In the minutes after he lost sight of Wrender, Hypha managed to gain a little altitude. But fear and adrenaline could only carry him so long. He went into a glide and tried to take stock of his situation.
The mathematics of flight came automatically, honed by instinct and training. Gliding was easy, but not free. This part of the mountainside was relatively level. He needed to land here. If he dawdled, he’d lose altitude, and the mountainside would fall off into a series of sheer drops. He’d have to glide all the way down to sea level to find a safe landing spot. He’d be stranded without the strength to fly back up.
No, his best hope was steering towards one of the nearby rocky outcropping and trying for a clean crash.
Tears froze painfully in his eyes. When he tried to wipe them away, they scratched his eyelids so badly they bled. The cuts on his face had sealed themselves, but the swelling got worse by the second. He guaged he had about four hundred yards until impact.
He hadn’t seen where Wrender fell. Maybe he got lucky and caught an updraft. Maybe he fell all the way down to the valley, where the ice flows and glaciers gave way to fields of jagged rocks. If he found a smooth outcropping to land on, he’d have a chance. Maybe. Three hundred yards--no, more like two seventy five.
Blood got in his eyes. He blinked hard but couldn’t clear his vision. Two hundred. He was running out of steam now. One seventy five. He needed to land. He needed clear ground.
Who was he kidding? Wrender was dead. Cumulus was dead. All of his friends, everyone he’d ever known, was dead. One hundred yards. His ribs shifted again, sending a jolt of pain up his side. Seventy five. The ground began to blur beneath him. Fifty.
He remembered Cumulus talking of crops, of waxing and waning. Twenty five. He heard Hirruck speaking in a distant voice. Hypha couldn’t pick out the words. Ten. At the last second, he saw a flat outcropping and angled towards it. Five. It was all gone. All gone.
The mountain embraced him.
His front hooves absorbed the energy of the crash, shattering like eggshells. His head smacked against the rocks half a dozen times as he cartwheeled. The loose rib broke free. Whole chunks of his mane and tail ripped free. He tumbled over and over and over.
When he finally came to a stop, he laid there for a long time, staring up into space as the cloud of impact dust settled around him.
Slowly, he sat up and took stock of his injuries. His right hoof was completely degloved, shorn down to the fibrous vertical sinew. His left hoof was severely cracked, but could hold some weight. He packed the left with snow until the bleeding stopped, then took stock of his surroundings.
There wasn’t much to see. He recognized the outcropping he’d landed on and recalled it was about a mile away from the monastery. Fog—the natural kind—clung to the mountainside, cutting his visibility to a few hundred yards in any direction. That didn’t matter much. He’d flown around these parts enough to know where he needed to go. Whether or not he had the strength to get himself there still remained to be seen.
Cumulus had instructed him to get to a neighboring temple and tell them what happened. But the nearest one, Shining Rock, was a full two-day flight, and he was too exhausted to hover more than a few seconds, much less traverse multiple mountains.
He had two options: climb up a sheer mountainside on two split hooves and pray for favorable gliding winds, or stay put and die slowly of exposure.
A dry groan of pain escaped his lips. He laid down on his side to get the weight off his hooves. As he set his head down in the dirt, he noticed a familiar lumpy brown shape protruding from the far side of the outcropping, where the horizontal rock shelf met the vertical cliff. Four mother sky mushrooms at the peak of ripeness.
He stared, frozen, dumbfounded. It was a miracle. Nothing should ever grow on this ledge. What little soil clung to the rock was too thin. The winds were too harsh. And yet.
Mother sky mushrooms were supposed to be cleaned, cut into uniform size, dried, and eaten in the company of other monks in a warm and supportive environment. The resulting four to six hours of plant-induced ecstacy could range from profound to peaceful to psychotic. The monks considered it irresponsibly dangerous to partake of such a potent psychedelic without a partner present.
Hypha leaned down and pulled the caps out of the ground with his teeth. They were unexpectedly fibrous, bitter, with bits of dirt clinging to the bottom.
When he was done chewing, he laid down on the bare rock and closed his eyes.
The mist coalesced into shapes from Hypha’s memory.
Far above him, he heard the telltale rumble of an avalanche. He squinted to see where the rocks would fall and saw jagged shapes moving through the mist, coming right for him. He sat up only to fall right back down again. Ribbons of blood filled the cracks in his split hoof. He crawled away on his belly, pushing himself across the ground with his working rear hooves. When he chanced a look back, he saw the rocks falling towards him.
But Hypha was mistaken. The shapes emerged from the mist not as rocks, but as his friends and mentors. Hypha heard their laughter echo all around him. He cried out, but they didn’t seem to hear him. They flew right over his head and disappeared down the mountainside. When he managed to drag himself to the edge and look down, they were gone.
Then he heard another sound, this one rising up from the earth. He turned just in time to see a grove of massive stonewood trees split the rock beneath him and shoot into the sky. Something was wrong with the trees, though. All the branches were scourged away. Only the thick trunks remained, tapering to a sharp point at the very top.
Hypha crawled over to the nearest tree and pressed his cheek against its side. The bark was smooth like polished glass. In its reflection, he saw the mist behind him coalesce into a snow leopard.
It moved like smoke. Its eyes locked onto Hypha. He leapt up, terrified, and a piece of his left front hoof chipped off. He swallowed a howl of pain and fell back onto his haunches.
The snow leopard grinned at him, the greedy smile of a starving predator. Rivulets of saliva flowed between jagged, protruding teeth.
It closed to ten yards. Then five. The snow leopard opened its mouth impossibly wide, so wide its chin brushed the ground. Its jaw contained row after row of razor-sharp rocks for teeth.
It lunged. It swallowed him whole. Hypha tumbled end over end. When he tried to fly, he found a long black spear had gone through his torso and pinned his foreleg to his sides. A bright red scrap of cloth fluttered on the other end.
The snow leopard’s jaw snapped shut. The world went dark. Hypha felt himself come apart on the rocks.