The sun broke through the ever present gloom and revealed a vast, open plain. Mountains bordered from east to west in the distance. It was no valley, but a land on its own, wide enough to see the curve of the horizon just above the fog. In the middle of that land, perfectly marked as the centerpointe, was a mound. It was mountainous in size, as if all the rest of the hills and valleys that once rippled between the natural rises of the walled mountains beyond were dug up and flattened out in ages past to make the mound stand higher.

  Four travelers beheld the land. They arrived from the south, through a band of deep woods which ended at a crested hill that sloped down into the flatland. A perfect line was drawn where no trees grew. The trees along that border curiously grew no branches in the direction of the mound, their trunks were barren and bark smoothe to the touch all the way to their leafy boughs. It marked the separation from the world they fled into a new place.

  The tales were true, they realized. All at once a hideous thought appealed to them. This was the Mithilmondt. A mountain built long ago by those who spoke no modern language, whose history was spotted throughout the darkened ages of the past like mold upon a marble ceiling. The Mithilmondt was the final legacy of their epoch of disgrace, a tomb which marked the ages past, the grave of the land it stood upon.

  It was still miles away. The walk was long, but unimpeded. The flatland ground was firm and the traveling party trod across the rustling grass without rhythm. Their marching order remained unchanged since they departed.

  The knight led the way. He was a stalwart man a head higher than the rest protected by an armored cuirass over a chainmail hauberk with a tattered lower edge. He had a sword at his left hip and a short mace strapped to his right thigh. His marching pace and posture remained unchanged after many days and miles.

  Behind him was the thief. His lanky body was hidden beneath a veil of wide loosely tied robes hiked up and knotted together to form layers of pouches. His gait was heavy with everything he carried, but practiced as if it were no more of a burden than the knight’s gear.

  At the back was a young nun, a cleric in training. She wore the traveler’s garb of her church which was stained around the bottom hem with mud. Her habit was pinned in place to her hair, the needles just barely meeting her scalp. Her cowardice was deferred by her sense of duty.

  Behind her, equally on guard, was the scholar. He was the eldest of the troupe with hair in two tones of gray and a long beard tucked under his traveling leather chestpiece. He carried an antiquated satchel on his back which balanced out his steeply hunched back.

  The group walked for many miles across the flatland. The uninterrupted seclusion on all sides was somehow more disturbing than the blind alleys of the forest they just escaped. The tension of many days wore them all thin. The Mithilmondt remained constantly looming in the distance, never drawing closer no matter how far they walked. At length, they took a rest and took blankets from the scholar’s satchel to sit upon dry ground.

  The cleric girl ran her hand through the grass at her side. “It’s dry,” she said.

  “Not so dry to crumble,” the scholar noted. He plucked a handful and investigated it. “Dark, almost deciduous. This is not common planar grass, I’d think.”

  The knight drew provisions from the satchel. He passed a waterskin around, giving it to the girl first. She slaked her thirst and lent it to the old man, then he to the thief. The knight took the skin away before the thief could begin, had his portion, then let the thief have at the rest. The thief glowered at the accusatory gesture. He only took as much as the rest did and surrendered it once more, then quickly covered his face back up with a bandana.

  “We’re not camping out here, are we?” he asked, his voice soft and murmuring.

  “No,” the Knight said. “The base of the mound will have shelter. Will it not, scholar?”

  “That it shall,” the old man said. “The Mithilmondt as I have studied is a construct. The whole thing was made by ancient man, and to make it they had to staff it and thus coalesced all of their society together along its slopes. They built new homes as they reached new heights, and each time they abandoned their former stations they altered the insides to consecrate them as part of an ever growing tribute to their God.”

  The girl whispered a quiet prayer.

  “So it’s temples,” the thief asked, “all the way up?”

  “Abandoned?” the knight asked.

  “For an eon,” the scholar nodded. “All those who made it have left history behind. They are gone, now. All we have left are stories.”

  Each member of the group took on their reprieve in a different way. The knight checked his armor and equipment over and polished whatever he could. The girl clutched her holy book, all memorized, to her chest and closed her eyes to pray. The scholar stared long ahead to the mound and was deep in thought. The thief did the same. He sat away from the others in a brooding manner, as if to remain a stranger so close to the end of their journey.

  The sun moved across the sky, high in an arch as if avoiding the peak of the Mithilmondt. Half of their day was over. The rest would be spent scaling the tower as soon as they reached it. Nothing was present to offend or threaten them. The knight borrowed a spyglass from the scholar to check on the forest boundary. They had no followers. Not even birds flew past the tree line.

