"There have been those who tried to reach him," Marta continued, her attention returning to the chastened merchant. "Young men, mostly—boys with more courage than sense, who thought they would be the ones to discover the healer's secrets, to prove the stories wrong, to bring back proof of what lived up there." She shook her head slowly. "They would gather their supplies, make their boasts, and set off at dawn with the whole village watching."

  She paused, letting the weight of her words settle.

  "Three days later, they would return. If they returned at all. Not triumphant, not victorious, but stumbling out of the tree line half-dead, their supplies gone, their clothes shredded, their eyes wild with something they could never quite describe. Starved. Frostbitten. Broken. They never spoke of what they saw up there. They never tried again."

  The merchant's remaining colour drained away.

  "The shepherds learned long ago not to let their flocks wander too high," Marta continued. "The goats would come back bleating, their eyes rolling with terror, and nothing could convince them to return to those slopes. The birds themselves avoid the upper reaches—you'll hear no song up there, only the whistle of wind and the occasional crack of ice calving from the glaciers."

  She leaned forward, and despite myself, I leaned with her.

  "The mountain does not want us, stranger. It has never wanted us. And the King who dwells at its crown—he does not invite visitors. He tolerates our existence at its base, he heals our sick when we need him, but he does not welcome us into his domain. The few who have pushed too far, who have ignored the warnings and climbed beyond where mortals should go..." She trailed off, her eyes growing distant. "They came back changed. Or they didn't come back at all."

  I remembered the story of the three boys from my mother's generation—brothers, all of them, who had vowed to reach the summit together. They had kissed their mother goodbye, promised to return with proof of the healer's secrets, and marched into the forest singing.

  Two days later, only the youngest returned. He crawled out of the trees on his hands and knees, his lips blue, his fingers black with frost, his eyes empty of anything but terror. He never spoke again. Not one word, for the rest of his life. He would just sit and stare at the mountain, rocking back and forth, until he finally wasted away and joined his brothers in death.

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  The elders said the mountain had taken something from him. Something more important than his voice.

  Another tale—my favourite, in a terrible way—was of a man who had laughed at the warnings. A big man, strong and confident, who had declared the stories were nothing but tales to keep children in line. He had marched up the mountain with an axe over his shoulder, promising to return with wood from the sacred grove to build himself a new house.

  He returned three days later, starving, half-frozen, with no memory of where he had been or what he had seen. But his hair, which had been dark when he left, had turned completely white. And his eyes—they were never the same after. Always looking at something just over your shoulder. Always starting at sudden sounds.

  He took his own life within the year. Jumped into the ravine at the mountain's base, as if finally answering a call he could no longer resist.

  So yes, the stories were warnings. The warnings became whispers. And the whispers became the half-believed tales I had grown up with, tales that made the other children shiver but only made me curious.

  And, I had never been good at listening.

  "You are the King," I said, the words feeling both audacious and inevitable on my tongue. "The Linchpin King. Ruler of the Northern Peaks. Guardian between our world and the darkness beyond."

  The silence that followed was absolute. It was not the absence of sound, but the presence of something else—a stillness so profound it felt like the world was listening. For one terrifying moment, I thought I had gone too far—that he would strike me down, or simply vanish, or worse, confirm my words with some terrible revelation that would shatter the world I knew.

  And then, in the midst of that terrible silence, a second thought crashed into me with all the grace of a falling boulder.

  What if I was wrong?

  What if he wasn't the King at all? What if I had just accused this gentle healer—this being who had saved my life before I was even born, who tended to the sick without asking for coin—of being some kind of... of what? A god? A monster? What if he was just a very, very tired man who had been living on this mountain, and I had just effectively called him a mythical being to his face?

  My stomach plummeted.

  The elders' stories flooded back with horrifying clarity. They had all gone up the mountain with questions, with challenges, with theories about what lived at the crown. And they had all come back... wrong. Changed. Empty.

  What if I was about to join their ranks? What if this was the moment the mountain took something from me too?

  My eyes darted to the tree line, calculating how fast I could run. Not fast enough, probably. Those boys had been strong, swift, confident—and the mountain had swallowed them whole and spit them back out as hollow shells. I was a fourteen-year-old girl with a bad leg and too much mouth. I wouldn't last ten seconds.

  And then there was the other possibility. The one that made my blood run cold even as my face flushed with absurdity.