#rampart ridge trail

[orofeaiel]

Autumnal Forest Scene on the Rampart Ridge Trail

[onehikeaweek]

Rampart Ridge in Pasayten Wilderness by Nanny Goat Mountain / 壁壘脊

Rampart Ridge in Pasayten Wilderness by Nanny Goat Mountain / 壁壘脊

Rampart Ridge in Pasayten Wilderness looms over Lost River across from Nanny Goat Mountain. Lost Peak, the nearest taller high point, sits just under a mile away. Moreover, it sees many of Washington State’s 200 highest peaks nearby. Nanny Goat Mountain summit ridge See more trip photos here. Rampart Ridge in Pasayten Wilderness at a Glance Access: Billy Goat TrailheadRound Trip: 24.1…

[mountrainiernps]

The season of snowmelt is upon us.

Days are getting warmer. More sunlight shining down. And the snow that has piled up since November is melting.

But it’s not gone yet.

Lower elevation trails like around the Carbon River entrance and Longmire, tend to melt out first. In areas with dense trees, snow banks might linger a little longer.

The higher you go up the mountain, the more snow there was, the cooler the temperatures and the longer snow takes to melt.

Trails in many places are still buried under snow. Many trail signs are still buried under snow. There might be nothing to point you in the right direction except a map and compass or a GPS.

So, if you want to hike in the national park, please come prepared with your 10 Essentials. Stop in at an information center or museum. You can get the latest intel from the park ranger on where the snow is and isn’t. And then go take a hike. Have fun. When you come to a stretch of trail buried under snow, take a look around. Can you see where the trail comes out of the snowbank?

If you’re not 100% sure about the trail or the snow obscures the way, turn around. The trails will still be here in another week or month that it takes for the snow to melt.

For more on hiking safety,  please start with this link https://www.nps.gov/mora/planyourvisit/hiking-safety.htm For more info on the 10 Essentials, this website can help https://www.nps.gov/articles/10essentials.htm To find links for Mount Rainier specific weather forecasts try this website https://www.nps.gov/mora/planyourvisit/weather.htm

These photos are from years past and do not reflect current conditions. NPS Climbing Ranger Photo. Climbing ranger walking onto snow covering the Glacier Basin trial. June 2019. NPS/M. Schmidt Photo. Snow melting along Rampart Ridge trail in dense forest. May 2022. NPS Climbing Ranger Photo. Climbing Ranger on snow near the end of the Glacier Basin trail. Inter Glacier and Mount Rainier in background. July 2018.

[newmooninhername]

Phileremon stood at the edge of the wood, staring out into the clear cut beneath power lines, pinching the divot beneath her bottom lip. Her neck had begun to hurt sometime the night before, and indicator that her strange physical affliction was coming on strong. The pain made it difficult to think.

Several feet away towards the middle of the clearing, a family of deer had, overnight, slipped between the long wall of pin oak sentinels and a group of persimmon. She saw evidence there of bark rubbed away, likely by the horns of some lone, rutting buck months prior. One of the elders had a limp, as evidenced by the way the right front hoof left race tracks atop the squall's leavings.

There was also a well-used rabbit trail. She made a mental note, that if she ever got desperate for meat she could make traps for them there. For now, mushroom and shiso-herbed rice and crystal yacón were as proper a meal as any, with their omega fatty acids and high protein content.

"Anassan, whatever lesson you give, I will face head on."

'I just hope it never involves me having to kill another being...' she thought, returning to her investigation.

What was missing was any sign of prints for the diamond-eyed walker. The snow was powdered there, its expanse untrodden at the bases of thistle stalk and burdock bur. The girl looked right and left. Yes, this was the exact spot it had been standing. "Nothing," she billowed, unaware of having spoken. Weren't skinwalkers known for leaving a yellow trail of pustulous saliva from whatever mouth they were wearing? The footprints of the animal or human it had donned? Tags of decaying flesh, left here and there on winter twigs, as its stolen hide slowly fell apart along the trail?

Phileremon suddenly remembered the scent of rotten meat she had smelled as she'd left the offering; the now-realized presence of a corpse. And yet, no sign of it remained. To her knowledge, there was not a creature within fifty miles whose passing was untraceable. Vetala were said to inhabit the mountainside, hanging here and there from old buzzard trees at midnight, but had only ever been sighted north of the halfway mark around its spiky midsection, where wild ginger, blood root and fir lost footing on the sharp spires of ironed manganese.

Phileremon looked up over the rising trees towards the peak. She was accustomed to thinking of it as a mountain, but in fact it was a being, heir of an ancient race, an Antæan skyggeberg named Theou. She stood still as its stone, gaping upwards. What a behemoth it was.

The Antæan had not moved in millennia. In the midst of thousands of kilometers of pin oak, sverrewood and cedar pine, it had settled, dozed and eventually slept, its roots comfortably buried.

Asleep it had remained, now less a being than a legend, its jagged charcoal cliffs and charnel grounds striking companions to the slivers of barren, snow-vowed roads and impassable valleys. Cragged elbow creases and armpits, forever pinned in ice packed so hard as to form glass pauldrons and gauntlets, dappled its massive, wrinkled form.

Theou's southbound crest now seemed to dissolve into the white-grey of that morning's sky. It was said that one could step off of the peak and find oneself standing on the plains of Prytannin, a planar rift of the dead whose sky is the landscape of the human world below. How unsettling that must be, to look up and see ash, oak, elk and bear instead of birds and bluesky. It was said that senates of wizened ghouls presided strictly over the dead there, their broken ramparts and bastions pristine inside, held together by their power. She had never been there, never had a reason to go, but knew that the plane's unique, necrotic creatures, half-ethereal, half-matter, had no interest in traversing into the common world.

