Weekly Writing – November 2 2024

No one travelled by that road if their destination left them any other choice. Narrow and rocky, it deferred to every twist and ridge of the mountains it traversed, making it no shortcut to anywhere except a cold, lonely death.
But, being so sparsely travelled, it was also too costly and impractical to patrol. So those who counted it more important to reach their destination in secret rather than haste might hire the most sure-footed mounts they could find and make the treacherous climb towards the sky.
Four horses plodding along in a loose, joyless line had made for practically a grand caravan on that road. Three for riders, one for supplies, which would be difficult to find at the journey’s peak. Nothing safe to eat made its home in those heights.
Why take that road? If the answer were so easily, harmlessly given, he wouldn’t have taken it at all. He had been riding at the head of the procession, that was the important thing to tell for now. He had taken what was meant to be the most dangerous position for himself, testing that crumbling sliver of a trail with his mount’s hooves, but it was the ridge above them and behind him that had given way. With a roar like something of stone hide and claws disturbed from slumber, it had swept the supply horse and their rearmost rider into the misty oblivion below.
With them, it had taken twenty feet of the road, wiping their only means of retreat from the face of the mountain. How the sound had echoed, the screams of beast and rider, and then only the pitiless stone piling a cairn for them below. And then only two riders on the mountainside, with the dusk clouds piling their own grave mound of coal black and drowning blue. Though there was only one option left to agree on, they had argued until the plunging screams of the coming storm had drowned out their voices, and had only then bent their heads over their mounts’ necks and continued up the mountain.