Finua

Chapter 17: The Threshold

The first change I noticed was the wind. It grew much colder, very quickly. I grew up on a mountaintop, but it wasn't like a mountaintop mountaintop. Sh'raitha was fairly temperate, with several bitterly frozen weeks every winter and a mildly irksome month of heat in the summer. But this was real. This was a legit mountaintop, or at least a path leading up to one. Within days of our setting out from the riverbank, the Northflow lazed subtly east, and we diverged from it and felt the ground grow steeper beneath our feet.

By the morning after the raid, the adrenaline of battle and of chaotically fluid circumstances had worn off, and, of course, being a harpy, Cooper began to mourn. It was a hell of a thing, witnessing grief when temperatures were dropping half a degree with every mile traveled. She cried at night when she had the cover of darkness as privacy, and during the day she was very antisocial and dismissive of everyone. Valdopeer, being the only non-goblin of the lot who was also capable of abstract thought, pleaded with the rest of us to understand and give her "time and space," as if her touchiness was somehow related to the theory of relativity.

But either way, we did. I thought of it as taking care of a drunken friend while sober: you feel nothing of what she was feeling, and technically it was her fault for putting herself in that situation, but you still hold her hair back over the porch rail because she's smart and can fly short distances. At least she kept moving and didn't spend her entire mourning period on the riverbed.

She was also completely frozen. While goblins, trolls, and bears are very hardy, weather-resistant creatures, harpies are not. Harpies are fucking birds. As temperature was replaced with altitude, Cooper's feathers became less and less useful as insulation, and she began to lag behind and lose her focus and dexterity. She probably would have died within the next week if we hadn't come across a random campsite that traded us some blankets and clothes for the low price of decapitation. Once Cooper was nice and bundled up, she skipped at least two stages of grief and spearheaded the party.

"What is this mountain even called?" Myrtle asked.

"I don't know, I don't think it really matters," Cooper answered.

One day, as we were spiraling around the edge of a pass, we found ourselves faced with a massive, expansive vista. It was fairly early, so there was still a lot of mist in the air, which gave the view a very ethereal and painterly look. It was a big collection of ridges, with some higher peaks thrown in, like a field of crops sprinkled with low bushy trees. One of the peaks I recognized.

I stood and stared, agape, at Sh'raitha, visible as a hazy little cone a hundred miles away. Such a lonely sense of longing washed over me that I didn't even know what to do. Almost everyone who had lived on that mountain peak was now dead. Everyone... but that was eight months ago. Were others living there now? What happened to the mine? What happened to my town? Eight months! It was forever and yesterday balled into one, like a sculpture of water or cloth that was carved out of marble.

Yusla came and stood beside me. He, Lugoke, and I were the only ones left. Well, and Kwer. But Kwer didn't know what the hell was going on. She didn't recognize shit. She just sat back on her ass and waited, her chain frosted and sticking to the raw grooves it had dug into her neck and shoulders.

Everyone else stopped and looked back at us.

"What are you looking at?" Valdopeer asked.

"That was our home," Yusla answered, pointing to the distant peak, looking oddly childlike when he did so.

"Your home, huh?" Cooper repeated. She sounded a bit bemused.

"Allow us this one sentiment," Lugoke said gruffly.