On some occasions of unknown celebration--once a year or so, but never the same month--the Prytannin dead would gather along Theou's ridges and cliffsides, led in procession by the Tymbidian, She Athrone the Underworld. Her presiding aspect (generally compassionate Polyodynos, alert Phylakê or the lantern carrier, Noctiluca) would take the River Styx and rise to the surface emanating a muted, Tyrian purple light, raising the dead through the many churt caves of the local karst region surrounding the skyggeberg. Friend of corpses, keeper of lost souls, the Tymbidian would lead them for three days before dissipating with the mists, running back down into the black soil once more, bearing the brunt of winter against her torches.

It was said that she walked them so that they would not feel alone, having something other to do than obsess over the loss of lives once lived above. Phileremon had witnessed the grim procession several years in a row, with absolute awe and wonder. It appeared to be less a trek of boredom, more a rite or ritual.

Nightly, the girl witnessed the Tymbidian walking the local dead along the borders during twilight, as was part of their pact. But She'd never been accompanied by any Prytannin dead below the halfway line except during Procession, so it could not have been them in the clearing, as they never moved into the physical world without Her permission, and certainly not ever alone.

The Theou's dreams mingled with hers often, called her to take its paths to the Prytannin, but she couldn't imagine why she should. It was dangerous up there and, by her estimates, she was still at least a decade away from being powerful enough to manage such a quest.

She wished that, instead of a skyggeberg, a lyfjaberg had settled there, as those brighter Antæan were said to lead to prytannin of healing, powerful artifacts of aide. The skyggeberg, on the other hand, was a place for strict ascetics, where one went to challenge oneself to the utmost, face one's greatest fears. It sickened rather than healed, starved, scared, its sigiled artifacts luring those seeking sepulchral boons only found once the traveler was lost, half-dead or beset by all manners of haunts and half-lives. For the time being, Phileremon had not the strength to undertake such a challenge, and little desire.

Her mind snapped back to the meeting between them, the diamond-eyed creature and she. Phileremon shook her head and shivered, her neck crunching, wisps of hair sticking out of her hood touching her face, too numb now to be felt, to tickle. While it was speaking the name out loud that chanced calling the skinwalker to you, she was even unnerved by thinking the name. What a horror.

The girl quickly admonished herself. Why was she even questioning what she had been told? Veneficar Hegêmonen was not a liar. If she had foreseen a skinwalker, that's exactly what it had been. Yet, Phileremon had lingering questions that she would not gain from Hegêmonen, who spoke so often in riddles and mysteries. She decided to go speak to the Historian about it instead. One thing was for sure, there was no evidence to indicate that anything had passed the treeline and entered her woods.

The skin on her face had begun to burn. It was time to return home. She followed her footsteps back to Propylon, to see about the offering and whether it had been accepted. Passing the apothecary shack at the clearing reminded her of the whistling that had accompanied the beast. She needed to remember to ask the Historian about that as well.

Arriving at Propylon to her right, she saw with sudden delight the massive tracks of a dog, evidenced by the x-shapes that the spaces between paw pads left in the snow. It had eaten, delicately, from the center of the offering plate where she had piled the meat, bone and egg, and marked it afterwards, urine leavings a sure ownership of the small shrine.

The prints never left the circle ward around the stone altar except for where they came and went down the hill to the small cave entrance. Excited, Phileremon ran to the cave, hoping as she ever had to find physical evidence of a visitation by her Matron.

It was as she had hoped, the second evidence of a physical manifestation. No human-shaped footprints, but prints nonetheless; hound tracks beginning and ending at the tiny entrance. No large dog could fit into that hole, and the prints stopped just short of it, which indicated to her that it was, indeed, a Stygian hound manifesting a physical form long enough to take the hill to the offering.

She imagined the scene; a shadow appearing at the hole in the frozen soil, atoms thickening into a black fog, taking form of a giant, silken hound. How graceful it must have been, its eyes slanted and wise. Perhaps one day she would stand before it, before them both as they stood, majestic, on either side of She, Borne of a Thousand Forms: Darksister, the Tuscan healer, Ecate. Leukophryne, the wizened, white-browed, winter veneficar. Ouresiphoitin, solitary wanderer of the Antæan wood. Perhaps the compassionate Agallomenen Elaphoisi.

Her heart beat quick in her chest, her eyes widening, a smile breaking across her numb face. What an eventful deipnon it had been! She had been so worried that the long stint of her inability would be followed by many uneventful months before she could return to her previous skill level. Here was proof, finally, that Hekate had no intention of punishing her for what she had not been capable of.

She knew this already, innately. The belief that she was not worthy was hardly beneficial to her craft. Hekate asked for courage, confidence, asked Phileremon to be the Queen of her land. It was time to stop being the self-doubting acolyte and step into her place at her Matron's side, no longer as a girl but as a Lampade of the New Moon.

She hurried back home to speak to the Historian, though it seemed less pressing now, her smile wide and warming the marble of a face that had been frozen so long, so long.

[wrap-around-your-dreams]

MOUNT RAINIER

RAMPART RIDGE TRAIL

JANUARY 10, 2023

[emphatic-nomadic]

Rampart Ridge Trail in Mt Rainier National Park

[tempest-melody]

Mount Rainier: Longmire

One of the entrances to Mount Rainier National Park was walking distance from our cabin. When visiting any national park I highly suggest getting a National Parks pass so that your entry is already paid for and entering is quick. Our first stop was the Longmire visitor center to speak to the park rangers about trail conditions. The park site is kept up to date but the rangers have the best…

[americasgreatoutdoors]

A creamsicle sky over the mountains at Shenandoah National Park in Virginia delivers mesmerizing eye candy. Shenandoah National Park straddles the Blue Ridge, a unique line of mountains forming the easternmost rampart of the great Appalachian Range. The park is bursting with spectacular vistas, cascading waterfalls, fields of wildflowers and quiet wooded trails. Fall colors have mostly come and gone, but many visitors flock each year to see the incredible autumn display during its peak. Shenandoah is only 75 miles from the bustle of Washington, D.C., and a visit brings a breath of fresh mountain air to those who make the journey.

