Chapter 10: The Mountain Begins to Lie
The cold of the glass mountain was a living thing. It seeped through the soles of Irena’s shoes, a damp, penetrating chill that made her bones ache. The fog clung to her skin like cobwebs, muting sound, swallowing Ryszard’s form just ten meters ahead until he was a ghost in the grey.
He was moving, not fast, but with a decisive, testing pace. He’d found the first rule already: hesitation was poison. A glass bridge, gleaming and wet, had stretched before him. He’d paused for a full three seconds, examining it. The bridge had begun to fuzz at the edges, becoming translucent, insubstantial. He’d cursed, stepped onto it anyway before it could vanish completely, and his foot had found purchase. The bridge solidified under his weight.
“Don’t stop to think, słoneczko,” he called over his shoulder, his voice flat in the muffled air. “It doesn’t like that.”
Irena watched his back. Her brilliant mind, used to solving complex problems in safe, quiet libraries, was screaming at the illogic. There was no pattern to the paths. They spider-webbed across chasms, doubled back under themselves, offered three identical forks. Choosing one felt like intellectual suicide.
She approached a similar bridge. Her instinct was to analyze: thickness, probable load-bearing, surface friction. The moment her thoughts spiraled into calculation, the glass under the far end of the bridge began to dissolve into fog. Panic, sharp and acidic, shot through her. She gasped, stumbled forward not out of courage but pure animal need to not be stranded. Her foot landed. The bridge held.
She stood there, trembling, understanding dawning not in her mind but in her gut. The mountain didn’t test your intelligence. It tested your commitment to a mistake. It rewarded the forward motion, any motion, even the wrong one. Reckless confidence was the currency here. And Ryszard, who built his life on the appearance of exactly that, had a head start.
He glanced back, saw her frozen mid-bridge. A smirk touched his lips, lazy and familiar. It was the look he gave her in the campus café when she fumbled with her words. It stripped years off her, made her feel like a child. A hot spike of something—shame, anger—pierced her fear. She took another step, then another, forcing her legs to move until she was across.
On the golden slope, the air was so warm and sweet it felt cloying. Lusiana wiped a trickle of sweat from her temple. The path before her was wide, paved with smooth, sun-baked stones. To her left, Luis stood before one of the doors.
They weren’t real doors. They were archways of light, golden and shimmering, set into the air itself along the path. The first one Luis had approached had swirled with a familiar scene: a university lecture hall, students hanging on his every word. The second had shown a quieter image: a younger version of himself, helping his sister Antonella with homework. A portrait of a good brother.
He hadn’t entered either. He’d watched them, his head tilted, that polished smile absent. Now, he faced a third door. This one showed a blurred, contentious political debate, his face on a viewscreen, calm amid chaos.
“Fascinating,” he murmured, more to himself than to her. “It’s not offering what you want. It’s offering reflections of what you believe earns admiration.” He turned to her, the consultant’s mask sliding back into place, easy and inviting. “What do you see in yours, Lusiana? What does your mountain think you value?”
She had passed two doors of her own. One had shown a reception desk at a luxury hotel, guests smiling at her as she handed them keys. Perfect service. The other had shown a recent memory: her, breaking up with Taitusi in a crowded Suva market, her face composed, his crumbling. An image of dignified control.
She hadn’t entered. The warmth of the slope was a lie. The doors felt like traps.
“I see performances,” she said quietly, not looking at him. Her hospitality-worker smile was gone, replaced by a naked wariness. “It’s not about truth. It’s about… the version you project to be valued.”
Luis’s eyes glittered with interest. “Very good. So, the strategy is to perform for the mountain itself? To show it the version most likely to be rewarded with a path forward?” He took a step toward his door, the one of political prowess. “Or perhaps, to enter and claim the admiration as fuel?”
He reached a hand toward the glowing arch. The path ahead of him shimmered, a new, easier staircase of golden rock melting into existence. The mountain was responding. Not to his truth, but to his engagement with the performance.
Lusiana watched, her heart hammering. Her instinct was to follow, to mimic the strategy of the more skilled player. But a deeper instinct, honed from years of reading the subtle disdain behind polite smiles, told her that in this place, the performance was the prison. She stayed where she was.
