The Obsidian Foothills
Kai pressed his palm flat against the canyon’s exit wall and felt nothing. No hum. No grief. No memory. Just cold, dead stone that crumbled under his fingers like dried mud.
Lian stood beside him, her water-form so thin he could see the jagged rocks through her chest. The golden light that usually pulsed inside her had faded to a sickly yellow, the color of old bone. She hadn’t spoken in three hours. When she did speak, her voice came out as a dry rasp, like wind through cracked earth.
“The foothills are dead,” she said. “Shen has drained them dry.”
Kai pulled out his tablet and carved: *No songs at all?*
“None. The obsidian here is volcanic glass—it was born from the earth’s blood. But Shen has been drinking from this mountain for decades. The blood is gone. The stone is hollow.”
Kai looked past the canyon’s mouth. The Obsidian Foothills stretched before him like a black sea frozen mid-wave. The ground was sharp, jagged, and glittered with a dull sheen under the gray sky. No trees. No grass. No water. Just glass and shadow and the distant silhouette of Obsidian Peak—a black volcano that bled smoke into a bruise-colored sky.
He had to climb that.
His hands, calloused from years of carving stone, trembled. Not from fear. From the absence of song. He had grown so used to the earth’s voice that silence now felt like drowning.
Lian touched his shoulder. Her fingers were cold and dry, like dead leaves. “You cannot use songs here, Kai. Every vibration you make will be heard by Shen. His fortress is built on the spine of a dead god—he feels the mountain’s pulse through his feet. If you sing, he will know exactly where you are.”
Kai carved: *Then how do I climb?*
“With your hands. With your memory. With the stonecutter’s craft your foster father taught you.”
He remembered. Old Chen, the man who had found him as a baby wrapped in riverweed, had spent fifteen winters teaching Kai how to read stone. How to find its grain, its weakness, its hidden veins. How to strike with the chisel at the exact angle to split a boulder cleanly in two. How to carve a handhold that would bear a man’s weight even when the rock was wet with rain.
“You are not a singer here,” Lian said. “You are a stonecutter. Be that.”
Kai nodded. He tucked his tablet into his satchel, tightened the rope around his waist, and stepped onto the obsidian.
The first step was the hardest. The glass crunched under his sandals, and the sound echoed across the empty plain like a scream. He froze, heart hammering. But no alarm sounded. No puppet warriors emerged from the black rock.
He took another step. Then another.
The obsidian was sharp. Within fifty paces, his sandals were cut to ribbons. He stopped, pulled them off, and tied the leather strips around his feet. The glass sliced through the leather in another thirty paces. He wrapped the remaining strips around his palms and kept walking.
Lian floated beside him, silent. Her feet didn’t touch the ground. She was conserving her strength, he realized. Every moment she spent manifesting in the physical world drained her. And here, in this dead land, there was no river water to replenish her.
By the time they reached the base of the first slope, Kai’s feet were bleeding. He left dark footprints on the black glass. The pain was sharp and constant, but he had learned long ago that pain was just another kind of vibration. He let it hum through him, let it keep him awake, let it remind him that he was still alive.
The slope rose at a forty-degree angle. Kai pressed his fingers against the obsidian and felt for its grain. The glass was smooth, almost polished, but there were tiny fractures running through it—stress lines from ancient cooling. He found one that ran diagonally upward and wedged his fingers into it.
He pulled himself up. His bleeding feet scrabbled for purchase. He found a crack, pushed, and rose another handspan.
Then another.
Then another.
The climb took hours. The sun crawled across the sky, a pale disc behind the smoke. Kai’s arms burned. His fingers bled. His knees knocked against the glass and split open. He kept climbing.
Lian watched. She didn’t offer help. She couldn’t. Her form flickered like a candle in wind, and Kai knew that if she touched him, she might dissolve entirely.
At one point, he slipped. His hand lost its grip, and he slid three body-lengths down the slope, scraping his chest and stomach raw against the obsidian. He came to a stop against a jagged outcropping, gasping. Blood dripped from his chin.
