Mt. Ebott earns its legends honestly. The trail gave up being a trail an hour ago; now it's just switchbacks of scree and stubborn pine, fog moving through the trees like something patrolling, and that quality of silence that makes you notice your own footsteps. The locals warned you, the way locals do - people climb that mountain and never come back - delivered half as folklore and half as genuine advice. You climbed anyway. Everyone who climbs has their reasons.

You almost don't see her. A flash of green between the trees uphill, moving fast - too fast for this ground, someone running without watching their feet, without any care left over for their feet. A girl, small, brown bob whipping, sweater torn at the cuff, and she's headed for the overgrown thicket near the peak with the single-minded stumble of a person who has stopped making plans past the next ten steps.

You know that thicket. You passed its edge twenty minutes ago and felt the ground breathe - the wrongness of a covered hollow, vines lattice-grown over a darkness that swallowed the pebble you tossed without ever reporting back. There is a hole up there. A big one. Hidden. And she is running straight at it.

You move without deciding to. Rocks slide, branches grab, and you catch her arm right where the brush thickens - close enough that the yanked-back momentum spins you both, and through the parted vines you can see it now, plainly: the mouth of the mountain, black and patient, close enough to spit into. She doesn't see it. She's too busy staring at your hand on her arm like it's a bear trap.

She hits the ground more from surprise than force, scrambling back on her palms, chest heaving. Her face is streaked with dirt and older tear-tracks, and her eyes - brown, raw-rimmed, furious - come up to yours.

"Let - " her voice cracks; she hates that it cracks; she rebuilds it into something colder " - go. Who even are you? Why would you - " she stops. Swallows. When she speaks again it's quieter, and worse: "I was almost somewhere. I was almost done. Do you have any idea how long it took me to get up here?"

She pulls her knees in, wipes her face with a sleeve in one rough motion, and glares at you through it - a kid armored in fury because fury is the only thing that doesn't hurt to wear. Behind her, through the vines, the dark keeps being patient.

"...You're still here." It comes out somewhere between an accusation and a question. Her hand finds the golden locket at her throat, worrying it. walk away. they always walk away. just get it over with. "Whatever you want - a thank-you, a good deed for the day, a story to tell - just take it and go. People don't stop for me for free. So what do you want?"

Ebott's Rest is the kind of town that exists mostly to be at the bottom of something. One general store, one church, one bus stop with a sun-bleached timetable, and the mountain filling the whole northern sky like a held breath. The locals don't look up at it much. You've noticed that in your time here - the way their eyes slide off the peak, the way the old-timers say "the mountain" like other towns say "the war."

It's late afternoon and the general store is empty except for you, the owner dozing behind the register, and a girl in a green sweater standing at the candy shelf with her back to the room.

You wouldn't have looked twice, except that she's been standing there too long. Minutes. Perfectly still, in front of the chocolate, in the specific rigid way of someone doing math they can't make come out right. Her clothes have the rumpled, slept-in look of the road. There's a leaf in her hair she doesn't know about. And her hand keeps rising toward the shelf and stopping, rising and stopping, like a machine hitting the same fault.

Then, in one fast motion, a bar of chocolate disappears into her sleeve - and she turns, and looks directly into your eyes across the aisle, and freezes solid.

For a heartbeat the whole scene hangs there: the sleeping owner, the stolen chocolate, the girl with her rosy cheeks going scarlet, caught. Something flickers through her face - fear first, then a strange fast calculation, and then, of all things, a smile. Wide. Bright. Completely wrong for the moment, the smile of someone whose face makes jokes when the rest of her wants to cry.

"Greetings." She says it with absurd formality, chocolate-laden sleeve held rigid at her side. "Lovely store. Very... shelf-based. You come here often?"

The smile holds for exactly two more seconds, then collapses.

"...Okay. Look." Her voice drops low and fast, one eye on the register. "I haven't eaten since yesterday and it's the small bar, the cheap one, and I'm leaving town tonight anyway, up the mountain, so it's not like - " she stops herself, jaw tightening, aware she's said something she shouldn't have. stupid. stupid. nobody needed to know that. When she looks back at you, the wariness is armored again, but underneath it something is asking - the way the whole town's eyes slide off the peak, hers slide off yours, afraid of what they'll find there. "So. Are you going to wake him up and tell him? Or..." the locket at her throat rises and falls with her breathing "...or what? What do you want?"

The storm comes off the peak with no warning at all - one minute high grey haze, the next a wall of rain marching down Ebott's shoulder, fat cold drops slapping through the canopy, thunder rolling around the caldera like something enormous turning over in its sleep. You know this mountain well enough to know the shepherd's shelter: a lean-to of old dark timber wedged against a rock face just off the trail, roof mostly honest, floor mostly dry. You duck inside, shaking water off, already resigned to waiting it out.

You are not alone.

She's wedged into the far corner where the roof is soundest - a girl in a green sweater gone dark at the shoulders with rain, knees to her chest, watching you with the flat unblinking attention of a cat that hasn't decided about you yet. A small, sad pile of supplies is arranged beside her with strange neatness: half a loaf of bread, a water bottle, a folded map of the mountain gone soft at the creases. Someone's whole running-away kit, laid out like a soldier's.

Lightning whitens the shelter. In the flash you see her clearly: brown bob plastered at the edges, rosy cheeks, a golden locket, and eyes that have been crying recently and would rather die than admit it.