[westernpining]

late day at Comb Ridge by Jeff Mitton

Comb Ridge extends for 28 miles from the Abajo Mountains in the north to the San Juan River to the south. The higher points reach more than 800 feet above Comb Wash, seen as a strand of cottonwoods in this shot, which shows the rampart at the western edge. Comb Ridge's eastern side is an incline that has trails that lead to Ancient Puebloan cliff houses, petroglyphs and pictographs. Comb Ridge is in the Bears Ears National Monument in Utah.

[imagine-darksiders]

👏MORE👏DRAVEN👏CONTENT👏 (pls)

And what better way to satisfy the needs of Draven fans than to add onto this fic? Here’s the rest, if you’ve missed it. 

BEAUTY AND THE DOORSTOP - CHAPTER 3. 

Fashionably late.

Sparkling bursts of colour and light dance at the edge of your vision as the Chancellor leads you through his portal and you instinctively grip his forearm just a bit tighter. You'd done some portal hopping with Death in the past, and it always left you queasy for a few moments, as if your human body knows it isn't supposed to jump through a tear in the fabrics between realms, and as such, it makes its discomfort known.

Lips sealing into a firm line, you ignore the pressure in your head and push on, at last stepping out of the cold, empty wormhole and onto solid ground. In an instant, the pressure lifts and you suck in a soft breath. At your side, the Chancellor is smirking down at you, no doubt amused by your discomfort.

“Ugh, this is why I prefer using Vulgrim's serpent holes,” you gripe, running a hand absently down the skirt of your dress to smooth it of wrinkles, “They don't leave me feeling like my body's been squeezed through a pinhole.”

Behind you, the cosmic gateway disappears following a subtle wave of the Chancellor's arm.

“Tch! Why doesn't it surprise me that a human is more comfortable using such a common means of travel?” He waits for you to quip back, glancing down at you when his jab goes uncontested for a beat. “Human?”

But the undead's pallid gaze finds your attention elsewhere, eyes wide and alive and wandering in every direction but his. Realising what has you so enraptured, he tuts impatiently and forces himself not to stare at the gentle parting of your painted lips.

The Chancellor's portal has deposited you both just inside the entrance to the Eternal Throne's courtyard, where, beyond the narrow, wooden passageway, lays a sight you never imagined you'd be privy to in a hundred years. The space that had once been modestly sparse and occupied only by a handful of undead is now packed from rampart to rampart with a throng of otherworldly beings.

Angels, demons and even a maker or two - along with several other species that you don't recognise - mill about the courtyard, each species going that extra mile to avoid one another, which is a vast improvement from the alternative, you suppose.

The war may have ended, but thousands of eons of hate and animosity is not so easily forgotten, or forgiven. That the angels and demons present aren't at each other's throats is testament to the strength of their self discipline.

Oddly enough, there aren't as many undead as you imagined there would be, and those that are here have taken up positions on the upper ramparts, their weapons gleaming in light cast by hundreds of lanterns that have been painstakingly strung up over the courtyard.

As you and the Chancellor proceed out of the entryway, your eyes are drawn up to the sky. 

Night, or what passes for night in the Dead Lands, has settled its velvet blanket over everything, rendering a horizon that stretches out like the void above you, almost black as pitch save for the subtlest touch of emerald tinged into its vast expanse. Even through the glow of lanterns, you can make out innumerable, winking stars, some bright, some dim, but all a dazzling, if unexpected sight. There's an effort here, a pride of appearance you'd never have anticipated from residents of the Dead Plains and you suddenly find yourself struck by the unsettling awareness that, just as the Chancellor hadn't bothered to look past face value with you, you in turn hadn't even considered that the Eternal Throne could be anything other than a dank and dreary place.

“It's beautiful,” you breathe as the Chancellor escorts you into the courtyard proper.

“Beautiful?” he echoes softly, his dull, grey eyes widening at your words and they follow your line of sight.

It isn't a term he's ever heard in correlation with the Land of Dead before, and likely never will again.

Beauty, in any form, has no place here, left behind and discarded by the denizens of this realm once they had died, and beaten out of the land itself by a cruel sun. The Chancellor cocks his head and hums at the stars, then trails a perplexed gaze down to you. After a pause, his perpetual frown lifts a fraction. 

Trust a human to find the beauty in a dead world.

Heels clicking audibly on the wooden boards, you tear your eyes off the heavens and focus back on the throng of ethereal beings in your path instead. At your approach, a hush sweeps through the crowd as several of the less subtle guests swing their heads around to gawk, immediately causing you to swallow down the nervous lump in your throat and force a hesitant smile, failing to notice how the Chancellor has pressed a few inches closer and set his jaw, scowling hard at a leering phantom guard.

“Well,” you raise your voice for the gathered crowd, opting to make a joke out of the awkward situation, “I don't think I've had this many eyes on me since I fell off the stage at graduation.”

If the dead silence that follows is anything to go by, you'd say your attempt at humour wasn't best received, made only more obvious by the Chancellor's long-suffering but barely audible moan. “Look, if this were Earth, people would have laughed at that,” you hiss at him from the corner of your mouth, receiving no more than a dubious 'hmph’ in return.

After perhaps a few too many moments, chatter slowly resumes amongst the gathered crowd as they all return to previous conversations with just a few whispering conspiratorially about the newcomer in their midst. Once you don't find yourself drowning beneath the weight of all those stares, you visibly sag, your fingers unfurling from where they'd clamped down unwittingly on the Chancellor's elbow.

“If you are done embarrassing yourself,” he grumbles, “perhaps we could proceed? My Lord is expecting to address you personally.”

“Don't I feel special.”

The undead rolls his milky eyes and - with your arm still on top of his - strides forwards across the courtyard, leading you expertly between the mass of bodies. More often than not, you need to restrain your hands from brushing idly along an angel’s feathery wings, or lightly stoking the fur on a maker’s boot as you pass. The only thing keeping you from doing so is the grip you have on your undead escort’s arm while your other hand is occupied with keeping your dress’s hem off the dusty ground. 