He lay there for a long moment, staring at the sky. The smoke from Obsidian Peak had turned the clouds black. They looked like bruises. Like the welts on his foster father’s back after the puppet warriors had beaten him for refusing to give up the sacred spring’s location.
Old Chen had died for that spring. For a handful of water that had already been drained dry by the time Kai reached it.
Kai pushed himself up. He found a new crack. He climbed.
The sun set. The sky turned purple, then black. The obsidian foothills glittered with starlight, and Kai realized he could see his own reflection in the glass—a thin, bloody boy with hollow cheeks and wild eyes. He looked like a ghost.
He kept climbing.
At midnight, he reached a ledge wide enough to sit on. His body screamed. His hands were raw meat. His feet were unrecognizable. He pulled out his water gourd and drank the last of it—warm, stale, precious.
Lian sat beside him. Her form was barely visible now, just a shimmer in the air. “You are doing well,” she said. Her voice was a whisper.
Kai carved into his tablet with shaking hands: *How much farther?*
“Three more days.”
He stared at her. Three days of this. Three days of bleeding, climbing, and silence. He would die before he reached the top.
Lian seemed to read his thoughts. “You won’t die. You are the mountain’s voice. The mountain will not let you fall.”
Kai wanted to argue. He wanted to scream. But he had no voice to scream with, and no strength to carve the words. So he just sat there, breathing, bleeding, and staring at the black peak that loomed above him like a tombstone.
He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew, the sky was gray with dawn. Lian was gone. For a terrifying moment, he thought she had dissolved completely. Then he saw her—a faint shimmer at the edge of the ledge, barely visible against the black rock.
She was waiting for him.
Kai stood. His legs wobbled. His hands screamed. He found a crack in the obsidian and climbed.
The second day was worse. The obsidian grew sharper, as if the mountain itself was trying to cut him away. The cracks became fewer, forcing him to carve his own handholds with a small chisel he kept in his satchel. Each strike of the chisel sent a jolt through his arm. Each jolt echoed across the silent foothills.
He tried to strike softly. He tried to be quiet. But the obsidian was hard, and his arms were weak, and every blow sounded like a thunderclap in the dead air.
By noon, he had carved twelve handholds. By dusk, he had carved thirty. His chisel was dull. His arms were numb. He no longer felt the cuts on his feet—they had gone numb too, which frightened him more than the pain had.
Lian spoke once, near sunset. “You are passing the place where the god’s ribs were broken.”
Kai looked down. The obsidian below him was veined with white—quartz, he realized. The god’s shattered bones. He was climbing a corpse.
He kept climbing.
On the third morning, Kai woke to find his hands had stopped bleeding. The wounds had crusted over with black scabs that looked like obsidian. He flexed his fingers. They moved, but stiffly, as if the joints had rusted.
He didn’t have the strength to carve a question. He just looked at Lian.
“The mountain is accepting you,” she said. “It recognizes you as kin.”
Kai didn’t feel like kin. He felt like a fly crawling up a corpse. But he stood, found a crack, and climbed.
The third day passed in a blur of pain and silence. Kai stopped thinking. He stopped feeling. He became a machine of movement—reach, grip, pull, reach, grip, pull. His world narrowed to the next handhold, the next foothold, the next breath.
The sun set again. The stars came out. Kai climbed through the night, guided by the faint glow of Lian’s fading light.
And then, just before dawn, he reached the top.
The summit of Obsidian Peak was flat, a black plateau the size of a village square. In the center stood a massive array—a circle of runes carved into the obsidian, each one glowing with a sickly red light. The runes pulsed like a heartbeat, and at the center of the array stood a man.
Lord Shen.
He was tall, with skin the color of ash and eyes that burned like embers. He wore robes of black silk embroidered with golden veins, and his hair was white, long, and tangled like roots. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, watching Kai with the calm patience of a predator who had already caught its prey.
“The broken boy,” Shen said. His voice was deep, smooth, and carried the weight of centuries. “I wondered when you would arrive.”
Kai stood at the edge of the summit, swaying. His body was a ruin. His hands were claws. His feet were pulp. He could barely stand.
