the climb after camp three felt less like ascent and more like walking up through a throat. the air grew thin enough that each step sounded farther away, like someone had recorded their movement and slowed it down. instruments began to disagree with themselves: the altimeter ticked in small jerks, the compass needle refused to settle, and the gaussmeter printed numbers that climbed and fell in a pattern that looked almost deliberate. lewis watched the readings with an unease he tried to keep from showing. hendrick kept glancing at the slope below, as if expecting it to rearrange itself.
"this is the electromagnetic zone," lewis said. his voice had gone soft with the altitude; syllables pulled at the edges. "field anomalies, distorted local magnetosphere. sensors lie here because the environment here warps fields unpredictably."
hendrick tried to make a joke and coughed instead. jokes were thin up here; the air cut them into shards.
they reached the jagged band the survey maps labeled corrupted, and the world stepped sideways. where they had expected a narrow shelf there was a hollow ring of basalt that hummed underfoot, and the breath they could feel through their jackets had a pressure to it that was not wind. it was as if something internal to the hill had inhaled.
lewis checked the gaussmeter again: spikes of 200 µt pulsed in irregular beats; the device read like a heart monitor for a stone animal. the barometer recorded pressure fluctuations that looked like respiration. hendrick's pulse matched the low-frequency spikes. both men felt the same thing not fear exactly, but that their attention had been taken as an object and examined.
"there's infrasound coupling," lewis said, thinking out loud. "seismic microfractures produce low-frequency energy. those frequencies are linked to autonomic nervous system responses. people report awe, nausea, even visions under those loads." he swallowed. "but this is beyond natural amplitude. it's as if the mountain is modulating the field intentionally."
the fog thickened until visibility dropped to five meters. the hum smoothed into a chord that threaded the space between their ears and the inside of their chests. hendrick stopped walking and turned slowly, his breath making a halo around his head. his lips moved without sound for a long moment, as if tracing a sentence in a language he no longer heard.
and then something moved through the fog like a punctuation mark: a black shape, impossible by the way it refused to touch the snow. it hovered.
at first lewis thought it was a trick of the fog a shadow where there was no object. then the shape resolved: a cat, small, sleek, fur like raked charcoal, but not walking. it floated with a slow, deliberate reluctance, legs tucked like a stone that had learned to swim. its head was a little long, ears tall and triangular; its face was structured like a feline's but not limited to that geometry. there were three eyes: left and right, and one set in the center of the forehead. the two lateral eyes were different from each other one held a spiral of orange that seemed to rotate inward, the other contained a blue star motif encircled by an orange ring. the third eye combined them both: a small blue star embedded in a spiral core, surrounded by concentric wavy rings in yellow and orange. the little nose was a tiny orange triangle; two minute fangs peeked like punctuation marks. a ruff of fur framed the neck in a collar that looked like inked waves.
hendrick made a small, involuntary sound.
the cat the thing regarded them. then it spoke.
"good day," it said, in hendrick's voice first, then in english, in a cadence that was both diplomatic and bored. the sound didn't come from a throat; it arrived as understanding placed inside their skulls, complete sentences with punctuation and accent. lewis felt the phrase as a shape in his thoughts.
"what... are you?" hendrick asked, voice thin.
"i am called daniel dorbin," the cat said. "names are small things. the greater name is complicated. you can call me daniel." it cocked its head, and the central eye shimmered like a small moon. the sound of it speaking was layered syllables folded over other syllables and for a fraction of a second lewis heard the phrase in a dozen different tongues, each one precise, each one ancient and casual.
lewis fumbled for the instrument that measures electromagnetic radiation; his hands shook. the device hissed and the numbers jumped like startled fish. he could not stop watching the cat's eyes. a spiral pattern spun inward in the left eye and, in that motion, a memory not his own brushed his mind: a field of wheat bending like a sea, a child's laugh that ended in a cough, a small town atlas he had seen as a boy. the memory left an after-print of emotion: a brittle sweetness.
"does this hill belong to you?" hendrick asked, half-choking.
daniel's whiskers twitched. "it belongs to the geometry of its insistence. i find the hill attractive." the creature's mouth made something like an amused purr. "towlin is convenient. it resonates with the modes i prefer."
"can you... will you help us?" lewis said before he could stop himself.
daniel tilted his head almost imperceptibly. the cat's three eyes narrowed like camera apertures. "i accompany," it said. "i am a presence in the region. however, the hill has etiquette. there are rules as old as the stones. i do not interfere in the hill's judgment unless the hill allows. companionship is permitted. rescue, unless permitted, is not."
hendrick's shoulders slumped as if someone had removed a weight they had been carrying for days. "so you'll just watch if something eats us?" he asked, half-sobering, half-snarling.