On the courtyard’s far side, slouched against a newel at the foot of the crumbling staircase is the Eternal Throne's resident blademaster, Draven. Sickly, pale grey skin stretches taut over a body made from nothing but bone and sinew. No blood pumps through his dried-up veins, no lips press together to hide a perpetual, skeleton grin and the heart that had once beat proudly inside his chest has been eerily still and quiet for centuries. So why then, when he tips his head around just in time to witness you emerge from the crowd, does something in Draven’s chest give a sudden lurch?

Time is no longer a relevant concept to the undead. Their bodies have already withered and rotted away to the bone. The passage of time has no meaning to the long-dead, yet watching you glide across the courtyard like a vision in a sleek, black dress, Draven would swear that time grinds to an immaculate halt and his jaw drops open so suddenly, it threatens to come loose from its hinges and clatter to the ground.

All else fades away, every angel and demon, every lantern hanging overhead and every undead patrolling the ramparts, even the sour-faced Chancellor beside you fades into a dull and lifeless background whilst you retain your vibrancy, bursting with colour and life. Nothing else seems as important to Draven's milky eyes as the woman before him. You are everything he sees for several, long seconds. Then, your head is turning towards him and your lips split open into that wide grin he's so accustomed to, the one that shows off your teeth and even a portion of gum. It's a smile he knows is reserved solely for very few people in your life, a smile that always leaves a rush of exhilaration in its wake when the blademaster remembers that he's one of the rare few who get to witness it.

Seeing your expression, Draven's own mouth tries to open in the same manner, but given any lack of lips, he merely ends up with something that closely resembles a grinning skull, which admittedly is hard to avoid, given that all the fat and muscle beneath his flesh has worn away, leaving nothing to keep the skin from plastering itself to his bones. 

To you however, the blademaster’s spectral visage couldn’t be a more welcome sight. 

Giddy with excitement, you slide your hand off the Chancellor's arm and at the same time, thrust the bottle of Cheval into his spindly hands. He sputters and fumbles with the slippery glass for a second, indignant at being treated as little more than a pack-mule. “Do you mind!?” 

Evidently, you don’t, which only adds to the Chancellor’s mounting displeasure. His complaint is promptly ignored as you pinch the hem of your dress between two fingers and trot towards your friend, cheerfully laughing out his name. “Draven!”

Whatever spell you’d unwittingly bound the blademaster up in is suddenly broken at the sound of your voice. He barely has the time to come back to himself and spread his arms in anticipation before you crash against his chest, throwing your arms around him and digging with your fingers for purchase in between the notches of his spine.

“Y/n,” he returns, amusement dancing in his misty eyes. Despite the ease of his tone, Draven's sinewy arms press you firmly against him, squeezing tight enough that he inadvertently gives away just how much he's really missed you - your company, your touch, the smell of your hair when he leans down and pushes his nose ridge right into it, drawing air into his sand-choked lungs. If only he weren’t too proud to admit that your presence soothes an angry fire in his immortal soul. 

All too soon though, the moment ends, and he feels you pull away to look up at him. But oh, how badly he wants to keep you there with your head resting on his exposed sternum and his dusty, green cloak billowing around you in the night’s gentle breeze. There are onlookers though, guests of his king with tongues that just love idle gossip, and it wouldn't be prudent to give them any inkling as to the nature of your relationship.

“God, it's good to see you,” you sigh through a smile, your hands sliding down to lay atop the blademaster's forearms whilst he cups your elbows in his strong hands.

His face is gaunt and heavily shadowed underneath the hood he wears, but his eyes still glow ethereally as he gives you a slow once over, exhaling a cool, stale breath that brushes invitingly over your lips. “Likewise,” is all he murmurs.

Shifting beneath his scrutinising gaze, you feel pressed to ask, “So...What do you think? Too much?”

“Huh?” Draven's white pupils dart up to your face again and he realises with some distress that he’d been leering at you, probably in an unsettling way, if your expression is anything to go by. “Oh! No, no, I think you look....” He pauses for a moment, trying to conjure something adequate, something that would let you know just how radiant you are without directly saying it. ‘Radiant.’ The word sounds so foreign and sophisticated in his head, more befitting of a charming suitor than a rotting, roguish knave such as himself. 

So far, your relationship with one another has only lingered just beyond the realm of friendship, dotted intermittently by flirtatious repartee and the odd gesture of physical affection in a hug or the skimming of your hands along his arms. He daren't ask for anything further. You're already more than he's ever had, and most assuredly more than he deserves. 

“...You look...indescribable,” he eventually settles on, because Creator knows he was never a well-read man when he was alive, and words beyond ‘radiant’ always seemed to escape his grasp.

The side of your mouth quirks upwards. “Indescribable? Well, now you're just playing it safe,” you tease, and before he can look too worried about having possibly offended you, your mouth stretches into an even wider grin and you add, “I'll take it.”

“You'll have to,” he replies with a hollow chuckle, “You won't be getting any more compliments from me tonight.” With that, he gives your elbows a playful squeeze and lowers his face towards you, his voice drifting lowly out of the tattered hood. “It really is good to see you...”

Ducking your head coyly to escape that profound and haunting gaze, you try to stop your cheeks from burning with the effort of smiling so wide, echoing the reply he'd given you earlier. “Likewise, blademaster.”

The pair of you are so caught up in one another's presence, you don't even notice the other undead glowering behind you, fists clenched around the bottle of Cheval so fiercely, its a wonder the glass doesn’t shatter. 

This scene playing out in front of the Chancellor is one he's well accustomed to. He's had to bear witness to this sort of interaction multiple times in the past - you and the blademaster, practically arm in arm and fawning over one another like fairytale sweethearts... Had the Chancellor possessed a working uvula, he'd gag at every encounter.

This time however, the sight hits a bit differently. This is somehow harder to watch, and instead of his usual nausea, the Chancellor notices the faintest twinge of anger, heat of a different kind rising up under the collar of his robes. Without even realising it, the undead has begun to grind his rotting teeth until the bone of his jaw creaks loudly in protest of the pressure he's putting it under, like he's trying to chew through steel.