Lian materialized beside him, a ghost of light. “Shen,” she said. Her voice was barely audible.
Shen smiled. “Lian. The Great River’s spirit. You look well.” He paused. “No, you don’t. You look like a puddle about to evaporate.”
Lian didn’t respond. She was too weak.
Shen turned his attention back to Kai. “You’ve come far, boy. You’ve gathered songs from the Sunken Forest, the Sky-Salt Desert, the Whisper Canyons. You’ve climbed my mountain without using a single vibration. Impressive.” He tilted his head. “But you’re too late.”
He gestured to the array. At its center, a crystal heart pulsed—the Last Mountain’s core, stolen and brought here to be drained. The red light pulsed through it, and Kai could feel the mountain’s agony vibrating through the obsidian beneath his feet.
“In three hours,” Shen said, “the Last Mountain will die. Its song will be mine. And with it, I will forge a body that cannot be broken, a soul that cannot be drained, a life that cannot end.”
Kai’s hands clenched into fists. His nails bit into his palms. Blood dripped onto the obsidian.
Shen laughed. “What will you do, broken boy? Throw pebbles at me? Carve a pretty message? You have no voice. You have no power. You are nothing but a mute child playing with stones.”
Kai looked at Lian. She was fading, her light almost gone. She met his eyes and whispered, “You are not broken.”
He looked at the array. At the crystal heart. At the mountain’s agony.
And then he did something he had never done before.
He screamed.
No sound came out. His throat was a scarred hollow, a wound that had never healed. But the scream wasn’t meant for his throat. It was meant for his hands.
He slammed his palms against the obsidian. The mountain felt him. The dead god’s spine felt him. And the mountain screamed back.
A shockwave erupted from Kai’s hands. The obsidian cracked. The array shattered. The red light flickered and died. The fortress walls groaned, and a massive fissure split the summit, sending Shen stumbling backward.
Shen’s eyes widened. “Impossible.”
Kai stood in the center of the broken array, his hands smoking, his blood sizzling on the obsidian. He looked at Shen.
And for the first time, Shen looked afraid.
Lian stood beside him, her water-form so thin he could see the jagged rocks through her chest. The golden light that usually pulsed inside her had faded to a sickly yellow, the color of old bone. She hadn’t spoken in three hours. When she did speak, her voice came out as a dry rasp, like wind through cracked earth.
“The foothills are dead,” she said. “Shen has drained them dry.”
Kai pulled out his tablet and carved: *No songs at all?*
“None. The obsidian here is volcanic glass—it was born from the earth’s blood. But Shen has been drinking from this mountain for decades. The blood is gone. The stone is hollow.”
Kai looked past the canyon’s mouth. The Obsidian Foothills stretched before him like a black sea frozen mid-wave. The ground was sharp, jagged, and glittered with a dull sheen under the gray sky. No trees. No grass. No water. Just glass and shadow and the distant silhouette of Obsidian Peak—a black volcano that bled smoke into a bruise-colored sky.
He had to climb that.
His hands, calloused from years of carving stone, trembled. Not from fear. From the absence of song. He had grown so used to the earth’s voice that silence now felt like drowning.
Lian touched his shoulder. Her fingers were cold and dry, like dead leaves. “You cannot use songs here, Kai. Every vibration you make will be heard by Shen. His fortress is built on the spine of a dead god—he feels the mountain’s pulse through his feet. If you sing, he will know exactly where you are.”
Kai carved: *Then how do I climb?*
“With your hands. With your memory. With the stonecutter’s craft your foster father taught you.”
He remembered. Old Chen, the man who had found him as a baby wrapped in riverweed, had spent fifteen winters teaching Kai how to read stone. How to find its grain, its weakness, its hidden veins. How to strike with the chisel at the exact angle to split a boulder cleanly in two. How to carve a handhold that would bear a man’s weight even when the rock was wet with rain.
“You are not a singer here,” Lian said. “You are a stonecutter. Be that.”
Kai nodded. He tucked his tablet into his satchel, tightened the rope around his waist, and stepped onto the obsidian.