"i will watch," daniel said. "i will be amused. at times the hill permits action. at times it does not. i do not choose those moments. the hill chooses."
lewis could not tell if there was cruelty in daniel's tone or purely amusement at the human expectation of moral symmetry. the cat stretched in the air and then folded itself, like a comma resting on its side.
"how do you speak?" hendrick asked, watching the way the creature's whiskers tracked their faces.
"i am a five-dimensional entity," daniel said, pronouncing the words as if they were ordinary. "labels are liek maps: useful, incomplete, occasionally wrong. i take forms. this form is domesticated-looking because it is economical. i know languages because language is a kind of line through possibility. i watch times. i foresee frames because time is a mode, not a prison. i can unmake and make, but i prefer to watch the possible weavings. the hill and i have a relationship: i attend; it instructs. it is an arrangement."
there was a soft, absurd thing about the way it said "attend." it sounded like a butler describing tea. lewis felt a cold, expanding sense of vertigo as pieces of logic that had fit together his entire life shifted. the instruments in his pack the gaussmeter, the altimeter, the spectrometer emitted small protest noises as if aware of anomaly. the fog around daniel shimmered, producing microscopic flakes of ice that arranged themselves into fractal patterns in midair. each flake was a tiny geometry, tessellations built around an axis lewis's mind wanted to name but couldn't.
hendrick, in a tone that mixed awe and professional habit, said, "what are those patterns?"
"visual fragments of state transition," daniel replied. "the hill likes to speak in geometry. watch." the cat extended one paw and pointed at a pebble no larger than a thumbnail. with an almost invisible motion it rotated the pebble in the air; then the pebble winked and multiplied. three identical pebbles floated there, each perfect. hendrick reached without thinking and caught one; it was warm as if it had been recently touched by sunlight.
lewis noted the pebble duplication in his mind, then made the typical scientist's internal correction: extraordinary claim, but possible local permission. he lifted his gaussmeter; the spikes on the screen settled for a breath, then resumed their pattern. daniel's presence did not change the field, but he allowed himself to move inside its permission.
"you can do anything," lewis said, quietly.
daniel's smile was a small crescent. "i can do many things. your verb 'anything' implies a lack of limitation. that is seldom true anywhere, even for beings of my humility. also, hypotheticals are boring."
hendrick, who had been breathing shallowly the whole time, laughed a short, nervous sound. "and you've been here the whole time? watching us? waiting?"
"i have been here for longer than your maps have been interested in measuring," daniel said. "i am not a native to your narrative. but i favor places that stir possibility. towlin sings such songs."
lewis tried to remain methodical. "why the bell? why the hum? why the anomalies?"
daniel watched him with those three careful lights. "the hill is a resonant cavity," he said. "it amplifies. it folds. the bell is a courtesy a paging signal, a polite oscillation, an ancient protocol of attention. the hum is physiology: rock with cavities that couple to human cognition. the anomalies are modes of translation between the hill's topology and your neural code. that is technical. now for the poetic: the hill prefers to make visible what you will not name. it is a mirror and a gate."
hendrick frowned. "mirror and gate. so it reflects and it gives?"
"it reflects," daniel said, "and when the geometry aligns, it offers a choice."
a gust of wind moved the fog in a way that suggested the world was turning a page. the little duplicated pebbles slid to the ground and froze into a pattern that spelled briefly, in the language of shapes rather than letters something like arrival. lewis felt, somewhere under his sternum, the small electric sensation one gets when a muscle moves before an action.
"are you dangerous?" hendrick asked.
daniel considered that. "danger is a concept dependent on point of view. you might find me amusingly indifferent. you might find me inconvenient. i am immortal by most definitions; death as you conceive of it is a closed possibility for me. but with immortality comes boredom. therefore i observe. manipulation is a craft, and i practice at times. but the rule here is: the hill's law trumps my taste. if the hill forbids, i cannot act beyond glimpses."
lewis's brain tried to reconcile the statement: an entity with godlike abilities constrained by a local substrate. the image was dizzying: a being with nearly unlimited power subject to a stone's etiquette. his training supplied a tentative model: the hill imposes boundary conditions on what any agent can do within or through it. daniel's power was thus filtered: he could move objects, clone, vanish things, but only if the hill's resonance permitted. the instruments might detect that permission as a transient stability in the field data.
"you know things about time," hendrick whispered. "you said you see frames."
"i see frames," daniel confirmed. "i watch possible timelines like a fisherman watches eddies. sometimes the current is thick with the future; sometimes the only fish is old regret. your ascent is thick right now. the mountain pulls time like thread. it will ask you to trade. be aware."
lewis felt a current of dread and a surge of exhilaration. the scientific part of him wanted to capture data and test the permissions; the human part of him wanted to fall to his knees and ask every possible question. instead he took notes in the way he could: small observations, measured, dry.
