The Exile’s Last Ascent

Ten thousand steps have worn his boots to air,
Ten thousand nights have gnawed his name to bone.
Yet still he climbs, though reason’s torch expires,
To seek the peak where all his sins were sown.
The mountain, old as God’s first scorn for clay,
Guards secrets in its glacial ribcage deep—
A chalice forged from ice and human tears,
A throne where frozen giants go to sleep.

*“Turn back,”* the blizzard whispers, *“Child of Ash,
What glory waits in tombs of breathless white?
Your valor’s but a scar on Time’s cold cheek,
Your quest a dirge sung wrong by failing light.”*
But steel, though rusted, cleaves to ancient vows;
He carves his path through avalanches’ teeth,
Each crevasse gaping like a lover’s curse,
Each cornice bending like the sickle’s sheathe.

Three specters trail him—shades he dare not name:
The first, a youth who laughed in sunlit fields,
Now gaunt as famine, dragging chains of frost;
The second, one whose sword a kingdom sealed,
But here holds nothing save a mirrored helm
That shows his face as Death might sketch in smoke;
The third, a woman veiled in twilight’s weave,
Her voice a stringless lute’s remembered note.

*“Why mourn the hearths you chose to leave in embers?”*
She asks, her words like petals on a pyre.
*“The world below sprouts fresh and bloodless springs—
No room for knights who feed dragons desire.”*
He stumbles, grips a rock that shears his palm,
And marks the snow with rubies of his vein.
*“I seek no pardon, but the right to cease,
To lay my deeds where none may praise or blame.”*

Dawn comes—a sickly thing, all phlegm and gold—
To gild the hells he’s scaled since memory fled.
His fingers, clawed and blackened by the cold,
Now clutch a ledge where eagles make their bed.
Below, the clouds congeal like curdled milk;
Above, the summit’s crown of razored ice
Sings hymns only the damned or divine could bear,
A siren’s throat stretched taut in sacrifice.

Here, at the brink, he finds no dragon’s hoard,
No scroll of fate, no font to quench his thirst—
But etched in ice by some lost pilgrim’s hand,
A verse half-eaten by the wind’s accurst:
*“What exiles seek, they carry in their chests;
The peak but mirrors what the climber lacks.
Turn back, turn back, before the glacier’s glass
Shows every soul the weight of their own tracks.”*

A laugh escapes him—sharp, a raven’s cough—
As decades drop like cloaks around his feet.
Was it for this he let his kingdom fade?
For phantom honor, cold and obsolete?
The specters crowd him now, their breathless choir
A lullaby to numb the gnawing why.
The youth weeps silver; the warrior’s mirror cracks;
The woman lifts her veil… he shuts his eyes.

Yet in that dark, a warmth he thought long dead
Unfurls—a memory of hands once held,
Of wine spilled laughing on a summer throne,
Of vows not sworn to conquest, but to meld
Two hearts into a shelter from the storm.
But swift as hope, the glacier’s heartbeat slows,
The vision fades. The mountain, ever wise,
Knows exile’s end is not the end of snows.

He rises. Takes the final step. And falls—
Not down, but *through* the ice’s azure skin,
Where time dilutes to liquid, thick and sweet,
And silence drinks the echoes of his sin.
The peak, impartial, lets the blizzard trace
A shroud across his absence, smooth and pure.
No epitaph but wind’s ephemeral script,
No legacy but what the rocks endure.

Far below, in villages he once roamed,
Maidens weave tales of knights in crystal caves,
Of heroes throned where mortal feet dare not tread—
But none speak of the fool the mountain craved.
The chalice, throne, and giants’ frostbound keep
Remain, as all such fables do, unseen.
And in the snow, where two voids merged as one,
A single feather spins, forgot, serene.