The first step was the hardest. The glass crunched under his sandals, and the sound echoed across the empty plain like a scream. He froze, heart hammering. But no alarm sounded. No puppet warriors emerged from the black rock.
He took another step. Then another.
The obsidian was sharp. Within fifty paces, his sandals were cut to ribbons. He stopped, pulled them off, and tied the leather strips around his feet. The glass sliced through the leather in another thirty paces. He wrapped the remaining strips around his palms and kept walking.
Lian floated beside him, silent. Her feet didn’t touch the ground. She was conserving her strength, he realized. Every moment she spent manifesting in the physical world drained her. And here, in this dead land, there was no river water to replenish her.
By the time they reached the base of the first slope, Kai’s feet were bleeding. He left dark footprints on the black glass. The pain was sharp and constant, but he had learned long ago that pain was just another kind of vibration. He let it hum through him, let it keep him awake, let it remind him that he was still alive.
The slope rose at a forty-degree angle. Kai pressed his fingers against the obsidian and felt for its grain. The glass was smooth, almost polished, but there were tiny fractures running through it—stress lines from ancient cooling. He found one that ran diagonally upward and wedged his fingers into it.
He pulled himself up. His bleeding feet scrabbled for purchase. He found a crack, pushed, and rose another handspan.
Then another.
Then another.
The climb took hours. The sun crawled across the sky, a pale disc behind the smoke. Kai’s arms burned. His fingers bled. His knees knocked against the glass and split open. He kept climbing.
Lian watched. She didn’t offer help. She couldn’t. Her form flickered like a candle in wind, and Kai knew that if she touched him, she might dissolve entirely.
At one point, he slipped. His hand lost its grip, and he slid three body-lengths down the slope, scraping his chest and stomach raw against the obsidian. He came to a stop against a jagged outcropping, gasping. Blood dripped from his chin.
He lay there for a long moment, staring at the sky. The smoke from Obsidian Peak had turned the clouds black. They looked like bruises. Like the welts on his foster father’s back after the puppet warriors had beaten him for refusing to give up the sacred spring’s location.
Old Chen had died for that spring. For a handful of water that had already been drained dry by the time Kai reached it.
Kai pushed himself up. He found a new crack. He climbed.
The sun set. The sky turned purple, then black. The obsidian foothills glittered with starlight, and Kai realized he could see his own reflection in the glass—a thin, bloody boy with hollow cheeks and wild eyes. He looked like a ghost.
He kept climbing.
At midnight, he reached a ledge wide enough to sit on. His body screamed. His hands were raw meat. His feet were unrecognizable. He pulled out his water gourd and drank the last of it—warm, stale, precious.
Lian sat beside him. Her form was barely visible now, just a shimmer in the air. “You are doing well,” she said. Her voice was a whisper.
Kai carved into his tablet with shaking hands: *How much farther?*
“Three more days.”
He stared at her. Three days of this. Three days of bleeding, climbing, and silence. He would die before he reached the top.
Lian seemed to read his thoughts. “You won’t die. You are the mountain’s voice. The mountain will not let you fall.”
Kai wanted to argue. He wanted to scream. But he had no voice to scream with, and no strength to carve the words. So he just sat there, breathing, bleeding, and staring at the black peak that loomed above him like a tombstone.
He must have fallen asleep, because the next thing he knew, the sky was gray with dawn. Lian was gone. For a terrifying moment, he thought she had dissolved completely. Then he saw her—a faint shimmer at the edge of the ledge, barely visible against the black rock.
She was waiting for him.
Kai stood. His legs wobbled. His hands screamed. He found a crack in the obsidian and climbed.
The second day was worse. The obsidian grew sharper, as if the mountain itself was trying to cut him away. The cracks became fewer, forcing him to carve his own handholds with a small chisel he kept in his satchel. Each strike of the chisel sent a jolt through his arm. Each jolt echoed across the silent foothills.
He tried to strike softly. He tried to be quiet. But the obsidian was hard, and his arms were weak, and every blow sounded like a thunderclap in the dead air.