> companion entity: daniel dorbin (form: three-eyed feline).
behavior: non-contact levitation; multilingual cognitive speech; limited local manipulation permitted by environmental permission.
abilities observed: duplication of pebble; localized geometric ice-flake formation; telepathic mode of speech perception.
constraints: claims non-interference unless hill permits.
as the fog thinned for a moment, lewis thought he glimpsed something else further up the slope, a band of sky that was too bright, a sheet of cloud that parted in the exact shape of a doorway. he felt a pressure in his chest like expectation.
"we should move," he said. "we need to keep schedule. we cannot get stuck in this zone longer than necessary."
hendrick nodded, though his fingers trembled around the rope. daniel levitated a few inches higher, as if preparing to resume their guide by presence. he did not walk; he preferred to orbit. his shadow did not fall in the way shadows are supposed to fall; instead it pooled like spilled ink and then retracted.
they continued, each step under the cat's quiet witness. the mountain's hum threaded their movements into a ritual. occasionally daniel spoke small things a translation of a single word from an old dialect, the correct name for a particular crystalline formation, an aside about the best way to nest a crampon in a basalt pocket. these were not helpful in the way of sweeping rescues; they were small, arcane, precise. hendrick leaned on those things like a sailor trusts a single line in a storm.
as the sun sank, the electromagnetic field stuttered. digital instruments blinked into static; printed numbers spiraled into meaningless patterns and then, astonishingly, reasserted themselves with new calibrations. lewis watched the altimeter jump up three hundred meters in a breath and then slide back, while his watch continued to tick forward. in one instance, the shadow of a passing cloud crossed the slope and lewis saw, for the breadth of a second, two different positions of hendrick at once: one where he was a few meters ahead, and one where he stood where he was. the vision lasted less than a heartbeat, and then his perception snapped back as if a lens had been pulled taut.
"temporal blurring," lewis said, testing the phrase aloud. his voice sounded like it belonged to someone else. hendrick made a small, humorless sound that could have been agreement.
daniel watched with a cat's patient smile. "the hill is playful," he said. "it experiments with coherence. you find that alarming, but it is the mountain's language for curiosity."
lewis frowned. "does it hurt perception permanently?"
"rarely," daniel said. "but the hill likes exchange. you will find yourself changed by the experience whether you wish it or not."
they made a sheltered cave for the night, a thin lip of basalt where the wind sheared around them. daniel curled in a floating circle above a stone and closed his spiral eye, which was a gesture more theatrical than restful. hendrick slept at once, exhausted beyond the reach of analysis. lewis lay awake, thinking of the pebble, of the duplication, of the bell, and of the cat's casual, casual knowledge of time.
he tried to test the limit of what daniel might do. quietly, with gloves on, he took a scrap of paper from his pack and wrote a single line: "if the hill allows, show us a sign we can measure." he folded the paper into a small square and tucked it into the pocket of his jacket where the wind could not take it.
the cat opened one eye and looked at the folded paper. a faint smile shaped the creature's mouth. without moving, daniel extended a miniscule projection of attention something like a thread of cold that wrapped the paper in a fine, crystalline sheath. the letters on the paper rearranged themselves while still sealed inside the ice: the script changed to a pattern lewis's instruments might have described as a frequency. when he unfurled the paper in the safety of his sleeping place, the words were gone; in their place was a single tiny printed symbol, not alphabetic and not numeric, a mark that seemed to be a vector pointing both up and inward.
lewis felt, absurdly, that the mark would be meaningful later. he could not read it now. daniel watched him with interest.
"what does it mean?" hendrick mumbled in sleep.
"it is a promise," daniel said softly, as if to a curtain. "promises are slippery, small things. keep track of them."
lewis closed his eyes. the mountain hummed. the bell chimed in the distance, patient and periodic like a heartbeat. the field oscillated, and through the fatigue and the thin air lewis experienced a new kind of clarity the feeling that beneath the instruments and measurements there was an ordering principle that could be perceived only when the mind was willing to stop insisting on category.
in the very late dark, when the world seemed to contract into the thin cylinder of their breathing, lewis dreamed a single fleeting vision: a doorway of light, and beyond it the sense of a voice that was not a voice but a presence holding a sentence thin and terrible as glass: i am there, and always will be.
he woke with the memory like a smear on his palate. next to him, daniel was floating, eyes open, looking at the place where lewis had seen the doorway. the cat's mouth twitched in something like a smile, and when lewis moved to see more, the creature turned its head and said, in a voice that now held something like respect and a hint of amusement:
"so it is close."
hendrick slept on, the bell ringing somewhere further down in the fog and the mountain breathing around them like a living thing. lewis put his hand on the folded paper in his jacket and felt the small vector on the page press into his palm as if it, too, wanted to be carried higher.