The Forest

Pinnacles

She smiled inside knowing it was time for them to go.  He blew her a kiss, catching it quickly in one hand before its release like he did when he was little and whispered, "caught it," and she remembered a little boy's confusion with the intangible.  Her love would scale the mountain with him and come back to silence in a kiss she'd return to him.

The mountain in front of them towered over the masterpiece rooted amongst the recent fury and other trees grounded in glitter.  But his determination, laced with a reason to go, turned wonder into action.  Before his heels could even lift off the back edge of the garden, his toes already felt the rise of another threat to conquer.  And from the summit, a sword would lie weeping in victory over a last stage of defeat.  At his feet, the steep angle forced his body weight forward onto a foreground of jagged, granite rock and stones, spilling out words he remembered from the past.  

"One day, you will follow your steps through the forest backwards in your mind and you will find what wasn't seen." 

These words echoed back from a source of foundation and surrounded him by the warmth of his own breath.  They were oddly familiar to the same words he trusted.  As he walked, narrow edges of stone bordered the path before him, forming a context of progress, dense with exposure and isolation.  His hands, raw at times, crawled the surface with a bias of strength.       

"Just like the rocky edges of strength cutting your feet."

A deceiving voice spoke, mimicking his thoughts. 

"We don't see you," Jule announced to the voice of obscurity.

"Of course you do. You see my demise lying in the crevasses of shade inside you.  I'm so obvious to avoid.  Do you like how clever your dreams are?"

Jule got up and swarmed at the ankles of a ragged cloth, dragging pointlessly on the path, quenching its desire amongst the fallen glitter fragments.  It was motionless and drab.  A boring mind that smelled of stolen regrets used to feed its future.

"I shackle your feet and toy with your thoughts.  Like a stale breath that lingers too long, it talks and talks believing the clumsy masterpiece it created but your vision walks with me, a cunning solution to your success so easy to indulge in."

The cuts scathed deeper into his hands as Jack climbed up through an angry riddle conversing with itself. 

"Let me ask you...when you take nothing from nothing, what are you left with?

Nothing." It answered itself. 

"You're right. You are left with nothing.

And when you take something from nothing. What are you left with?

You're right again. 

Nothing.

But you have everything to gain Jack, and all the things you seek to gain, you think you already have. But you don't. They are only the hopes and dreams of everything you think you want.

Now, when I take something from everything you have to gain, then what are you left with I ask?

You are only left with fewer hopes and dreams of what you think you want. 

But what if I were cruel? What if I kept taking more and more of everything you have to gain? 

Then how would you feel? 

And what if I took away the very mind inside of you to even think about the things you'll never have? The source of every thought, of every hope, of every dream you have. What if I stole them? What becomes of you then?

Nothing.

Just like me...you are left with nothing.

So you see, you'll never lose anything at all when you have nothing, do you? If anyone tries to take something from you, they will never succeed. And you will surely win. I promise you, soon, your slender mind will grow very weak with my teaching and you will become the mastermind of our lost forest. And you will start with nothing."

Jack maintained a stoic ignorance to its voice, climbing and watching the rock rapidly age under his grip.  He continued an ascent over competing pinnacles of crumbling stone that broke off and reigned down in a torrent of shale below them.  A grieving weakness building from words of power outside of his grasp.  Jule carefully balanced on spiny moguls, maintaining an unwavering march over the tops of enemies in front like he had been there before.  His tolerance to the depth of uncertainty littered the ridge line ahead with an internal silence spoken between them.  They knew their presence alone was rupturing the integrity of evil, even surrounded by an unwelcome culture of sabotage.  And even if it swallowed them up, its force would be compromised and unsustainable.

Breathless and exhausted, Jack pulled himself up to a tiny outcrop of rock, smooth and solid under his feet and lined with a resilience of reward.  It was large enough for he and Jule to settle for a night.  From here, they could see the ragged cloth still billowing against the cliffs in awkward gusts.  But the platform, a remedy of solitude and ledge of containment, sheltered them from the melted current they climbed against and the stories they scaled beneath them.  Jack slowly slid down the rigid rock he leaned against, now etching a tall line of endurance onto his back.  

At its base, the platform held tiny cracks in the surface that extended out in patterns, fading into distant memories.  And bolder cuts in thickness that started and stopped abruptly, like a line drawn that could be walked on, crossed over or extended with reach.  Eyes behind him soaked in the image of her words fighting with the shards of cloth below them.  The two were connected, like lochs woven into the architecture of a mind that lead to a sea of promise or ocean of regret.  They revealed the power to uncover a deepest doubt lying idle in a dying crevasse or rescue a smallest morsel of hope.  There would be no greater exhaustion felt than climbing up together through the thickness of a riddle that stole the end to every dream.  An exhaustion that steeped its confusion and hunger on the satisfaction of success that passed him by while he slept.  

Jule, at his side, was conscious of every thought that promised him, every dream he followed, every word that haunted him and every choice he obeyed.  He felt the sting on his back the same as if he wore it alone.  He stayed there with Jack, watching the world of success march by him in a savory clash with egos and greed-spiked oblivion.  One by one, they followed suit, treading over each other and trampling on the tiny cracks and bold lines beneath in search of their own strength.  But for Jack, there would be no greater achievement than silencing the voice from below and remembering a childhood that held him safe in his own hand.