Greater Mountains

It feels like the path must wind up into the clouds forever, but you can see the top of the mountain above. The crumbling stone walkway switchbacks time and time again, building itself into the clouds until finally tributes step through them and can see where the valley peeks up at them from below. It’s an intrusive thought, walking on the clouds, feeling like you could step out onto them and they might be solid underfoot. The cliff faces rise up alongside the steep, skinny path as it winds up the incline. Familiar plant life gives way to strange, glowing flora. Long stem flowers that look like lilies except they glow a blue, the pistil bright with aqua light. At nighttime, the forest is neon electric, seelie bouncing through the trees, ungrounded, casting strange purple shadows with their crackling. Occasionally tall red gates loom up over the path, leading tributes towards and away from the ruins that are nestled along the cliffside. Small growths of purple rock, condensed into small stone chunks gather along the path, glowing in the night. A strange sight they can’t see from anywhere else: the mountaintop, floating, untethered, and a path leading right towards it.