The Mountains of Mourning

Book 2 - Chapter 5 - Giselle

Giselle flailed wildly, trying to get hold of the world around her, gain some purchase on the now totally elusive rock wall that enveloped her, tried to move back.

It took a minute before she realized her lungs didn't burst. She wasn't choking. She wasn't even breathing, not just holding her breath.

Not breathing!

The lack of the familiar thumb in her chest sent another wave of panic through her. No slow stream of air through her throat, not the gentle movement of her ribs. Nothing at all.

Her thoughts came back together as the initial panic eased.

Not breathing... but not dying either.

She knew she had her eyes squeezed shut, but she couldn't feel them. Every part of her had become numb, no, more than that. It was no longer there. There was nothing left of her but the voice in her head.

That wasn't entirely true. She heard the music again, heard it with the ears she no longer had, feeling it with the body that had dissolved into the stone.

Open your eyes.

She had to see, no matter how terrifying it might be.

Opening her eyes, having no physical control, was hard. It was more like remembering the act of opening them. One moment she was in total darkness. The next she was... well, still in darkness, but it had a distinct quality. For one, she could see through the rock. She saw the stone that enclosed her as a void, not a massive structure. She hovered in nothingness, and on the edge of that, she saw the faint light of the cave, and the bodies huddling against the back wall. The fire at the entrance blazed white hot in her vision and she threw up her hands to shield her eyes from the glare.

Nothing happened. She knew she had put her hands over her eyes, but there was nothing there. Looking down, she saw nothing. No, that wasn't true either. She saw into the rock, saw shadowed shapes deep down, but what she didn't see was her body. It wasn't there anymore. Instead, she floated inside the mountain, intangible and invisible like a specter.

I'm dead!

The thought flashed through her mind. Was she dead? Was her body there, with those people, trampled into a pulp?

She wanted to go back there. Petal was there. She had to... had to...

There was no way she could go back, even if she could get some control over her spectral body back. The mass of people pressed against each other, body against body, no space to breathe, everyone locking her in... She couldn't go back to that.

Without knowing how she did it, she turned around, looking in the other direction. All around her was a shadowy darkness, but just as with the shallow cave, there was a space there, clearly lined. The darkness was less deep there, a light gloom. It looked like a larger space, a cave, or something like that.

Without thinking too much about it, she started to walk towards it. To her surprise, it worked. No frantic milling around of arms and legs, just ignoring her surroundings, ignoring her situation, and tell her body she was walking on solid ground, through air.

She moved her legs as she always had, sometimes losing grip on her movement as she forgot to hang on to that familiar feeling. Did anyone ever think about how to walk when they moved? How their muscles and bones worked, what her brain had to do to get those legs into motion? She never had. It was slow, but she moved towards the cave, one fumbling blind and numb step at a time.

When she burst through the barrier of that dark, almost suffocating rock wall, tumbling into the cave, gravity once more took hold of her. She dropped to the ground, the dry grit scraping the palms of her hands. The reflexive breath she took inhaled air that tasted and smelled stale and slightly moldy, like wet old leather boots.