Accusation in the Stone

The charge from the Weeping Stone figure—"Another one… came to look. To… pick at the wounds."—hung in the cold, icy air of the plateau, each phrase a shard of razor-edged ice that pierced Zen's meticulously preserved poise. An almost intolerable, ancient frailty that spoke of resilience stretched far beyond any conceivable limit cruelly emphasized the raw, guttural wrath thrumming in her voice, that awful sound of stone grinding mercilessly on stone. The very earth around her seemed to weep darker, more viscous tears that glistened with a sinister glow, and the smothering pressure was the tangible fear of a more direct, possibly physical, assault.

Zen stared into her hollow, flaming eyes, which seemed to reach right down to the core of his soul through bone and flesh. His innermost intellectual impulse and his long-standing training pushed him to examine, classify, break down, and comprehend the horrifying mechanics of the phenomena that was taking place in front of him. The exposed, screaming, forever raw nerve of a soul that had been flayed beyond human endurance was not a trivial phenomenon to be studied from a safe distance. It would be irreversibly confirming her sour allegation for him to react now with a clinical, detached analysis, to paint himself as just another heartless tormentor in a long succession of tormentors.

He purposefully kept his hands at his sides, palms facing out, a common non-aggressive stance that seemed pathetically insufficient in the face of such immense anguish. It felt completely, almost comically, inadequate here, the carved stone he had used against the Curator, a weapon of concentrated will. This was a raw, primeval pain that required, somehow, a response far more fundamental than intelligence or skill—something that approached true, unshielded empathy. It was not a coded protocol to be deciphered and manipulated with cunning.

He spoke in a low voice, scarcely more than a whisper against the melancholy keening of the wind that blew across the barren plateau, yet he willed it to be steady, unshaken. He started, "Your pain is… a mountain," selecting each phrase with great, almost reverent care, considering how likely it was to cause further hurt. "A huge, awful mountain. I cannot and will not claim to have a complete understanding of its unfathomable heights or its dark depths. And I feel and know that "seeing" has always meant a breach, a trespass on your most private pain." At that moment, he stopped to let the weight of his recognition, the harsh admission of her indisputable truth, sink into the tense space between them. "I'm not here to give that mountain any more injuries. It is to comprehend why it is so tall and why it weeps so unceasingly, if you would allow it.

A strong, full-body tremor shook the Weeping Stone figure, threatening to break her delicate cohesiveness as it flowed through her fragmented, stone-like shape. Like tortured, spectral serpents, the dark shrouds that surrounded her writhed and slashed. A loud, fractured sound ripped from her, a scratchy, grotesque spoof of laughter immensely worse than any scream Zen had yet experienced.

With a single, powerfully mocking word that was dripping with centuries' worth of collected cynicism, she rasped, "Understand?" "You arrive with your reserved tone and your well-chosen words, just like everyone else who pretended to be empathetic before their actual, ravenous cravings were unavoidably exposed! Their hands were defiling and clutching, and they 'understand'! Their dissecting, violating eyes 'understood'! Even while their acts inflicted new, excruciating scars on the elderly, they "understood" with their vacuous claims of recovery."

A new, horrifying burst of icy, angry light erupted in her sunken eyes, those twin wells of ancient anguish. Zen could feel the phantom sear of white-hot brands against his skin, the sharp chafe of iron restraints on his wrists, and the crushing, suffocating weight of complete, unavoidable, and deeply remembered defilement. The very air around him became noticeably colder and heavier, and the psychic projections became more intense with cruel, punishing force. It was a constant stream that was carefully crafted to subdue his will, to cause him to run away in fear or strike out in irrational rage.

But Zen refused to back down. His strong mental faculties, developed over years of intense practice, labored frantically at the limit of their ability to filter the deafening assault, to recognize the terrible truth of these phantom sensations without being completely overwhelmed and shattered by them. Even though he was aware that he hadn't bitten his lip, he could still taste the coppery tang of blood in his mouth—it was the flavor of intense, sympathetic stress. The faint, spectral light caught the tear-slicked, multifaceted surfaces of her stone skin, the almost imperceptible, desperate clenching of her gaunt hands, and other minute, tangible details of her tragic form. He forced himself to focus on these details in order to desperately anchor himself to the present, undeniable reality of her suffering rather than just the projected, nightmare echoes of its cause.

The Weeping Stone figure went on, "They spoke of'records'," her voice growing louder and louder, each word containing a powerful concoction of new poison and old, unfathomable sorrow. "of'study.'" 'Preservation for posterity.' Their sanctimonious, self-congratulatory sorrow was a pitifully thin veil for their voracious, devouring, and unending inquiry, and they brought their cold measuring lines and their chisels to the very center of what was sacred! "They labeled our suffering, carefully classified our defilement, and then contained our ongoing suffering in their clean, sterile, academic accounts, then ventured to refer to that desecration as 'knowledge'."

With the sound of a hefty gravestone being mercilessly scraped across unforgiving rock, she took a tentative, painfully dragging step in his direction. In tormented sympathy with her movement, the Hill's very foundation, the ground, seemed to groan softly and sorrowfully.

"Do you truly know what it is to be made a specimen?" Zen felt shivers down her spine as she snarled, her words suddenly brimming with a cold, almost sensual intimacy. "To have your most profound, holy transgression exposed, probed, scrutinized, and then mercilessly written off as just... information? To be reduced to a footnote in their sweeping, self-congratulatory tale of discovery? "Cartographer, is that the 'understanding' you are looking for?" Like a curse, she spat out the title. "To add another layer of finely scribed, elegantly phrased desecration to the wound that never, ever heals?"

The sheer, uncontrollable intensity of her unbridled anger and unfathomable anguish seemed to cause her tormented figure to visibly bulge and expand. Around her, the darkness grew darker and merged into something bigger and more menacing. The delicate, excruciating thread of this conversation was strained to its breaking point, on the brink of disintegrating into a wholly destructive, annihilating manifestation of her unending suffering, and Zen sensed this with a basic, instinctual warning scream. He was horribly confident that he needed to respond to her burning words as well as the unfathomable, unbearable pain that drove them both, pain that now threatened to devour them both.