Do not climb the mountain.
If you climb the mountain, you may catch sight of the woman who patrols it. On the mountain, there are two of this woman. One lives inside a locket, seventeen and impossibly beautiful, her smile untainted by fear or worry. The other's face is hideously disfigured, twisted around an old scar—but the disfigured face is honest. Her eyes work perfectly, and when she encounters you during her patrol, she will shoot on sight. She will not miss.
She will go back to a house she built herself, with supernatural strength and force of will, from felled logs and the guts of a flying machine. It is a chimera of a house, made of rough wood and brushed steel, but she has never felt as at home anywhere as much as here. She will go back to a girl who cannot speak, who will make words with her hands when her body language won't do.
She will fight, always. She will never break herself of the worry that they will someday be found. She will practice her fighting techniques once a day and bathe in the icy river to discipline herself. She refuses to be a civilian. She will always be a soldier. This is how she has chosen to live, how she has chosen to mark this mountain.
Before the winter, she will come down from the mountain and buy supplies from the townsfolk, who are never sure how she carries it all back up. But they do not ask, she does not tell, and she returns to the mountain, never having to tell people that she is not to be followed. Those who climb the mountain never return.
Do not climb the mountain.
If you climb the mountain, you may find yellow eyes looking back at you from your shadow. These eyes will be the last thing you ever see. You will not be the preferred prey of the eyes' owner, but the owner will have seen enough killing to know that sometimes she won't always get what she came for. With that in mind, she will hunt and trap, but mostly hunt. The animals she will kill, skin, and take apart will become food, clothing, and art supplies. But she will try not to hunt too often. She will be neither completely human nor completely animal, and so she will understand the tenuous balance that she must strike between the two.
She will understand a great many things, but especially the power of listening. A throwing knife will have robbed her of the ability to speak, but she also lost the ability to interrupt and to exclaim. So she will learn to listen. She will listen to the sounds of the forest and the music of the wind. She will listen to the songs the clouds sing. She will listen to her friends' breathing at night, and to the snores of the woman who sleeps in her bed. She listens to the cold metal of the locket on her chest.
But she will speak, too, in her own way. This woman will learn to sign, and all the members of her house who can will have learned to sign back, even though it's easier just to talk most of the time. One of her housemates will have been blind for a long time, so this one can't sign, so the yellow-eyed woman will go out of her way to communicate with her in Braille notes, small favors, gentle touches. But between the yellow-eyed woman and the blind one, there will be a darkness difficult to breach.
Darkness will be the element of this woman. Those who climb the mountain at night learn well that she is a light sleeper, because she is always listening.
Do not climb the mountain.
If you climb the mountain, you may find a house by happy accident. You will feel cold as you approach it, and you may put this down to a sudden chill. You will be wrong. The statue you freeze into will be shattered by an heiress in hard-wearing leather boots. The heiress will bury the leftover pieces of you behind her house and in an hour will have forgotten you in favor of her work.
The heiress will write. Sometimes she'll write poems with ten word long titles, other times stories. In the winters she will write large novels she never finishes, because when the end is in sight the sun will return and melts the snow away, and she can't reflect without it. But mostly what she will write is oral histories. She will ask her housemates about their life stories. Where they're from, their hobbies, their wartime experiences. She will write up essays on themes: virginity, war, art.
In what passes for spare time, she will the blind woman about her life in excruciating detail. She is writing a biography, gathering and parsing information. This will be her true life's work. In the room she and the blind woman share, sheaves of paper will be scattered like fallen leaves, and no one else will understand how they are organized. But when she is done, she will make copies of the biography and send them abroad through great communication towers. She will make sure the whole world sees this story.
The air around her is cold, but if you are good at concealing yourself, you may see her pressing her mouth to that of the blind woman in corners when she thinks she is invisible. Then, despite her freezing aura, this woman's mouth becomes hot. Then, falling into the shadows, she will make love to this blind woman, this woman called Reaper. And when she is done, she will notice you, and she will freeze you solid for daring to invade the Eden where even God never dared to tread. Those who sneak up the mountain find that winter is always waiting.
Do not climb the mountain.
If you evade the other three women, you may find one in dark sunglasses. She will be outside, tending to a garden, feeling vegetables for their ripeness, turning soil, watering, fertilizing. She is used to combat fatigues, but she will be wearing a sundress and a straw hat. She will look like a painting.
She will not see you, but she will know you're there. She will congratulate you for making it this far, and laugh when you do not understand that you have survived only by the graces of God. She will invite you in for a cup of green tea, and she will tell you a story. A story of oppression, resistance, war. She will tell you about crimes that make you sweat. This sweet gardener will talk about disfiguring and disabling people she has loved more than anything else in the world, and her tone of voice will make it seem like small talk.
When the tea is gone she will steep the leaves again and keep talking. She will tell you about how she adjusted to blindness, how the sweet taste of bell peppers from her garden once stopped her from opening her arteries. She knows too much about how to die. It has taken her until now, in her middle age, to think about how to live.
You will be shaken. She will take you outside, and you will wonder at how sure her steps are, for someone who is blind. She will smile, and tell you a secret: her empty eyes still have power. It is not a power of battle. It is a power of understanding. In the ruins of her sight she found the silence of the world and made it part of herself. She is something beyond you, and beyond herself. You will not understand. When she snaps your neck from behind, you will feel profound relief.
The mountain is gentle, the mountain is blind. Those who climb the mountain and find sweetness never take care to check for fangs.
They die. It will not be all at once. They will die like ice melting, a little at a time until it is all gone. The woman with yellow eyes goes first. She will simply wilt and disappear, burned out before her time. She will be buried in a grave marked with black flowers, and a cross lashed together with a ribbon. The fighter is next. Loneliness has never suited her.
It will just be the blind woman and her lover, and the blind woman is the next to die. The only survivor will finish her biography with a flourish and use the technology left in the ship to send it as many places as she can think of. She will know that the transmission is traceable. The house will still be enough ship to take off, and for the first time in over a decade, the mountain will be empty of human life.
She will fly out over the ocean and search for something to belong to. She will die before she finds it—but not before she understands that she will never find it. She will make peace with death and pass from the world as the nose of the ship dips toward the waves, her soul joining the black exhaust as it spirals up toward heaven. She will not see the irony. Neither will you.