There's no conceivable rhyme nor reason as to why he so despises the sight of Draven's hands on you, drinking up the warmth your blood provides through his own, decaying skin! As if a master of blades were so much more deserving than the rest. You never even hesitated before you embraced him, as though his decomposing flesh were far less abhorrent to you than the Chancellor's had been, who pretended not to notice when you'd faltered as he offered you his arm in your home and your lips pursed distastefully, no doubt repulsed by the very idea of touching an undead. What makes Draven so worthy of that touch, all of a sudden? 'Hypocrite!' the undead's hateful mind screeches at the blissful ignorance on your face. There’s an anger in him, certainly, but his skull is too thick with pride to realise that his rage is a byproduct of something else. Something greener than the hooded robes he died in. 

Unable to simply stand by and watch any longer, the Chancellor stiffly raises a fist and clears his throat loud enough that you flinch, whilst the blademaster merely tosses him a scathing look.

“Oh, you're still here?” you say, genuinely surprised, “I'd have thought you'd be dying to get as far from me as possible once we arrived.”

Draven smirks at your joke, but the older, angrier undead wears a scowl so deep, you fear his forehead will crumble to dust. Suddenly, before you can utter another word, he marches forwards, snatches up your wrist and tugs you out of the blademaster's loose grasp, proceeding to quite literally drag you up the wooden staircase that leads to the throne room.

“I think you've kept my Lord waiting long enough, human,” he spits, ignoring the defensive snarl Draven utters at your expense.

One of the steps nearly trips you up and would have succeeded if not for the Chancellor's iron grip. The moment you begin to stumble, he jerks his arm and all but lifts you over the stair, and if your eyes aren't mistaken, he even slows a fraction, just enough that you can right yourself without much trouble. There's no time to be shocked about it though. Twisting around to glance at Draven, you find him following you up the staircase and raising a hand out to snatch you back out of the Chancellor's crushing grip, but he stops short once you flash him a bemused smile. “Don't worry about me,” you call, lifting the hem of your dress so it doesn't get caught on a loose splinter, “I'll catch up with you later.”

The blademaster looks ready to protest, only pausing on the stair when you jerk your gaze over towards the courtyard, hoping he'll catch your drift. Bewildered, he glances over the railing, and understands. There are at least twelve pairs of eyes watching the commotion hungrily, some subtle with their heads tilted away but their ears pricked to listen, whereas others are far less wily in their nosiness, necks bent almost painfully over their shoulders and pointed at the stairs.

The message you'd conveyed in that look is now clear as Draven turns back to you and presses his teeth together, offering you a tight nod. 'Don't make a scene.'

As you reach the top of the steps, you can only shrug down at your friend before the Chancellor shoves you none too gently onto his other side, placing himself between you and Draven and barking for the undead at the door to let you both pass. Timid in the face of such abruptness, you softly thank the guard when he pulls the doors open. The Chancellor, of course, merely scoffs and presses the bottle of wine back into your arms with rather more force than is necessary.

Wood scrapes noisily against the ground as the entrance is slid open, the sound reverberating around a woefully sparse throne room. Unlike the newly decorated courtyard, this chamber has remained as cold and unadorned as you ever remember it being, with nothing but a few skulls scattered upon the pine-wood floor and a throne sitting proudly at the far end, upon which reclines the reason for your being here at all. To one unfamiliar with the denizens of this realm, it might appear that someone has stuck a halloween prop onto an enormous, stone chair, plopped a jagged crown on its head and called the whole thing a masterpiece. You, however, are more than aware that the bonafide corpse sitting in that chair is more than just dust and bone, and as soon as you step past the first pair of guards, it opens its eyes. 

An involuntary shudder rolls over you when those twin lights of blazing green swivel in your direction. Suddenly, your ears fill with pops and snaps as the skeletal figure twists his neck around to follow his eyes, every bone fighting to be pulled free of the rigor mortis that has claimed them and set them into their rigidity. 

The atrophied creature - a living corpse that somehow manages to look even deader than the rest of his subjects - gives his shoulders one, hard thrust and successfully detaches them from the back of his throne. 

As you and the Chancellor slow to a halt at a respectable distance, you once again find yourself contemplating on what a fitting name ‘The Lord of Bones’ actually is. 

“My Lord,” your escort drawls, bowing himself nearly in half in front of his master and sweeping a hand out towards you, “As per your orders, I have personally ventured to Earth and retrieved the human; Y/n.” 

You’ve met the King of the dead before, but this time is different. He’s never had you here as his personal guest. And like any good guest, you feel it necessary to show your host the proper courtesy. Or in this case, the proper curtsy. 

Swinging one foot back and planting it daintily behind the other, you take hold of your dress’s skirt and bend your knees, descending into a graceful dip. Then, just as evenly, you rise, inclining your head and saying with what you hope is your most fetching smile, “Your Majesty.”

Out of the corner of one eye, you notice the Chancellor’s head slowly turn to face you, his mouth agape and you don’t know whether to be offended that he didn’t think you would know basic etiquette, or pleased that you could throw him for a loop so easily.

The King, meanwhile, sits back in his throne and appraises you coolly, the only indication of surprise being in one, slightly raised brow bone. 

“I see my invitation reached you then,” he says, “and, I trust, was well received?” This he addresses to the Chancellor, who draws himself up and you can see the wheels turning in his head as he tries to formulate a response that wouldn’t insult his king. After all, you had rejected the offer in the first instance.

Luckily for him, you notice the fumbling of his hands and decide to answer in his stead. “While it certainly came as a surprise, I was... humbled by His majesty's gracious offer. It's not everyday I get to attend such an occasion.” 

The Chancellor will end up having to pick his jaw off the ground at the rate it keeps falling open.

“And I trust you were told why you were asked to attend?” the king drawls, stroking a long, spindly finger down his beard. 

Although you have mixed feelings about being little more than a glorified accessory that the king can show off to his guests, you have enough sense not to complain. “It was mentioned....in detail,” you reply without adding anything further. Something tells you the Lord of Bones values discrepancy and the prudence of his guests. 