The storm ridge offered no warmth, no illusions of choice. There was only the deafening grind of rock and the percussive snap of purple lightning overhead. Antonella was on her hands and knees, not in submission, in examination.
A section of the path ahead had collapsed five seconds ago. Now, the rubble was vibrating, pulling itself back together like time reversing in fast-forward. She watched the grain of the rock, the direction of the shift.
“It’s not random,” she shouted over the noise to Taitusi, who was crouched behind a precarious spur of basalt. “It reacts. Look—it reshapes after movement. Especially sudden movement.”
“Great! So we just… stop moving?” he yelled back, his voice strained with a false levity. “First team to die of boredom wins?”
“No. You move with intention. You don’t flinch.” To demonstrate, she stood up slowly, deliberately. She placed her foot on the reassembled section, applying steady, unwavering pressure. The stone solidified, locking into place. She took another slow, planted step. The ground held.
Taitusi watched her, a man built on charm and evasive action facing a problem that demanded blunt, exposed progress. His way of moving through life was a series of quick, graceful sidesteps. Here, that would get him killed.
He tried to mimic her. He stood, took a careful step. Then a loose rock skittered near his foot, triggered by some deeper tremor. He jerked back—an impulsive, graceful dodge. The moment he did, the path directly in front of him erupted upward, forming a jagged, seven-foot wall.
“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!”
Antonella didn’t look back. She was already ten paces ahead, a slow, relentless metronome of motion. She didn’t fight the mountain’s rhythm; she studied it until she could move between its heartbeats. Taitusi was left behind, facing a wall his own nervous energy had created. He stared at it, and for the first time, his smile vanished completely, revealing the raw panic underneath. He’d have to climb it, or go around. Both options required a kind of commitment his entire being rebelled against.
In the Grand Trial Atrium, the three massive projections painted the silent darkness with living struggle.
Antoinette’s eyes darted between the feeds, her fingers dancing over the console. The numerical predictions flickered, updated, contradicted themselves.
DUEL 1: IRENA vs RYSZARD
Predicted Outcome FLUCTUATING: RYSZARD (58%) | IRENA (42%)
Factor Shift: Irena Slawinska’s stress biomarkers have spiked, but associated with focused analytical activation, not panic. Adaptation rate accelerating. Ryszard Zawacki’s confidence metrics showing early signs of depletion; frustration rising.
“The glass mountain is teaching her,” Antoinette said aloud, her analyst’s tone masking her own thrill at the shifting numbers. “She’s learning faster than he is adjusting.”
Leara sighed with pleasure from her balcony. “The fragile one has teeth after all. She just needed them to be sharpened on his arrogance.”
Kelmen made a soft, dismissive sound. “Temporary adjustment. The boy’s fear of being revealed is a deeper motivator than her fear of falling. He will tap it.”
DUEL 2: LUSIANA vs LUIS
Predicted Outcome SOLIDIFYING: LUIS (85%)
Factor Note: Luis Fuentes has successfully manipulated the environmental feedback loop, gaining consistent path advantages. Lusiana Veitayaki’s strategy is non-participatory; stability is high but progress is negligible.
On the screen, Luis was now passing through his fourth door—this one showing him receiving a prestigious award. Each time, the mountain gifted him a smoother route. He was playing the game within the game perfectly. Lusiana, meanwhile, had simply started walking up the raw slope, bypassing the doors entirely. It was harder, slower, like trekking through deep sand, but the ground didn’t change. She was ignoring the mountain’s preferred currency.
“She’s rejecting the economy,” Arkan Veyl observed, his first words since the trial began. They weren’t praise or criticism. They were identification, like naming a species of bird.
“It’s a stubborn strategy,” Kelmen said. “Inefficient.”
“It is a consistent one,” Arkan replied. “It may become resilient when his economy eventually crashes.”
DUEL 3: ANTONELLA vs TAITUSI
Predicted Outcome NARROWING: ANTONELLA (59%) | TAITUSI (41%)
Factor Breakdown: Antonella Fuentes’ progress is linear and stable. Taitusi Rayawa’s path is chaotic, circuitous, but occasionally yields surprising shortcuts through collapses. High energy expenditure. High volatility.
They watched as Taitusi, instead of climbing the wall he’d created, found a narrow fissure at its base. He didn’t think; he wriggled into it, disappearing into the dark. For a moment, the external feed lost him. Then, he spilled out onto a ledge fifteen feet further up the ridge, ahead of Antonella for the first time. He whooped, a raw, surprised sound.
