The road ended. The goat path that had pretended to be a trail narrowed to a line, to a suggestion and then to nothing. Rock, Grass, Sky was all that remained.

  Wei stood at the boundary between trail and not-trail. Pack on his back. His hair moving in wind that tasted of altitude and emptiness.

  He looked at the mountains.

  I looked at the mountains.

  "Mountains again," he said.

  "Mountains," I said.

  Behind us: everything we'd left. A village. Three sects at an inn. A legend spreading south. A boy with a broken core who had said I'll find you again. A flower that had bloomed and died in ten seconds.

  Behind us: the world.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Ahead: mountains. And the emptiness that mountains provided — not absence but scale. The geographical equivalent of silence.

  Wei walked forward. Past the end of the trail. Onto rock that had never been walked on in any pattern that constituted a path.

  He walked ahead of me.

  This was new. The distance had been growing for weeks. But the position was intentional. He was leading.

  I am going. You can follow.

  Something shifted. Behind my eyes, in my sternum. Lika a Déjà vu but heavier — vertigo without falling. The taste of metal, brief and sourceless. A wrongness from directions that shouldn't exist.

  I let it pass. It passed.

  I followed.

  His back was straight, his pack adjusted and his hands were trembling. Both. The tremor visible even from behind — fingers that wanted to be still and couldn't.

  Three out of ten. And falling.

  I followed him into the mountains.

  We walked. No dialog. No plan. One ahead, one behind, steps falling into shared rhythm without discussion.

  The mountains received us. No judgment. No order. Just rock and sky and thin air that was honest about what it cost.

  Wei didn't look back.

  I followed.

  One step. Then the next.

  The mountains.

  The sky.

  The boy ahead.

  The being behind.

  I followed.