As you suspected, the Chancellor's shoulders relax minutely and the King's dry lips quirk up into a reserved smile.

“If I didn’t know better,” he says, leaning forwards and steepling his rangy fingers together, “I’d say my Chancellor has fetched me the wrong human.” 

Letting out a small bark of laughter, the undead at your side crosses his arms neatly and replies, “I thought much the same at first. But, you can rest assured, my Lord, that this is definitely the same woman.” 

The fact doesn’t escape your notice that he’d said ‘woman,’ and not ‘human.’ 

“It would seem some time away from the Horseman has done her a world of good,” he continues with a sideways smirk. You bristle at his snide remark before recognising that he’s only trying to bait you, so, swallowing down a reply, you ignore him and instead take a step towards the Lord of Bones. 

At once, a guard that had been at his side marches forwards and places himself between you and the king just before you reach the steps, his horned helmet tipping down to glare at you through a dark visor. 

“Tenarus,” the old king sighs boredly and waves a hand through the air, dismissing the guard. 

But, rather bravely, the undead towering over you doesn’t stand aside, instead, he calls back over his shoulder, “She has something in her hand, Sire.” 

“Oh, I do actually,” you pipe up, having nearly forgotten about the wine altogether. Leaning around the guard, you hold up the bottle of wine and give it a slight, enticing shake, smiling at the king. ”It’s a gift. I brought it from home - just to say thank you for having me here.” 

Curious, the Lord of Bones raises two fingers and beckons you closer. Daintily stepping around Tenarus, you start to ascend the stairs when the Chancellor suddenly blurts out, “Forgive me, my Lord, I did try to tell her that you would have no use for such a paltry little-”

“Be silent, Chancellor!” the king snaps whilst taking the proffered bottle out of your hands and raising it to his face, eyeing the label. You can’t imagine he knows the brand name. “Wine?” he asks more softly, flicking his icy gaze down to you. 

 “The finest I could find at short notice, given the state of Earth right now.” Suddenly, you do feel a little sheepish handing a bottle of wine to someone with no stomach. “Sorry, I couldn’t think of anything that would be more useful to you.”

Ignoring your apology, the Lord of Bones grasps the cork between his thumb and forefinger and wiggles it free. His eyes slip shut and he holds the bottle neck beneath his exposed nose bone and takes in a long, slow breath. After a moment, his eyelids crack open again, wider than before and filled with a strange softness unbefitting his hard nature. “Oh, I remember that smell,” he whispers, and his words linger in the air for a moment, his mind far away from the throne room. Then, all at once, he flicks his eyes down to you again and corks the bottle, holding it out to one side. Tenarus, who had begrudgingly returned to his post behind the throne, steps forwards and takes it from his king, handling the bottle with his too-large fingers as though it's more delicate than a flower petal.

The Lord of Bones appraises you with a newfound intrigue, his head tilted and fingers aimlessly stroking down his flimsy beard, as though you’ve suddenly become a puzzle he can’t work out at first glance. After a while though, he simply nods to you and you curtsy again, drawing back to the Chancellor's side. 

“Enjoy your time here, Y/n,” the King says, “And, Chancellor?”

“My Lord?”

It could be your imagination, but for a moment, you could swear the King's tone is almost smug. “Do make sure to keep an eye on her. We wouldn't want to incur the horseman's wrath if something bad were to happen to our guest, now would we?”

You’re about to protest yourself when the Chancellor does so for you, similarly horrified at the suggestion.“But – but my King, with all due respect, I have far more important matters to attend!” he sputters.

The Lord of Bones turns a dangerous glare onto him, long, crooked fingernails scraping the arm rest of his throne. “More important than following my orders?”

Realising what he'd just implied, the Chancellor's mouth snaps shut. You can concur with him though. The very last thing you want is to be followed around by an irritable undead, especially when you plan to be catching up with old friends and, hopefully, making some new ones.

“Now, begone,” the king says with a regal sweep of his arm, “Go. Mingle, inject a little of that good, old fashioned human exuberance into the atmosphere.” Lowering his voice, he grumbles, “Goodness knows this gathering needs it...”

Sharing a look with the Chancellor that suggests neither of you are particularly thrilled about this arrangement, you nod and smile through gritted teeth. “Will do.”  

“But, I-” The undead is cut off with a venomous glare from his king and he sighs, conceding, “Whatever his Majesty commands.” And with a dip of his head and a respectful bow, the undead turns around, his robes swishing gracefully out behind him as he ushers you out through the doors and onto the wooden deck beyond.

[orofeaiel]

Fall Color on the Rampart Ridge Trail

[gravelish]

Rampart Ridge

21 July 2021

I left Seattle before 6:00 under overcast skies and didn’t see the sun until I was east of Snoqualmie Pass. That also meant that the eastern approach to Rampart Ridge up Box Creek Canyon was mostly sunny, but that as I passed Rachel Lake and climbed toward the ridge, it got grayer and cooler. The Rampart Lakes (there are many) weren’t completely socked in, but were definitely in the clouds. There were no views to the west.

The Rachel Lake Trail was much as I remembered it from my last trip here, more than twenty years ago. It’s sort of a New England trail on its upper half - roots, rocks, and stream channels. The switchbacks are more by accident than by design. My knees did fine coming down but my perennially sore perineal tendon (right ankle) was pretty annoyed (and remains so several hours later).

[mountrainiernps]

It’s National Take a Hike Day! While many of Mount Rainier National Park’s higher elevation trails are covered in snow, if you are prepared there are still options to get out for a hike. For easy trails with less chance of snow, try Twin Firs Trail or Trail of the Shadows in Longmire. Rampart Ridge Trail or the Wonderland Trail also start from Longmire but are longer trails that climb to higher elevations. Westside Road, near the Nisqually Entrance, is closed to vehicles, but the first three miles is a gentle walk through the forest to Dry Creek. Carbon River in the northwest corner of the park is also a great lower elevation area for hiking. No matter the trail, be prepared for quickly changing conditions and carry the 10 Essentials, including food and water: https://go.nps.gov/MORASafety.

