The Weeping Stone

Unquestionably, the virulent source of the Hill's most severe and excruciating infection was the glistening, feverish deformity at its center, and the barren plateau was a raw, bleeding gash in the Hill's basic fabric. The air became so frigid that Zen forced himself to get closer, feeling as if it were actually burning his lungs, each breath he took a sharp shard of ice. Not a simple scream, but an endless, cyclically looped echo of a single, crystallized moment of ultimate terror and unforgivable betrayal, the single, piercing cry that had been his harrowing beacon through the upper slopes now resolved itself into a sound that was almost intolerable. It was a sound that tore at the very foundations of sanity.

He paused, keeping a respectful and purposeful distance from the glimmering whirlpool of agony. Even his own lingering pains, the ghostly throbs of the emotional assault he had suffered on the climb, melted into a barely discernible background hum, dwarfed into insignificance by the sheer, overwhelming intensity of the pain that throbbed and emanated from this horrifying center. The raw, focused, and unquestionably sentient presence that was starting to gradually develop inside the waning, melancholy light left Zen's senses reeling and his mind momentarily dazed, not just by the unbridled intensity of the agony in front of him.

Like a live thing in agony, the distortion writhed before gradually—and with a painful hesitancy—becoming more definite. It was a tentative, painful congealing of shade and intensely melancholy light, rather than a rapid, striking emergence, as though the air of the damned plateau were tearing itself into a human form. What eventually became apparent was a figure, unmistakably feminine in its fundamental shape, but so severely afflicted and shattered by an unnamed, old trauma that her body appeared hardly unified, always on the point of melting back into the surrounding gloom. She was made of something that resembled broken, constantly weeping stone—dark, volcanic, and gleaming as if eternally slippery with ancient, unshed tears—rather of delicate paper, like the mysterious Curator, or fleeting rainbow light, like the innocent Children's Souls.

Tragically, her limbs were malnourished, her posture was irreparably shattered, and she hunched over as if a huge, unseen weight were pressing down on her thin shoulders and pushing her down toward the tortured ground. With every violent earthquake that swept over her stone-like body, wisps of dark shadow clung to her frail shape like ragged, ghostly funeral shrouds, swirling and eddying. When she eventually, with great effort, raised her face to meet his, it was a timeless mask of old, unbearable agony. In a way that the Hill's diffuse rage had not, her eyes were hollow, desolate voids from which a chilling, ethereal, and oddly focused light emanated. This light fixed upon Zen with an unnerving intensity that pierced right through his carefully constructed mental defenses, leaving him feeling vulnerable and exposed.

The Hill's once-diffuse emotional projections now became a terrifyingly focused and cohesive beam, directly and unquestionably originating from her very essence, with her complete, tragic expression. In a series of suffocating waves, Zen was overcome by overwhelming waves of her personal, intimately experienced horror, the burning memory of her violation, her limitless, impotent rage, and a soul-deep, abyssal despair. Each wave was far more powerful, far more intimate, and far more intrusive than the generalized suffering he had endured during the ascent. It was her now, not just the Hill yelling its pain into nothingness.

Zen didn't say a word. He didn't move to provide surface-level consolation because he was persuaded that any cliché or traditional act of consolation would be a hideous and terrible affront to the depth of her pain. Against this overpowering flow of pure, elemental, and sentient anguish, he instinctively knew that raising a hand in defense would be completely pointless, a pointless charade. With his boots firmly planted on the cold, polished obsidian of the plateau, he just stood his ground and bore witness with all of his strength. Accepting their indisputable reality, their awful, soul-crushing weight, he let the crushing waves of her suffering crash against the disciplined wall of his mind, sifting them through the agonizing, draining discipline he had developed on the slopes below, without allowing them to shatter his own fragile core. In contrast to the immense, galaxy-sized agony that was embodied in front of him, his own sacrificed memory of joy and the vacuum it had left inside him suddenly felt like a far-off, nearly meaningless ache.

Her dark shrouds tightened around her like tortured serpents as the Weeping Stone figure shook uncontrollably. Layer by layer, she dissected him with her hollow eyes, which were blazing with that icy, unblinking fire. The unending, excruciatingly looping broadcast of her anguish, now heightened and laser-focused upon the unexpected intruder in her bleak, inviolable sanctum, was all that was seen in that gaze—no flicker of inquiry, no trace of recognition. The wind's sorrowful sigh, which carried the echoes of her silent, psychic scream and the dreadful, focused pressure of her unadulterated, weaponized pain crushing in on Zen from all sides, was the only sound to break the long, suspended quiet that stretched taut between them.

Then from the inconceivable depths of her stone-like body came a new sound, different from the Hill's ubiquitous keening. Although it was a voice, it was unlike any Zen had ever heard before—cracked and extremely raspy, like massive millstones rubbing against one another with much effort, each syllable a pain to make. Within this harsh, irritating tone, however, was a core of unquenchable, blazing rage, contrasted with an almost intolerable fragility and tragic vulnerability.

"You… see…" It was neither an invitation nor a query. They were a frank, guttural, and intensely poignant charge, laden with the weight of long-forgotten periods of betrayal and grief. "Come have a look at another one. To pick at the wounds indolently."

In a quake that seemed to rock the very plateau beneath their feet, her anguished body shivered forcefully. Around her skeletal feet, the obsidian-like ground seemed to grow darker, the viscous, tear-like sheen on its surface becoming mysteriously thicker and more sinister. Zen saw the imminent, pressing threat of an even more direct and deadly attack, something that went beyond simple emotional bombardment and felt terrifyingly capable of tearing him apart, body and soul. The air itself crackled with a new, real tension.