The Orphan’s Ascent to Veil of Frozen Stars

Ten years had fled since first he learned the name
Of truths that orphaned hearts are sworn to seek:
A locket rusted shut, a mother’s claim
Half-heard in fever-dreams, her voice so weak
It melted with the frost. “Ascend,” she’d sighed,
“Where heaven’s gate weeps tears of diamond light,
There waits your cradle, where the storm winds hide
The chronicles of blood the stars once wrote.”

He’d clutched that vow—her ghost’s last sacrament—
As monks clutch relics in their trembling palms,
And pledged to scale the spire heaven-bent,
To pry from glaciers truth’s unbreaking calms.
Yet now, as cliffs grew fangs and winds turned knives,
He faltered, footsoles raw as butchered meat,
His eyelids crusted shut with frozen lives
Of tears that dared not fall, nor admit defeat.

“Press on,” a rasping whisper cleft the gale—
Not wind, but memory’s gilded counterfeit.
Before him stood the crone, her face as pale
As moth-chewed shrouds, her eyes twin coals alit.
She’d found him once, a babe in raven woods,
And reared him on the milk of fables spun
From spider-silk and shadow. Now she stood,
A specter fed by snowlight, come undone.

“You vowed,” the boy accused, his voice a crack
Through glacier-flesh. “You swore to guide my tread!”
The crone’s laugh clattered like bones stripped bare of slack.
“Child, vows are but the lies the desperate wed.
Turn back. The summit holds no locket’s gleam,
No mother’s bones to bless your orphaned claim.
This mountain is a mirror, cold and keen—
Its truth will gnaw your soul to empty flame.”

He gripped her ghostly shawl, though fingers bled
Icicles incarnate. “Liar!” he screamed.
“You, who hoarded maps to wake the dead,
Who stoked this pilgrimage with lies redeemed—
I’ll carve my epitaph in ice, if must,
But kneel I shall not to your hollow lore!”
Her form dissolved to smoke and mocking dust,
As avalanches roared their grim encore.

Three sunless days he grappled with the slope,
A mote of grit in wrath’s white-whirling maw.
The locket’s chain grew tight, a spectral rope
That strangled warmth, yet nourished him with awe.
At last, beneath a cataract of stars,
He breached the summit’s throat—a plateau vast
As absolution, where the frozen airs
Hung heavy with the scent of long-past blasts.

No cradle carved in ice, no tomb, no scroll—
Just endless white, the void’s gaping reply.
The locket, clutched, now seemed a dead man’s toll,
Its rusted hinge the sum of his life’s why.
He pried it open—palm blood-slicked and torn—
To find naught but a lock of silver hair,
A curl as insubstantial as the morn’s
First sigh, which mountain winds soon stripped to air.

“So this,” he breathed, “is what the phantoms sell—
A wisp of thread to darn the rags of hope?”
The summit shivered, tolling like a bell,
As frost began to lace his lungs’ last scope.
He sank, a fallen star in snow’s embrace,
The locket cold against his stiffening chest.
High overhead, the crone’s derisive face
Melted into the dawn’s indifferent zest.

The mountain, ever-patient, ever-wise,
Retrieved his bones by spring’s first tentative hand,
And cradled them where no mortal surmise
Might resurrect the boy who sought the land
Of promises. Now climbers, brave or mad,
Pause where a locket’s ghost embeds the ice—
A fleck of rust where two small names once clad
In gilt now sleep, erased by winter’s vice.

Thus ends the tale of truths no summit keeps,
Of orphans led by phantoms dressed as dawn.
The mountain breathes, and all who dare its steeps
Are scribes of epics never to be drawn.
For every step toward light’s illusory throne
But etches deeper in the frost’s stark page:
The truest crown this world has ever known
Is wrought of ice, and carved by pilgrimage.