Ascent into Agony

Each strained breath brought into Zen's lungs not only the thin, biting cold but also the minusculely sharpened edges of pure, unadulterated psychic torment. The atmosphere at the barren base of the Hill of Lingering Screams was like a razor. The omnipresent keening he had felt from a distance had become a visceral, internal thrumming, a resonance frequency that cranked through the bone marrow, making his teeth hurt with a sympathetic hum and his eyes take on an unsettling, sporadic gleam. As he started the difficult climb, the ground itself crunched with a disconcerting, crystalline resonance beneath his worn boots. The ground was a dangerous and uneven scree of blackened, obsidian-like rock that seemed to swallow the feeble, bruised light.

There was no obvious way; in fact, the whole imposing slope seemed to vehemently deny any idea of passage. Its surface was a jumbled scene of deep fissures and scars, as if it had been ripped apart by some unimaginable, old, and terrible catastrophe. Twisted, skeleton trees, their branches twisted into attitudes of silent, endless cries, their bark like strips of burnt skin peeling from bone, clawing hopelessly for the bruised, eternal twilight of the sky. Dark, viscous pools of the coppery-scented liquid gathered here and there in deep cracks and depressions, their stagnant surfaces reflecting the oppressive gloom with a dead, oily sheen, like eyes looking up blindly.

The emotional projections, the psychological shrapnel of this tortured location, were more powerful and particular with each hard-won upward step. They had evolved into targeted, viciously piercing attacks on his consciousness rather than being merely ambient waves of undifferentiated anguish or broad panic. Behind his eyelids he would experience blinding bursts of burning, incandescent pain that were completely foreign to his own body, leaving him temporarily dizzy and confused. As heavy and stifling as a leaden cloak, a crushing, almost tangible despair would try to settle into the cavity of his chest. And the murmurs, which had previously only been heard in the background, now slithered with sinister clarity at the very boundaries of his hearing, ghostly voices spewing hateful charges of contamination, intrinsic worthlessness, and an eternal and ancient humiliation that, they maintained, only he could bear.

Zen walked with a somber, almost supernatural, deliberate resolve. Other than the controlled silence of his own mind—the complex mental defenses that his instructor, Icor, had so laboriously, and sometimes brutally, trained him to build and maintain—he had no physical defense against such a persistent, multilayered assault. He fixed his attention on the exact, calculated positioning of every step on the perilous, sloping hill. He focused on the steady, regular beat of his own breathing, which contrasted with the tumultuous pulse of the Hill. He painstakingly pictured the intricate geometric patterns developing inside the safe haven of his inner mind—cold, hard, and indisputable reasoning. These anchors were the entirety of his defense, despite being tiny and brittle in the face of the raging tempest of raw, projected trauma.

He stumbled at one crucial moment due to a particularly strong wave of projected self-loathing that was so strong and destructive that it felt like acid destroying his soul. The sound of projected horrors was broken momentarily, mercifully, by the real, scorching spike of his own suffering as his knee impacted a shard of razor-sharp rock with vicious force. Gasping, he fell to one knee, his defenses cracked open by the abrupt eruption of his own pain. Sensing this fleeting fragility, the phantom accusations rushed forward, seeking support in his sudden, glaring vulnerability. "Unworthy" Contaminated The psychic chorus seemed to mock, its voices brimming with disdain, "You understand nothing, pretender."

This was a serious setback, a risky infringement on his carefully guarded inner sanctuary. With a clarity that chilled him more than the surrounding cold, he realized that simply stifling the flood of emotions was not enough. Not only was this location, this sentient hill, passively radiating agony, but it was aggressively, almost predatorily, demanding that it be felt and acknowledged. If he tried to entirely isolate himself, it would persistently seek out and take advantage of any weakness or crack in his armor. At that moment, he realized that he needed to change his tactics, to move from a purely defensive approach to a riskier one. A more risky, more personal kind of the "attuned witnessing" he had hesitantly practiced in the relative quiet of the Sunken Fields had to be applied to an agony that was actively, violently, and personally hostile. It required not only shielding but also an active process of acknowledging and processing the pain without being completely consumed by it.

He closed his eyes to more precisely filter the sensory information rather than to block it out. Using deeper reservoirs of his training, he deliberately let the blazing echoes of pain pass through him, recognizing their terrible passing and their horrifying, indisputable intensity, but resolutely refusing to allow them to settle and fester at the very center of his own being. His goal was to become a conduit, not a container, so that this awful energy might flow through him without ever settling down. It was a torturous, draining discipline that demanded all of his tremendous mental strength—a delicate balancing act on the brink of sanity. Not as a detached academic exercise, but as a profound act of bearing witness to their terrible, imprinted reality without giving in to their overwhelming, soul-crushing narrative, he started to catalog the specific textures of the pain that assaulted him in his mind. These textures included the cold, airless desolation of complete helplessness, the jagged, tearing edges of profound betrayal, and the incandescent, burning core of utter violation.

The overwhelming force of the direct, individualized attack gradually started to change. The intensity of the pain did not actually decrease, but its direction did; it became less... sharply focused on him. Though Zen was no longer the only, suffering object of the Hill's undifferentiated wrath and unfathomable misery, the Hill continued to scream its endless pain into the ether. It was now digesting its terrible outpourings in a way that would not immediately invite more, targeted violation of his own psyche. He had become a known presence, possibly an aberration within its pained orbit.

The exhausting climb went on. Against the sickly, bruised colors of the always twilit sky, the jagged, fractured crown of bare rock that was the Hill's true crest now stood out sharply above him. Here, the keening had evolved from a sound or vibration to a tangible physical pressure that made the air itself shake, as though it were awaiting some horrible revelation. A single, razor-sharp thread of agony then started to emerge from the deafening clamor of raw, undifferentiated emotion. It was a specific, recurrent cry of such intense, focused pain and complete desolation that it was somehow more piercing, more intimately terrifying than the general maelstrom he had already experienced.

Finally, just below the actual, ragged summit, he came to a small, windswept, and completely barren plateau. Compared to the dangerous slopes below, the earth here was unnervingly smoother, nearly polished to a dull sheen, as though by countless millennia of silent, unseen tears. A faint, almost imperceptible shimmer started to form in the icy air in the very center of this bare, melancholy plateau. It was a subtle distortion, like to heat haze rising from sun-baked asphalt, but it was infused with an unnatural, bone-deep cold that seemed to spread outward. This glimmering, emerging focal point appeared to be the source of the single, piercing howl, that needle of pure misery.

Zen halted, the cold, charged air containing dense puffs of his breath. His ribs were pounded by the steady, heavy beat of his heart. He was aware that he was getting close to the exact center of this place's suffering, with a deep and solemn certainty that sank into the very center of his being. The Hill's furious, dispersed pain was now congealing, focussing, as though a single mind imprisoned inside the larger storm of trauma was finally ready to manifest itself. He had withstood the Hill's ruthless exterior defenses and its torrent of broken feelings. He was now ready to confront its core.