If I’d caught them further down the mountain I would have warned them sooner what was going to happen. As I hadn’t, and I was travelling in the same direction, I decided to join them. Maybe I still should have told them when we first met, even though it was inevitable, but I didn’t really want to be alone any longer, no matter how much I’d wanted to avoid the entire world at the beginning of my journey. They, three humans males who looked to be in their late thirties, stumbled across my camp while I was still asleep one… I have to admit that it was getting close to midday, although technically it was still morning. We were all surprised and I think what surprised them most was the fact I was still asleep.
They were climbing the mountain for fun, while I was planning on sleeping for a century. Once we reached the summit that was exactly what we did. I could see the other sleepers, even though they were invisible, and I thought that afternoon, as we were setting up camp, that I should tell them what was going to happen. It didn’t matter if they didn’t believe me. It didn’t matter if they tried to make their way back down. Nothing was going to stop the mountain from putting them to sleep. That was what the mountain did, although no one was quite sure why.
As we ate the meal that Rick had prepared I bit my lip. “Have you ever heard the story of this mountain?” I asked, looking into the metal dish thing I was using rather than at any of my companions.
“Of course we have,” Jeffrey replied, sounding amused. “We came up here to prove the stories wrong.”
“What happens if the stories prove you wrong?”
Silence followed my question. I gathered my courage and looked up at them, to find them all staring at each other as though that was something they hadn’t thought of before, before Jeffrey shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said, the honesty in his voice terrifying. “I guess we should have planned more for that possibility.”
“Are the stories going to prove us wrong?” Rick asked, looking at me, and once again I was certain that he saw more than he let on.
“Yes.” I sighed. “Tonight you will go to sleep for a century and when you wake up the world will have changed.”
“Is there a reason you didn’t tell us before?”
“It was already too late, Rick. You’d passed the point of no return. If we’d met before that point I would have told you, so you could have made an informed choice.”
“We made an informed choice. We knew the stories. Even though we didn’t let ourselves think about it we knew we might end up falling asleep for a hundred years.” Rick raised an eyebrow. “As you knew the stories I’m guessing you also made an informed choice, although you knew that you were coming up here to sleep for a century.”
Mirrored from K. A. Jones Writing.
