Prologue

Off The Beaten Path

The sun was low in the western sky when John came to the final point in the path, and the moon was a waxing crescent in the south smiling faintly as if it were keeping some secret.

The path thus far felt of relative ease. It was moderate ascent, rising over a trail well-beaten and blazed. After a while the grade leveled off, and the way twisted and turned gently into the Rocky Mountain side.

Then came the sharp corner. Here, the path turned and veered down and south over miles made shorter by the descent, all along a ridge which provided a bold vista of ranges and wood.

It was a natural trail formed by hundreds or thousands over time. And hundreds or thousands had turned south, John thought. Back down hill, to their vehicles, their homes, and their beds, they all went.

But John’s road was a harder one.

He turned off the beaten path at the giant redwood with a burning flame carved into its trunk, then climbed over the fallen timber at its side. They were brothers to each other, he surmised as he leapt from one trunk to the other – a sour thought turned sweet when John realized that the dead nourished the living.

Not one month prior, John received the invitation. Recycling spam and solicitations, he almost discarded it. It was a plain white envelope with only his first name; no postage, no return address, nothing to indicate that the message had not been hand delivered. That meant several laws had been broken. All with the conscious intention of getting this letter to him.

Fear rose, unbidden. News media would allow no one to forget: that criminals lurked behind every tree, and radicals planned beneath every rock. Suspicion fired in his lower brain by mere instinct.

But he let the fear go. He sat at his kitchen table, white envelope in hand, and considered how his life had become a buffet of routine and monotony; yet how he was still starved of intrigue, of novelty, of life itself. He mastered his work as a jester in a circus, memorizing words, cues, and motions. When he was younger, he felt like a knife cutting butter, but now he was a sword rusting and dulling of disuse. He found whetstones: exercise, instruments, languages. But the world still lacked something basic – a dynamism that his sanity and spirit both demanded.

After he regulated his conditioned response, he broke the red wax seal.

Inside were two parts: an invitation, and directions to this tree.

It was a memory. For years, one common thread wove through all his dreams. Pushing legs or pulling arms or even pumping wings, upward propulsion was a force as universal to his nights as gravity was to his days. In those dreams, he would always chase some high up light, white hot and ringing. The path to the goal might change, but the general trajectory did not, nor did the goal itself. Though he couldn’t remember with absolute certainty, John could’ve sworn he had hiked toward a fire on a mountaintop before.

Now, John was not a superstitious man. He held no faith or ritual propitious, nor any god as sacred. But when stuck at a cross-road with no map or memory to guide you, why not follow the signs?

And so he did, ignoring the fear which others might rationalize to be common caution. Over the paved road winding up and on through the mountain, to the trail-head, he drove. Along the trail formed by thousands of others, he climbed. To the redwood with the burning flame carved into its trunk, he came.

West, off the beaten path, he pushed.

John may have sometimes lacked that common caution, but he was not a fool. He carried a pistol at his side this evening, illegally. Perhaps a bit of caution would have been good, he thought, wondering why he didn’t make camp until the morning. It seemed not even an hour had passed after he turned west before the evening was complete. He could see constellations and galaxies floating through the pines; and he could also see that the moon was now grinning less modestly.

Then he saw the lights. He had turned southeast to gauge how far he’d come when they flashed. Two dim golden lamps floated through the dark highland, leaving a faint glow like ripples through water. Whether it was fear or curiosity he felt rise, he knew well enough to let it go. Staring and thinking did no good here and now. He pushed on, putting those lights out of his mind, refocusing on the words of direction.

Keep west and you will find it, the letter spoke of a hidden gate. And always keep your compass. John was resolved to never break his line. It was a hard line to hold, though, and his compass was of no use to him. It was not for lack of light. The arms spun and stopped, then spun again, fist clockwise, then counter, repeating. Maybe he was just unprepared. Or maybe he was going mad. Maybe it was a bit of both, he thought with a wry smile. He had only his internal compass to trust then, just his spatial sense and memory, battling the steepening terrain. Now and then he’d get stuck on something – a small cliff, a fallen tree, a half-frozen stream – but he kept on, until the mountain became one uniform dense brush, each step more forgettable than the last.

