Persephone

The Summit

There he stood alone, as he had always stood since she had been taken from him, taken by the men in white. He strained his eyes to see her, to see them. But all he saw was the bleak blank nothingness of a plain plain, a land desolate of anything.

His limbs were heavy, weak and heavy from the climb, and his lungs burned within his chest like a fire that fuelled his heart, feeding him with a strength he did not possess so he could continue onward: one sliding, heavy, leaden limb after the other.

Snow lay around him. Snow at every footfall, snow at every glimpse, every glance ahead. A flurry, a shower, a storm; it grew and grew and grew and into his eyes it cascaded, upon his bare blue skin it fell and he raised a hand to cover his eyes from the storm, from the bitter cold that blew upon him like a hand pushing him back, like the hands of the men in white who had taken his wife.

That was what it was, it wasn't snow, it was their hands. Hands that pushed and pulled, that dragged and tore, that caressed and calmed, that did all they could to take his thoughts away from his one purpose, his one goal: rescuing her, rescuing Persephone.

He reached out and his hand touched the cold hard surface of stone. He stepped back and opened his eyes and there stood a stone wall, a titanic wall that rose before him.

Like when he had stood upon the shore and looked at the mountain before him, he turned to his right and saw the wall fade, fade, fade away into the distance. He looked to his left and saw it fade, fade, fade away into the distance.

Then he looked before him and it opened, it opened onto a forlorn desert, a plateau of sand. He stepped from the snow that gathered around his blue feet and stepped on the sand, the burning sand of that ocean that swallowed him, that surrounded him till he stood and span, his head light and his limbs heavy. He stood and span on that sand, the touch of it soft and familiar yet yielding him no foothold till he was spinning out of control. Twisting and turning like a tower that cannot fall, like a leaf in the wind, falling and falling without ever touching the ground and he felt cold cold air, cold like the snow on the summit, cold like the hearts of the men that had taken his Persephone. He stood for a second. Stable at last. Stood and breathed in that air. For a moment it distracted him, took his thoughts and took his mind and took his concentration, his determination, took everything from him till it came back, till the world came back.

He opened his eyes that were already open, opened them wide and realised he was standing on the edge, the very rim of a great precipice, some grand valley. He looked down into its depths and lost his footing, slipping for the briefest of moments that were enough to send him forward, out of control once more but falling forward, tumbling down, down, down into the abyss, into the space that he had only seconds before peered upon.