Antonella didn’t look up. She continued her methodical climb, unfazed.
“He is using the chaos as a tool,” Leara mused. “Turning his own instability into a kind of navigation. How very… human.”
“It is unsustainable,” Kelmen stated.
“Most exhilarating things are,” Leara purred.
Arkan watched, his mercurial eyes reflecting the three flickering screens. No duel was decided. But the mountain was no longer just a backdrop. It was an active player, and it had made its first moves. It had shown Irena the cost of thought, offered Luis the bait of admiration, and mirrored Taitusi’s chaos back at him. It had begun choosing what each of them must confront, and the confrontation had just scratched the surface.
In the silence of the atrium, beneath the projections of struggle, the only sound was the soft, persistent tap of Antoinette’s fingers tracking the fractures as they formed.
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The Wishing Ascent Trial Dimension — Irena and Ryszard’s version of the mountain, a landscape of glass bridges, shifting fog, and mirrored paths projected live inside the Grand Trial Atrium.
The fog grew thinner, punishingly so, until it was just a freezing mist that coated the glass in a slick, invisible film. Irena’s hands were numb, her breaths coming in shallow clouds. For what felt like hours, she had followed the logic of forward motion, her eyes locked on the shape of Ryszard’s jacket ahead. She stopped analyzing and just moved, a desperate mimicry that kept the paths solid.
But the mountain was changing the test.
The path narrowed until it was a ribbon, no wider than her shoulders, clinging to the side of a sheer drop into silent, grey nothingness. And the glass beneath her feet was no longer clear. It was reflective. With every step, she saw herself looking up: her own face, pale and streaked with damp hair, eyes wide with a fear that looked like stupidity. The reflection showed her as she feared others saw her—fragile, foolish, a glass girl about to shatter.
Worse were the peripheral reflections in the panes that jutted from the cliff. They showed fragments of memory: her, laughing too loudly at one of his jokes in the cafeteria; her, pretending to study while watching him from across the library; her, carefully wording a text message that he’d left on read for two days. Each image was a tiny, private humiliation made public by the mountain’s cruel mirror.
She faltered. Her foot slipped a centimeter. The glass groaned.
Ahead, Ryszard reached a point where the single path split cleanly into two. Both routes ascended into the final bank of pure white fog that hid the summit. The left fork was dramatic, a sweeping, transparent arc that promised a bold, direct line. The right fork was narrower, less defined, ducking behind a jagged outcrop of milky, frosted glass.
He stopped at the fork and turned, a grin spreading across his face. He was breathing hard, but his eyes were bright with the thrill of a finish line he could almost taste.
“Final stretch, słoneczko!” he called out, his voice echoing oddly in the thinning air. He gestured to the dramatic left arc. “Think that’s the one. Big gesture, right? The mountain eats that stuff up.”
He was performing. For the mountain, for the unseen audience, for her. He winked at her, a familiar, lazy gesture that had once made her heart stutter. Now, it felt like a distraction. The reflection in the glass at her feet showed her staring up at him, a silent question on her face. She looked pathetic.
Then the path under Ryszard’s boots crackled.
It was a faint sound, like ice settling on a pond. A spiderweb of fine, hairline fractures radiated from where his weight was planted. He glanced down, his smile not fading but tightening at the edges. He shifted his foot. The cracking continued, a soft, persistent song of structural failure.
In the Grand Trial Atrium, the probability graph for Duel 1 exploded into violent recalculations.
“Shift!” Antoinette announced, her voice cutting through the silent observation. The numbers on the main feed blazed and scrambled. “Environmental feedback is inverting. Confidence interpreted as arrogance. The substrate is rejecting his narrative.”
Kelmen leaned forward, his bioluminescent channels flaring a sharper blue. “Impossible. It’s a simple physical reaction.”
“It’s psychoreactive, your highness,” Antoinette shot back, her analyst’s discipline overriding deference. “It’s not about mass. It’s about authenticity. The mountain thinks he’s lying.”
On the screen, Irena had stopped looking at Ryszard. She was staring at her own reflection in the glass pane beside her. She saw the fear, the desperation. But deeper, under the surface tremble, she saw the concentration she used on exams, the stubborn thread of intelligence that people called “fragile” because it wasn’t loud. She stopped seeing a glass girl. She started seeing a person on a glass mountain. The distinction was everything.
