Apatite

Description

It was a conduit; knowledgeable and guiding. A flicker in the marrow of an age broken for centuries.

It was long ago. So long ago that the elders argue if it was memory or dream, but there was to be light. Violet and powerful. For decades it shone on the townsfolk and each time it did, they turned their ways of evil away.

But that was long ago. The townsfolk did not speak of the night the violet failed; yet they felt it. In the weeks that followed, their rage did not exhaust itself. It rooted. Rooted in the grief that did not soften. It sharpened. It sharpened in the air itself for it seemed tighter, as though the world had inhaled and forgotten how to breathe out.

The girl did not return. Some say she tried to climb again. Some whisper she could not bear to do it without him.

They were all wrong for the monolith, it stood. It stood in silence, a place no longer of mercy but of witness.

They were all wrong for on the night that has swollen with something beyond evil, a figure arrived. That conduit. And so, he climbed.

His footsteps did not shimmer as they once had. they pressed into the soil like anyone else's.

The forest did not hush for him this time. The wind did not turn inward. The path felt itself steeper, as though the mountain remembered his absence. as though it was screaming to him that he had been forsaken for far too long.

At the peak, beneath a sky thick with unspent darkness, he did not wait for evil to swell. He let it.

He let the vilest midnight reach its fullest breath. He let the town below churn with unchecked anger, with years of unpurified grief. Knives were drawn. Curses spat. Doors slammed harder than they had in decades past.

But then, he pushed his face to the pitch black sky, and a light poured from the tears that left his eyes.

Not violet.

Blue.

And it was so, so, cold.