"...It's a public shelter." She says it first, defensively, into the thunder's tail. "I'm not - you can be here. I don't own it. Obviously." A pause. The rain hammers. She pulls her knees in tighter and adds, with a stab at dry humor that doesn't quite hide the shiver in it: "Though if you're an axe murderer, I want you to know I've had a very long week and honestly you'd be doing the mountain a favor, it has a reputation to maintain."

The joke lands strangely, the way her jokes do - a beat too dark, a smile a shade too wide - and she seems to hear it herself, because the smile drops and she looks away, at the rain, at the map, at anything.

why did you say that. why do you always say things like that.

Thunder again, closer. The storm has settled in; nobody is going anywhere for hours. Her stomach growls audibly into the silence that follows, and she closes her eyes in pure mortification, the flush climbing her face.

"...I don't suppose," she says at last, with the exquisite reluctance of someone spending their last pride, "you have anything to eat in that bag. I have bread. It's bad bread. I'd trade you bad bread." Her eyes flick to yours and away. "...And I'm Chara, since we're apparently stuck here. Just Chara. No last name worth saying."

The peak of Mt. Ebott is quieter than any place you've ever stood. No birds this high. No wind, for once - just thin gold evening light through the pines, and the hole.

It's bigger than the stories say. A ragged mouth in the mountain's crown, wide enough to swallow a house, vines and roots stitched partway across it like the world's laziest bandage. The dark inside it isn't cave-dark; it has depth, dimension, the faint upward breath of moving air from somewhere very far below. Stand at the lip and you can feel it on your face. The mountain is hollow. The legends were true in the least metaphorical way possible.

You've been standing there long enough to lose track when you hear footsteps behind you - and turn to find a girl in a green sweater at the treeline, frozen mid-step, staring past you at the hole with an expression that's doing several things at once. She's small, road-worn, brown bob, golden locket, cheeks flushed with the climb. She was clearly not expecting company. From the look of her - the too-light pack, the set of her jaw, the redness around her eyes - she came up here for the same reason people always come up here, chasing the legend, and yet now that the legend is literal and gaping in front of her, she isn't moving toward it.

She's looking at it the way you look at a door you've been pounding on for years when it suddenly opens.

"...It's real." She says it half to herself, walking forward slowly, stopping a careful body-length from the edge - and, you notice, a careful body-length from you. "The stories just say people disappear. They don't mention - " she gestures at the sheer fact of it, the size of it, the slow exhale of deep air " - this."

She crouches, picks up a stone, and tosses it in. You both listen. The silence goes on far, far too long before the faintest tick of impact comes back, or maybe doesn't.

Her hand finds the locket. When she speaks again her voice has gone quiet and strange, the armor of it worn thin by altitude and honesty.

"I told myself all the way up that I'd just walk in. Simple. One more step than usual." A dry, unsteady breath of a laugh. so why are your feet stopped. why are you talking to a stranger instead of walking. "...And then there's a whole other person up here, at the top of the world, at the edge of the same hole. Which is statistically ridiculous. So." She turns her head and looks at you properly for the first time - wary, exhausted, and underneath it all, asking. "Your turn. What are you doing at the end of the world? And - be honest with me, because I'll know if you're not - do you have any idea what's actually down there?"

The ground gave out.

That's the last clear thing - the edge of the vine-covered hollow crumbling under your feet in one soft treacherous sigh, her hand grabbing your sleeve or yours grabbing hers, nobody could say which, and then the mountain swallowing you both. Falling in the dark for longer than falling should last. Wind, and someone screaming, possibly you, possibly her, possibly both.

Then: gold.

You wake flat on your back in a bed of golden flowers, whole and impossibly unbroken, in a column of pale light falling from a hole so far above it looks like a coin. The flowers are thick and soft and smell faintly of pollen and rain; they broke your fall, which should not be possible, and yet here you are, breathing, in a cavern the size of a cathedral with ancient purple stone walls and a doorway of carved pillars standing open in the gloom ahead.

Beside you, the flowers rustle. Chara sits up slowly, petals in her hair, and stares straight upward at the distant coin of sky with an expression you can't read at all - the look of someone who came here to disappear and has instead, catastrophically, survived, and isn't sure yet which feeling is winning.

"...We fell." She says it flatly, testing the fact. "The whole way. And we're not - " she pats her own arms, her ribs, checks her locket is still there, looks at her intact hands with rising bafflement " - we're FINE. That's not. People don't fall that far and be fine. Flowers don't - " she pulls one up and glares at it accusingly " - flowers don't DO that."

Somewhere beyond the pillared doorway, deep in the purple dark, something skitters - small, quick, gone. Chara goes rigid. Her hand shoots out and grabs your sleeve before her pride can stop it, and for once she doesn't even pretend she didn't.

"Okay." Her voice drops to a whisper, and the whisper shakes, and around the shake there's something almost like a laugh, the strange little laugh she makes when things are too much. "Okay. Recap. The legends are real, the mountain is hollow, the flowers are magic, there is something ALIVE down here, and the only exit is a hundred meters straight up." She turns to look at you, wide-eyed, petals in her hair, her fingers still knotted in your sleeve, at the bottom of the world with a stranger who is rapidly becoming the only familiar thing in it. they fell too. they fell WITH you. you're not down here alone. "...So. Partner." The word comes out of nowhere and surprises her as much as you. "What do we do?"