Inspired by a prompt from @flashfictionfridayofficial
'I See My Light Come Shining' by @jack-of-crowns
At least when there was enough of that first light as could cast a shadow; that's when the winding ridgelines looked most like a path had once run down from the crowns of the high peaks to the valley below. Morning was best for remembering just where you'd been and where you were trying to get at. Problem was, the sun didn't always rise when it ought to have anymore. When the black haze of memory clouded her vision, Clara could hardly recall if there had ever been a set course to begin with.
That was partly why she kept within the ghostly forests of whitebark that skeletoned the mountains, because the surest way to lose your grip was insisting too much on where the handholds were. Those were things best not counted upon now. Death wasn't much for parlour tricks, and among the bare starkness of her fellow ghosts there was always some degree of an honest truth to be found. The damned kept with the damned; there was no sense carrying on about morning when inevitable evening came a-calling with such terrible stillness.
The mountains never moved no matter when; this much she could count on. The one far off to the east; how it held the shadow of a giant's face well into the day. She'd been looked at that way before, when she was alive. It was the look of the ancestor; set hard in flint, not sure of whom it beheld across the scoured chasms of time when she was deep in the dreams of the Old Man. If only she could find the right words to ask for an answer to her prayers.
Then at the edge of the dead pine stand; a glimmer.
It had been perpetual winter here in this purgatorial gloom, but now she could see ice melting from the bony branch tips where the rays of a low sun struck. Clara felt a thirst rise in the dry gulch of her throat. Fresh, clear water; streaming down thawing wood, frosty limbs rattled by the breath of an easterly breeze. She took a long look at the scree slope where the giant's visage was silhouetted, cast by the shadows of a spire of rock topping the mountain westwards of it. Either the distance fooled with her, or it wasn't quite so far away as it had been before.
She knelt down to drink, cupping the precious meltwater in chafed hands, asking herself different questions. Maybe the answers were not coming from those who had already gone; just maybe, the answers were coming from them who had never left.