Where will you go for a hike? Learn more about winter hiking at Mount Rainier:

Longmire in Winter: https://go.nps.gov/LongmireWinter

Westside Road in Winter: https://go.nps.gov/WestsideRoadWinter

Carbon River in Winter: https://go.nps.gov/CarbonRiverWinter

NPS Photos of Carbon River Trail (8/30/23), Rampart Ridge Trail (10/4/23), and Trail of the Shadows (11/15/23). ~kl

[kasser21]

First time hiking of the year!!! And first time hiking with amazing people!!! Also first hiking after pandemic!!! #hiking #mtrainier #nature (at Rampart Ridge Trail) https://www.instagram.com/p/CB12VtJH6o-YdMyeQGgE2Lf4x0U1C6QPtH22sQ0/?igshid=1wkir12q87grx

[freelancer-chronicles]

A story about someone new! And a nice nod to our Season of Skull hoods in the image lol

Kiir adjusted the magnification on her visor and peered at the almond-shaped karrid leaf. Its jade-green shine was marred by a dusting of white frost — the gift of an early Icetide.

The frost didn’t concern her. Instead, she peered at the lightning bolt of pinkish, luminescent crystals that struck diagonally across the leaf’s surface. Where the strange accumulation met the green flesh, odd aberrations swirled. Veins knotted into geometric patterns. Cell structures exploded.

Ember bloom. Chimeric mutations.

Kiir dropped the leaf and looked up at the karrid tree. Two parallel slashes of pink ember had crosscut its rugged bark. These crystals were much bigger, as large as her hand, and had formed into the typical square-based pyramid with the points shaved off. But the light within was rosy. Simmering with power.

Unlike any ember known.

Excitement surged in her. Triggering the jets in her suit, she leapt into the air and surveyed the valley from on high. It was typical of the Sundric lowlands. Here, the mountains of Heliost gave way to soggy heath. Thick fog blanketed the land, punctured by distressed trees and crumbling castles. All of this terminated at the Sundric Sea, a silvery expanse about ten leagues north. Beyond that, Stralheim — a strangled signature on the far horizon.

Ice crystals on the wind. And something else… an unfamiliar tang.

The sensors in Kiir’s interceptor whispered. They drew her attention to a northwestern promontory overlooking the valley. Tuning up her optics, she saw peaked roofs and a palisade wall. Both played ghost games in the fog.

She returned to the ground and hooked the air sled to her suit. Spying a decrepit castle outside the village, she rocket-jumped clear across the valley and landed amid its crumbling ruin. There, she hid the sled, packed with her weapons and camping gear, taking only her SMG and dagger.

She walked straight through the swirling ice fog towards the village. The palisade wall emerged. She leaped over it and landed noiselessly in an alley between two wooden buildings. Arabesques of pink crystals snaked across the walls on either side. She followed them into a wide plaza.

All around her — devastation. Peasant dwellings blasted to ruin. Bodies frozen in the mud. A Sentinel watchtower broken off at the third story, its upper ramparts smashed across the street.

Crystals everywhere. Etched in curious double rows across the ground and walls. Looming over the town like blushing titans hewn from pink gemstone. Erupting from the skulls of victims. Hissing their little ember song.

The echo of the Anthem.

The wailing again pierced the silence and it drew her to the town’s edge. There, a village girl, some twelve winters old, wept near a quintuplet of recently dug graves: her peasant clothes, tattered and burnt; the snowy ground, stained with blood.

Such unchecked grief was hard to watch. And yet...

A smile itched at the corner of Kiir’s mouth.

Yes. Yes, it was here.

***

She set camp in the exposed third floor of the Sentinel tower. From there, she could see all around the town and across the valley, antics of the fog permitting. She’d brought a suspension tent, a tripod for her spyglass, a notebook, and a small armory: sniper rifle, hunting rifle, two SMGs, a bolt lance, and the Leach, her signature nine-inch, green-glowing, poison-seeping dagger. Everything needed to execute her hunt.

Then she exited her javelin and checked it for damage. It was a custom-fitted Interceptor, decked out in metallic black plating and fireproof muslin half-cape, hood, and trailing skirt. She checked the ember rings on all the joints; the pin-thin orange hoops glimmered reassuringly in their ceramic fittings. The sigil of the Princess Zhim, her patroness, etched in silver along the jaw of her faceplate, reflected the falling snow.

Then she flew a recon pass over the valley. In summer, this was a verdant but cool paradise fed by a river from the Helossar glacier. Now, frozen falls crowned the southern end of the valley, and two hilly ranges extended outward like a “v.” There were five rugged peaks: two on the left, three on the right, with the village below the first peak on the left. Between the ranges: a vast wilderness of frosty muskeg, lake ice, and snow-blasted forest.

It would take days to search it all.

When the white sun touched the horizon, she returned to camp, lit a fire, and waited. Wolven lingered at the forest edge; their blazing, yellow eyes betrayed their intent. With her scope and hunting rifle, she killed five in one breath and stacked them beyond the fire’s heat, to freeze.

While she roasted one, the rest of the pack receded into the dusk.

Daylight began to dim. She ate the cooked wolven, the stiff scars on her face resisting the simple act of chewing.

For a long time, she sat. Listened to the sounds of the wilderness. Of the village ruins creaking in the wind. Watched as the sky turned violet, then indigo, then black. As the constellations emerged and recounted the legends of old.

Gods and monsters. Hunters and prey. The deeds of mortals engraved in the heavens, with stars for words.

She swallowed hard and drew a pinch of grey dust from the pouch around her neck, tossing it in the fire. A blast of sparkling silver figures and prismatic symbols erupted upward, writing their own mysteries against the twilight.

She scanned the obscure imagery for meaning. Attempted to divine a prophecy of what her hunt may bring. Glory? Fortune? Perhaps contentedness to come? A return to joyful days long submerged in a life of misdemeanor?

Kiir sighed and closed her eyes. She could not read Shaper words — no one could. They were the musings of beings far greater than anything left alive on Coda today. But she held out hope that somewhere, someone, something knew she was there. Validating their great works.  

