Hall of Infinite Doors
The mountain is a sacred thing, you remember, a thing prayed to, and personified, and given life and glory and the bones of the tribe's greatest men. There are priests in the caves who do not emerge, and are fed by the hunters while they sit in the bowels of their god, interpreting messages and growing old and feeble. It is rarely climbed, only during quests of great importance, but you figure since everywhere else is devoid of food, why not try the mountain? Gathering your tools, you wish a brisk goodbye to your mate and set out. You emerge from your cavern into a bowl-shaped canyon, pocked all along the sides with caves both shallow and deep where your tribe lives, and grown in the center with aromatic herbs and the beginnings of primitive agriculture. You set down a long, rocky path between two arms of rock, the only exit from your tribe's gathering, and set out immediately to climb as soon as you spot a place where you can hoist yourself up. Your new body gives you remarkable strength, more than you remember ever having, and you can barely feel the rock of the mountain under the thick callus on your feet. There are no paths along the mountain, nowhere where the tribesmen traditionally climb, so you find yourself alternately skirting rocky ledges and lifting yourself up jagged, often hanging rocky faces, resting on sloped plateaus and grappling clumps of ragged weeds that grow in the accumulated dirt between crevices.
Before long, though, you see signs that you aren't the first person to climb. You see intermittent gougings from what must be claws, deep and worrisome in the stone, and soon find something like a path, though it's mostly just an easier climb with a calmer incline. Occasionally springs of cool water, filterred by the rocks of the god-mountain spring from the face of the stone to trickle down; you drink from these when you can, but notice that there are many of the deep claw-marks around them, as if you're not the only one to have this idea. Occasionally you pull yourself onto high plateaus or bowls that have actually collected some amount of migrant soil and dust, enough to grow a thin covering of scrubby grass, but other than insects and the occasional bird nest, you can't detect anything alive around.
When you emerge into the mouth of the cave it comes as a distinct surprise. One moment you're hoisting yourself onto what you think is one of the innumerable small and sloping ledges, and the next you're staring into a large, gaping aperture into the darkness of the holy mountain. The cave opens onto nothingness, no ledge, no path, no nothing, but here you notice the deep claw-marks more than you have anywhere else. You also notice an almost physical stench coming from the black, rocky wound. The cave smells FOUL, like some sort of hideous animal aroma mixed with death mixed with everything unpleasant you could ever think of. It almost knocks you back down the mountain.
The signs are obvious: something big, something you've never seen lives here. You don't know if that something is in there now, and once you enter the cave you won't be able to, as you have no light and no way of making light. To enter this cave would be to throw yourself at the mercy of one of the hidden horrors of this prehistoric age and hope your wits and your crudge instincts can see you through.
Before long, though, you see signs that you aren't the first person to climb. You see intermittent gougings from what must be claws, deep and worrisome in the stone, and soon find something like a path, though it's mostly just an easier climb with a calmer incline. Occasionally springs of cool water, filterred by the rocks of the god-mountain spring from the face of the stone to trickle down; you drink from these when you can, but notice that there are many of the deep claw-marks around them, as if you're not the only one to have this idea. Occasionally you pull yourself onto high plateaus or bowls that have actually collected some amount of migrant soil and dust, enough to grow a thin covering of scrubby grass, but other than insects and the occasional bird nest, you can't detect anything alive around.
When you emerge into the mouth of the cave it comes as a distinct surprise. One moment you're hoisting yourself onto what you think is one of the innumerable small and sloping ledges, and the next you're staring into a large, gaping aperture into the darkness of the holy mountain. The cave opens onto nothingness, no ledge, no path, no nothing, but here you notice the deep claw-marks more than you have anywhere else. You also notice an almost physical stench coming from the black, rocky wound. The cave smells FOUL, like some sort of hideous animal aroma mixed with death mixed with everything unpleasant you could ever think of. It almost knocks you back down the mountain.
The signs are obvious: something big, something you've never seen lives here. You don't know if that something is in there now, and once you enter the cave you won't be able to, as you have no light and no way of making light. To enter this cave would be to throw yourself at the mercy of one of the hidden horrors of this prehistoric age and hope your wits and your crudge instincts can see you through.