our hair, our skin. The sky became a bruised yellow, the sun merely a small ball of light in the smog. Now our children and elderly became sick, the screaming keeping the village awake at night, even our own yells drowned in the storm. They begged that we should leave, the world was ending, our only hope was to flee. The Chieftain disagreed, this was our ancestral home he argued. Why should we leave what was rightfully ours? Our gods would deliver us. The next day came the rumbling.
It was soft, a low rumble in the ground. A small vibration. But in time it too increased, a thumping moving at a repetitive, mechanical pace. It was here that The Chieftain drew the line. Gathering our best warriors, they set off towards the source of these plagues, promising to return only when whatever demon that threatened the village was slain. Given the blessings of the priests, set off into the wailing gale. By now most of the villagers retreated underground, the noise and smell greeting them even there, the rumbling a new nonstop plight. The fear of the outside became palpable, many families deciding to move all living to the former food shelters under their huts. We lived in filth, defecating in our new homes, our livestock long since dead from whatever disease came with the wind. Their leathery skin was our only nourishment, months had gone by since the smell of meat and machine was on the wind. Whatever was coming we knew came from the old world, an age the elders warn us of. The hubris of our ancestors brought about the wrath of the gods, and so they were punished. Many of us prayed that this punishment would soon end, as disease spread through the community at unprecedented speeds. Whole families died covered in filth and emaciated, but none could mark their passing without leaving their own shelters. Some devolved into cannibalism, drinking the blood and eating the bones of their own family before screaming to the surface, and becoming one with the storm. Loping off into the night, they joined the madness of the surface.
The Chieftain and warriors never returned. And so, I left my family beneath the earth, and visited the other huts. In some all I saw was horror, blood splashed on the walls, insane words written with waste, the bones chewed and broken. Some huts were broken into by some sort of animals, maybe the insane themselves. They shared a similar fate, pulped and eaten. In others I saw families merely broken husks, red eyes and muttering indescifrable words against the sound of thousands of throats screaming out in unison. In the ones that still held some semblance of sanity, I gathered a small group willing to brave the surface to follow in the steps of the last group. Our only hope was to find the source ourselves, and succeed where we imagined the previous failed. And so, we moved through the environment we once called our own, now much changed.
The sky was grey, smog covering the sun and blue sky. It smelled of exhaust and oil, meat cooked or left to rot. We covered our faces in the cleanest cloth we could find, dampening the scent as we could. Using the yellowed dying leaves we filled our ears, the violence of the peaks now slightly muffled, even as we could feel it in our bones. The rhythmic pounding we could not defeat, but after living underground for so long it was unoticable compared to the power we had felt before. The trees were gray, with decay still noticeable. Once proud and mighty pines were left defeated, bent under the unrelenting storm, yellow rot spreading amongst the roots and in between the bark. The needles lost all their color, unnaturally still against the ever moving forest. The ground a barren wasteland, where once was a true show of nature, green grass moving in the wind now nothing but soft dirt and pale slate. As we moved through the forest of the fallen, a grey snow began to fall. It tasted of soot, and burned our eyes as we moved through its softly falling flakes. We followed the grey creeks, devoid of color except black swirls of oil snaking its way down the mountain, corrupting the environment as it went. The scent only grew in intensity, now smelling of burst intestines and that coppery scent of blood. The lucky ones of the group managed to move their masks before vomiting what they had left in their stomachs, the unlucky ones too weak to move them as they filled their mouths and nose with bile. Some went back, one threw himself off the mountains, too overcome with insanity. Others were dragged screaming into the forest by once human abominations, stringy muscle and hairless scalps, eyes wide open and mouths ever screaming. They couldn't be heard, the noise, the never ending beat, it was always too late when they came. But still we continued on, for we had no choice. We crossed tortured peaks, found the husks of other mountain villages, either a den of insanity, with violent orgies in an attempt to appease the new god of the mountains, or devoid of all life, no sign of what happened to the inhabitants. Even still we continued on, occasionally picking up whoever would join us from those communities of the damned. Eventually we came across it, The Mountain.
As we crossed the last ridge, it came into sight. From a large distance it seemed like a veritable god, larger than any mountain in the range. It was grey, and smoked like a volcano about to burst. The noise rose to a crescendo, softly dimming as our hearing was pushed to the limit, and broken. The air itself had texture, greasy to the touch, hurting our lungs and eyes. It tasted of raw meat and smoke, a bastardization of nature. It wasn't until we got closer that we were revealed the true horror. Huge pipes snaked around the mountain, belching forth smog into the air, many sparking and igniting as the pure corruption combusted, cooking all around it. Where mountains are made of dirt and rock, what stood before us was made of flesh and metal and bone, a tortured mass of biology meshed with machinery. Thousands of mouths screamed, never in unison but as a discordant cacophony of noise, many vomiting out oil, crying out against what could only be everlasting pain. Spires of bone rose, jutting out of the vast expanses of flesh, wrapped by miles of pipelines and chords. Vistas of steel and lakes of oil covered the beast, spilling out onto the ground below. White sightless eyes flicked back and forth, the largest being thousands of feet across, the smallest the size of a fist. A mouth the size of a cavern twitched listlessly, bars extending like that of a jail door where teeth should be, tens of meters apart giving enough room for a small village to move through quickly, emitting a low whine. But despite the true scope and horror of the crime against all that lived, it was none of those that shot fear into us so deeply that some of us broke right then. For the mountain moved. Below its large hulk, millions of legs the size of our own carried the abomination, breaking under its own weight and lurching forward, bones jutting out as they are turned into paste under it. At its sides, gargantuan metallic legs like that of a spider slowly moved, pulling into the dirt and dragging it along with a rhythmic beat. As we grew closer, the more details we noticed and the more disgust we felt towards this living nightmare. Small wires stuck out, making fields of "grass", veins moving beneath the surface pushing forth the fuel to keep its unholy engine-heart running. Rivets kept entire expanses of steel in place, permanently grafted to the engine of pain. Forests were made of exhaust pipes, constantly expelling the waste of the creature as it moved forward, never ending. Its mouth forced open, held open by large roped cords of steel, it's lips pulled upward in a never ending scream, each eye constantly tearing with blood. Even in our revulsion however, each of us felt the pull. The curiosity, every part of us screaming against our will as we moved toward the mouth. We had to stop the beast, but it's perverse pull wouldn't lessen, and we followed the footsteps of hundreds before us. We approached the mouth-cavern, and stood before its opening. We felt fear as we looked into its depths, and knew that it looked back.