By noon, he had carved twelve handholds. By dusk, he had carved thirty. His chisel was dull. His arms were numb. He no longer felt the cuts on his feet—they had gone numb too, which frightened him more than the pain had.
Lian spoke once, near sunset. “You are passing the place where the god’s ribs were broken.”
Kai looked down. The obsidian below him was veined with white—quartz, he realized. The god’s shattered bones. He was climbing a corpse.
He kept climbing.
On the third morning, Kai woke to find his hands had stopped bleeding. The wounds had crusted over with black scabs that looked like obsidian. He flexed his fingers. They moved, but stiffly, as if the joints had rusted.
He didn’t have the strength to carve a question. He just looked at Lian.
“The mountain is accepting you,” she said. “It recognizes you as kin.”
Kai didn’t feel like kin. He felt like a fly crawling up a corpse. But he stood, found a crack, and climbed.
The third day passed in a blur of pain and silence. Kai stopped thinking. He stopped feeling. He became a machine of movement—reach, grip, pull, reach, grip, pull. His world narrowed to the next handhold, the next foothold, the next breath.
The sun set again. The stars came out. Kai climbed through the night, guided by the faint glow of Lian’s fading light.
And then, just before dawn, he reached the top.
The summit of Obsidian Peak was flat, a black plateau the size of a village square. In the center stood a massive array—a circle of runes carved into the obsidian, each one glowing with a sickly red light. The runes pulsed like a heartbeat, and at the center of the array stood a man.
Lord Shen.
He was tall, with skin the color of ash and eyes that burned like embers. He wore robes of black silk embroidered with golden veins, and his hair was white, long, and tangled like roots. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back, watching Kai with the calm patience of a predator who had already caught its prey.
“The broken boy,” Shen said. His voice was deep, smooth, and carried the weight of centuries. “I wondered when you would arrive.”
Kai stood at the edge of the summit, swaying. His body was a ruin. His hands were claws. His feet were pulp. He could barely stand.
Lian materialized beside him, a ghost of light. “Shen,” she said. Her voice was barely audible.
Shen smiled. “Lian. The Great River’s spirit. You look well.” He paused. “No, you don’t. You look like a puddle about to evaporate.”
Lian didn’t respond. She was too weak.
Shen turned his attention back to Kai. “You’ve come far, boy. You’ve gathered songs from the Sunken Forest, the Sky-Salt Desert, the Whisper Canyons. You’ve climbed my mountain without using a single vibration. Impressive.” He tilted his head. “But you’re too late.”
He gestured to the array. At its center, a crystal heart pulsed—the Last Mountain’s core, stolen and brought here to be drained. The red light pulsed through it, and Kai could feel the mountain’s agony vibrating through the obsidian beneath his feet.
“In three hours,” Shen said, “the Last Mountain will die. Its song will be mine. And with it, I will forge a body that cannot be broken, a soul that cannot be drained, a life that cannot end.”
Kai’s hands clenched into fists. His nails bit into his palms. Blood dripped onto the obsidian.
Shen laughed. “What will you do, broken boy? Throw pebbles at me? Carve a pretty message? You have no voice. You have no power. You are nothing but a mute child playing with stones.”
Kai looked at Lian. She was fading, her light almost gone. She met his eyes and whispered, “You are not broken.”
He looked at the array. At the crystal heart. At the mountain’s agony.
And then he did something he had never done before.
He screamed.
No sound came out. His throat was a scarred hollow, a wound that had never healed. But the scream wasn’t meant for his throat. It was meant for his hands.
He slammed his palms against the obsidian. The mountain felt him. The dead god’s spine felt him. And the mountain screamed back.
A shockwave erupted from Kai’s hands. The obsidian cracked. The array shattered. The red light flickered and died. The fortress walls groaned, and a massive fissure split the summit, sending Shen stumbling backward.
Shen’s eyes widened. “Impossible.”
Kai stood in the center of the broken array, his hands smoking, his blood sizzling on the obsidian. He looked at Shen.
And for the first time, Shen looked afraid.