  Hours later, as evening threatened the sky with distant darkness, they arrived. The Mithilmondt was all they could see ahead and to either side. Above them stretched a city, warped and stretched upwards along the slant of an artificial mountainside. The buildings present to greet them nearest to the ground were clustered and collapsed into each other, too old to sustain through an eon of weathering. They had to scale higher to find the first usable structures.

  The architecture grew from antiquated stonework to smoothened, paved artisanship. These were buildings more akin to the reachable eras they knew from the south, where granite could be polished to shine like glass. Each individual building was but a stone worked hut. Some were empty, others repurposed with shrines and pedestals in the middle of otherwise usable space. Some had holes in the floor - their use seemed obvious by the decayed stains in the rock. These were not homes, but sections of an immense communal expanse.

  The main street of the vertical city rose ever upwards in steeper sections of stairways. The mound was segmented by each rising era of craftsmanship. It was as if they trekked through the very ages. Soon stonework decreased in favor of wooden braces filled by cobbled stone and mortar. Some of the walls were broken away, accidentally forming units of multiple rooms. They stopped at that level as the sun began to set. The knight found them a nearby hovel which was stable and large enough for all four to rest in comfortably. He shrouded the doorway with a tarp to keep the breeze out and they slumbered through the night.

  Partway through, in a blinding dark hour, the knight awoke and noticed that the thief was not in his bed. The other two were still fast asleep. He went out to investigate and saw the thief, a sagging shadow, walking from up the rounded road. The knight approached him in a hushed tone.

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  “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” the thief said. “There’s a latrine up that way if you need one.”

  The knight nodded. “Have you checked your tools?” The thief simply stared, his eyes the only bright things out of his entire frame. “Do you know they are safe?”

  “Yes,” the thief said. “It’s fine.”

  He tried to leave, but the knight seized his arm.

  “We all depend on one another,” he said. “That is the agreement.”

  “I know,” the thief said. “You wouldn’t have me otherwise, would you?”

  “I would have any man capable of the task,” the knight assured him. “I had a chance to choose. I chose you.”

  The thief politely shrugged his arm free. “Thank you, kindly,” he said. He entered the makeshift hovel, and the knight followed. They returned to sleep without another word. Anxiety visited them all in the night with fevered visions to plague their rest. They awoke the next morning all at the same time in an eerie coincidence. All of them were alerted in the same fashion, to the same thing.

  “Did you hear that?” the scholar asked. “That voice?”

  “It felt real,” the knight confirmed. “Stay here.” He reached for his mace and dashed out of the covered door. The force of his exit tore the tarp from its crook in the wall. The thief followed with his hand hidden inside one of the folds of his cloak. He saw the knight at the main road crossing and rushed to defend his back. They faced off against nothing at all.

  “This mountain intends to deceive us,” the knight said. “Some fae powers may still linger in its ancient depths.”

  “Then we bless them,” the thief said as his posture laxed. “Drive them all out.”

  “Indeed.” The knight put his mace back. The cleric and scholar joined the party once again. They only had to keep climbing to reach the true summit.

  Many eras of masonry, carpentry and social order passed them by. One of the top rungs struck them all with a deep, unnerving nostalgia. They passed by castled partitions, the beginnings of a fortress which encompassed the last stretch of the mountain top. It was visible from afar, the blocky cap of the Mithilmondt like a flat, iron crown. Above that was a piece which stood out, invisible from the base and middle but more prominent as they drew closer. It was their target, the unnatural mountain’s apex, that which gave the mountain its value.

  Before them, at the end of their climb, was a tomb. A massive cathedral rose as a spire, something unfounded by them all. The sides were smooth, vertical walls without a single mortar line or brick in sight. It was as if it were carved directly from the hardest rock, sculpted without a single crack to disfigure the pure artistry of it all. It was cross shaped, all sides equal. The peaks of each entryway were many stories up and steepled in segments like stairs.

  The four wings converged into a massive center which was rounded at the top yet cornered and angular at the bottom. Nothing was built on a diagonal. It was only increasingly wide square cuts and small, sliver lengths too narrow for even a finger to grasp. The highest point was barely visible as it was so high up and centralized in the built shape. A spire rose tall to the sky. The height was dizzying. The clouds seemed to warp around the highest point, as if they were afraid to be scrapped by the monolithic gray needle.