A mile or five through that dullness had passed when he heard a wolf howl in the distant south. Tiredness fell then, like a weight suddenly tied around his torso. It’d been no short climb to this point – even from the trailhead to the redwood with the carved flame was at least ten miles, and that was the easy part, before he turned off the path. He was not immune to fatigue. Nor to fear. John had an unnatural tolerance for both, but no man was impervious to either. He knew enough at least to focus on his heart rate and his pace, lest the scent of his fear draw the wolves closer, or his legs give out before he could escape them; but time passed slower, the intermittent howling inched closer, and fear uncoiled in his belly. He tried to focus on the light in his dreams.

Unprovoked, he looked back and saw the two floating lights again, dim, yellow, curious. Why did he always have to look? Just as he did, wolves howled again, one north and one south. They were closer. John wondered: how close is the dawn?

He pushed on still, in the hope of a new day, trying and failing to ignore the cold in his bones and the cramping in his sides. The canopy of wood eventually gave way to a pine grove. A cold mist clung between the trees, a cloud that surrounded and penetrated him, and married his lungs to the frost. A wolf howled again in the south. Time slowed to a crawl.

Finally, suddenly, the mist receded, and John came to a flat in the mountain side. A different kind of cloud met him there: a lighter fog laced with the scent of burning wood and leaf. He had been staring at his feet for some time, but the smoke brought him up. He turned left and right to look for a fire, and found one – not the one his nose had expected, but the one his heart was hoping for.

It was still night above, though the stars had lost their luster in the great black firmament, but turning east John saw the darkness give way slowly and seamlessly into a faint tangerine glow, first through a deep azure, then violet. The orange and pink hugged the eastern mountain ranges and the day’s first light created a perfect contrast with the pitch black landscape, a neon outline on a jet canvas.

The canvas stirred.

East and south, two timber wolves closed in. Among them stood a different monster: a great mountain lion the size of a bear. Its eyes were two lamps, burning bright and gold, hungry and angry. West was a wall of stone.

In that moment, John became acutely aware of a fact that is so easy for a man to forget: that he was nothing more than an animate sack of flesh and blood. The enormous tan cat took slow steps toward him, flashing its teeth.

John sprinted, north along the wall, fumbling for his gun. The cold, the fatigue, the aching in his sides, the smell of burnt leaf, the hope of the new day – all were extinguished in an instant. There was only John and the terrain underfoot. The wall towered taller at his left as he ran further into the cloud. He fired three shots backwards, connecting with only snow, wood, and air. The cat leapt and knocked John to his knees.

The sound of his wailing voice was immediately drowned by the whimpering of wolves, cries of the dying. John turned onto his back, and, for only the shortest of moments, looked into hellfire, those two molten eyes. The cat leapt suddenly to speed off downhill toward the cover of trees, away from the arrows that were chasing it.

Before he could ask himself what had happened, John heard laughter deep and guttural, then looked up to see a wide smile spanning a wind-burnt face, dull and featureless but for eyes of the brightest blue. The man was dressed in thick black fur, and walking toward him. He stopped and gestured for John to follow, and follow John did, after only a moment’s pause. He drew a deep breath and gathered himself up.

John followed the smiling man over a ridge into a dell. Other men sat around a fire pit, dogs at heel. They all rose in greeting.

John followed the smiling man further, past the fire, then under the lip of a cave. Torches lined the walls. The man pulled one, handed it to John, then gestured deeper into the tunnel.

“Welcome to the land of the living!” he said, and that was all.

John went on alone, feeling the slick stone wall under his fingers. Heat and light grew greater as he climbed. He came to seven wide steps leading up to a gate, and he fell to his knees at the foot of them. The gate was massive and round, brown and red, split down the...