She took a step forward, not looking up at him. The path beneath her feet, which had been slick and treacherous, seemed to firm. The frost receded from the edges, offering a fraction more grip.
Ryszard saw her advancing. The cracks under him were spreading. His performance was now actively destroying his route. Panic, raw and unfamiliar, flashed in his eyes. He covered it with a louder version of his charm, a Hail Mary pass of his entire personality.
“Hey, Irena, wait up!” he called, forcing a laugh. “Crazy, right? This thing’s got a sense of humor. Look, the left’s toast. We’ll take the right one together, yeah? Safer.”
We. The word hung in the frozen air. It was the same word he used to get a girl to leave a party with him, a temporary alliance of convenience that implied a shared moment, a secret. It had always worked. It made the other person feel chosen, even if the choosing lasted only an hour.
Irena finally looked at him. She saw the tightness around his eyes, the slight, frantic calculation. She heard the ‘we’ and understood it as a tactical retreat, not an invitation. He wasn’t offering partnership. He was trying to re-establish the old dynamic where he led and she followed, where his definition of the moment was the only one that mattered. It was his final risk.
The silence stretched. In the atrium, Leara’s amused smile faded into something sharper, more interested. Her velvety glow seemed to still. Arkan Veyl’s expression remained unreadable, but his eyes were fixed on Irena’s profile on the screen.
Irena looked from Ryszard’s strained face to the two paths. The left, showy and cracking. The right, quiet and obscure. He was already edging toward the right, assuming she would fall in behind him.
She did not answer him.
Instead, she turned her body fully toward the narrower, right-hand path—the one he was already claiming—and then, with a deliberate pivot, she stepped onto the disintegrating left arc.
“What are you doing?” Ryszard’s shout was genuine, stripped of all performance.
The glass screamed as her weight settled on it, a chorus of splintering echoes. But it held. She didn’t run. She walked, each step deliberate and light, a dancer on a floor she knew was dying. She wasn’t trusting the path. She was accepting its collapse as part of the journey. The fractures spread around her feet like blossoming, transparent flowers, but the core held just long enough for her next step.
She was past him. The fog of the summit swallowed the bold arc, and her with it.
Ryszard stood frozen at the fork, his chosen safer path now seeming like a concession. He spat a curse and lunged onto the right path, scrambling upward.
In the fog, there was no sound but Irena’s heartbeat in her ears. The glass underfoot became smooth, solid, and warm. The oppressive cold vanished. The whiteness parted.
She emerged onto a small, flat plateau of flawless crystal. Above, the furious, luminous stormlight of the peak churned, but here, it was calm. In the center of the plateau, a pedestal of the same clear glass held a swirling, condensed sphere of the white fog, pulsing with a soft, internal light.
The summit. The wish.
She didn’t hesitate. She didn’t think about a grand desire, about home or victory or anything else. She simply reached out and placed her palm flat against the sphere.
The mountain opened.
It wasn’t a violent rupture. It was a yielding. The sphere dissolved under her touch, flowing up her arm in a wave of gentle warmth. The fog around the plateau recoiled, clearing to reveal a staggering, 360-degree view of the impossible mountain range. And beneath her feet, the glass bloomed with intricate, glowing patterns of gold and blue that radiated from her point of contact, a silent, spectacular acknowledgement.
In the atrium, the outcome screen flashed definitive, brilliant text.
DUEL 1: CONCLUDED.
VICTOR: IRENA SLAWINSKA.
On the secondary feed, Ryszard stumbled out of the fog of the right path onto a lower, barren ledge. He saw Irena above, illuminated by the radiant patterns, the mountain celebrating her choice. The connection between their two paths severed, his route ending in a blunt, glass wall.
He looked up at her, then seemed to remember the cameras. He smiled. It was the same lazy, charming smile he’d entered with. But his eyes were fixed on a point far away, and the smile didn’t move them. It was a shell. He was still performing, but the audience was no longer watching him. They were watching the victor, standing quietly in the light he thought he deserved.
The mountain had granted nothing. But it had revealed everything. Irena had won. Ryszard was left behind in the fog, smiling, a performer who had finally lost control of the room.