  The group patrolled together from the southern wing to the east. Along the way they saw the final additions of the ancient workers who lived to create such an awesome thing. The most diminutive grave markers imaginable filled all the empty space in the ground which was not occupied by the mausoleum’s expensive figure. The markers were all simple, blocks and bricks and errant stone piles, and were not arranged with the same precise symmetry as the creation whose shade they rested in.

  Each wing met a different main street, one for each side of the mountain, and each side equally built from the base with many buildings. The scholar looked out to the horizon and saw they were above the nearest mountain range. Mist blocked his view of the rest of the land beyond that, and distance stole any further discovery from him as the world folded over its own curve.

  The group finished their full patrol at the western door. The cleric walked around one more time reciting prayers to begin her consecration of the land. The scholar retrieved an old tome from his satchel and scanned its pages as he paced around.

  “Yes, this is it,” he said. He stepped up to the west wing and tapped on the wall. Its entrance, like the rest of them, started just wide enough for a person, then shrunk down as the angles within constricted downward, like a well organized and ornamental collapse. “From the west…and then the sunset…and so shall he who seeks the deepest tomb…uh, light shall bend the shadows and the distance will reverse into…This ancient language is so ridiculous.”

  “So we wait?” the thief asked.

  “Not long,” the knight said. “Once the girl returns, we eat.”

  “Ah, but gentlemen,” the scholar warned, “only one may enter. One must stay behind.”

  “Why?” the thief asked.

  “The entrance must be perceived,” he explained. “Someone has to….to stand out here and look at it as you go in. And stand in the way of the sun. But if they go in alone, they cannot.”

  “Very well,” the knight said. “I will stand and enable this ritual. One of you should go inside, carry out a short scouting, then return.”

  “Returning the same way is not possible,” the scholar said. “A return must be made through the eastern wing at sunrise. In the same manner.”

  The thief sighed. “So I’ll need at least a night’s worth of provisions just to duck my head in.”

  “Indeed,” the knight said. “The ancient magics impede us, but they will not stop us.”

  “I only have to risk my death of starvation,” the thief said. “Assuming this trick of the light doesn’t work the same way as the old book states.”

  “This book is truer than the men who hoarded it,” the scholar said. “The very treasure you coveted came from this encrypted place. Is that not the whole reason you volunteered for this?”

  “Would you not be better?” the thief asked. “To learn - that is your vocation.”

  “Then who shall read from this book?” he asked. “If something were to go wrong?”

  “What about the girl?” the thief asked. “She has as much of a reason to enter as I do.”

  “Friends,” the knight commanded, “let us not bicker now. Not here.”

  The cleric finally returned and concluded her session of prayers with the chime of a tiny bell. She stifled it and tucked it back behind her ear. “Are we ready to go in yet?”

  “Almost,” the thief said. “Only one of us can go in at a time. I’m heading in first.”

  “Oh,” she said, sullen. “Is that true?”

  “It is,” the scholar confirmed. “And at first light he will return. We can repeat this as much as is necessary until all of our curiosities and functions have been satisfied.”

  “Four days,” the knight said. “Four days more than what we were ready to spend here. But, it shall be a worthy find.”

  The cleric forced herself to nod.

  The group stood by and waited for the hour to arrive. The thief sat before the narrow hall with the knight just behind him in the way of the sun. He saw something beginning as the sun drew close to the mountain range far away. The shadows at the threshold of the doorway seemed to expand. It was like the structure decompressed and widened in subtle ways in his vision. He blinked and pressed his eyes but the phenomenon continued.

  Finally, as the sun reached its twilight distance, flat against the sky where it could stare long ahead at the peak of the Mithilmondt, the hallway was opened. The square cuts in the walls were close enough for the thief to run his fingers along them, and the way ahead was widened into a grand, echoing chamber. He took a step in, then another, past where the hallway was closed off before.

  “I’m off, then,” he called out.

  “We await your return, Nock.”

  As soon as the thief turned around, he saw only darkness. The echoing of the knight’s voice was cut out in the same moment, stolen away into the dark. He was alone again, lost inside of a vast open space devoid of light which defied his common senses. Nock reached into one of his pockets and took out a lump of was with a coiled wick that poked out of it like a thick worm through an apple. He knelt down, got some flint and iron from the same pouch pocket, and struck the candle to life. The flame burned close to the amber resin and gave it a peculiar golden glow.

  Nock was alone, under the peak of the Mithilmondt. Taken into its embrace where the very age of Gods was left buried for all time…