In return, she asked for the one thing she needed most.

Salvation.

***

The next day, she drew a rudimentary map in her notebook, jotting down all relevant landmarks: the village, the five peaks, the frozen falls, the coastline, two large frozen lakes, a scattering of lagoons. At the same time, she tracked the rosy, parallel trails of ember. They jagged and snaked all over the valley, sometimes congregating in snarled knots, sometimes running for leagues and terminating for no apparent reason.

Twice that day, she saw the survivor girl gathering berries from the mander bushes. Many the child ate voraciously; many more she carried through the snow back to the village. Later, Kiir spotted her entering the Sentinel barracks, one of the few buildings left standing after the attack.

Through her spyglass, Kiir watched as the girl nursed a wounded Sentinel. He was unconscious. Suffering. Still locked in the towering javelin of his order, propped up against a column inside the barracks. She fed him berries with gentle desperation.

After almost an hour of hand-feeding the dying man, the girl went about various tasks: propping up a wall on the verge of collapse; patching wind-torn gaps in their ravaged shelter; tending her meager fire. Kiir rubbed her jaw and frowned. Despite the hard work and singular focus, the girl’s situation was dire. The winter was young, and the wolven were starving.

Later, when the girl left again, Kiir entered the barracks and stood over the Sentinel. Something in the room smelled worse than decomposition: floral and acrid, like fermenting perfume.

The man’s head was a horror. A chimeric mutation had overtaken the left side of his head, the flesh bubbled and sculpted. Erupting from the centerline of the infected area was a ridge of that unreal pink ember: flat-pointed pyramids, glowing and humming, apparently anchored to his very skull. A wound on the man’s neck and collar had been bandaged by an amateur.

She avoided the ember wound and stripped the bandages off his collarbones. The whiff of rotting flowers rose like a cloud — not like any infected wound she’d known. She swallowed her nausea and peered closer.

Blood pumped easily from four deep, ragged tears below his neck.

An animal wound. Certainly fatal.

She dropped the bandages on the dirty ground and shook him. When he didn’t respond, she touched the freezing Leach to his neck. That brought him around.

“Who…?”

“What attacked you?”

His eyes drifted over her javelin. “You Corvus?”

“Did the creature make you smell like this?”

He took a long breath and seemed to grow suspicious. “Help her first.”

Kiir raised her faceplate to reveal her maimed and wretched leer.

All hope drained away. His voice quavered with disgust. “Regulator.”

“My questions first. Then I save you and the girl.”

But the Sentinel’s integrity was intact. He looked away from her and spoke no more.

***

Later, Kiir sat by her bonfire on the watchtower roost and rubbed at the stiff scars on her face. She’d picked off another half-dozen wolven during the day and one was nearly done roasting on a spit.

Meanwhile, the girl crept near. Her grubby feet picked over the rubble. Never taking her eyes off the black-clad hunter, she sat by the fire and shuddered with relief.

Kiir watched as the girl cautiously inspected the hunter’s possessions: the tent, the air sled, the tripod and spyglass, the array of modern weapons. Finally, she stared wide-eyed at the roasting wolven. After a moment, a question began to form on her lips.

But Kiir turned to reveal the injured portion of her face. Its ghastly texture rippled in the firelight, like molten metal. And so the girl’s question died right then and there.

Kiir smiled. Though the injury was truly disfiguring, she enjoyed its tendency to simplify discussions.

Instead, there was quiet for almost twenty minutes. Then, without warning: “Why did you come here?” the girl asked.

“I’m hunting.”

“For the mantikar?”

Kiir’s brow raised and a thrilled shiver ripped through her.

This is no legend. The mantikar is real to her.

“I didn’t see it. I was sleeping when it came. They said it was a young one.”

Kiir stared long at her, then sniffed and returned to the fire. “I would have traded you meat for that information. I couldn’t have known if you were lying.”

That didn’t faze the girl. “What do you want with it?”

“Can’t let a dangerous creature run around, terrorizing the folk.”

Silence and doubt.

“Okay,” Kiir grinned. “I’m actually just a wicked, greedy bitch. I’m gonna capture it and trade it to a crime lord to curry her favor.”

The girl pondered that and nodded.

Fourteen, maybe? Makeshift boots and nothing but a torn smock? Somehow still alive… everyone else dead. Kiir shifted and frowned at the fire, went back to rubbing her face.

“You won’t help him, will you.”

“Who, your Sentinel? He’s already dead. Or will be by tomorrow.”

“What happened to your face?”

Kiir snorted. “This? I did this on purpose. To scare children.”

“You’re not scary. You’re just old and ugly.” Then she got up and left without hesitation.

Kiir’s neck warmed with indignation. She suppressed the urge to shred the girl’s back with SMG fire. Instead, she snorted out a rough laugh, leaned her head back and closed her eyes.

But the laugh didn’t work. The girl had nicked something vital.

Doubts flowed up from below. Much closer to the surface than ever before. Dreads and regrets. Disappointments and betrayals. The threat of punishment if she failed. No… as redress for a long line of failures.

So many years since it all began. Zhim and Kiir. The girls who killed to survive. Now she’s a princess… and what am I? Barely her pitiful subject.

She swallowed hard and fished out a pinch of dust, flicking it angrily into the fire. In the blast of ethereal Shaper symbols, she hunted for a remedy.

But there was nothing. Just more Shaper nonsense. She kicked a burning log, erasing the ancient diagrams with a flurry of sparks.

***

On the third day, she went deep. Followed every trail. Roared through the forest, kicking up a wake of flurried snow, shattering the frozen trees with rocket wash and sending animals screaming into the underbrush.

The risk of failure nipped at her heels. Like a pack of starving wolven.

Late in the day, high on a rise leading to the third peak on the east side of the valley, under a vaulted cliff hung heavy with ice, she found it: a pile of frozen corpses. Nineteen wolven, three licked-clean arnisaur shells, a host of smaller wildlife, and twenty-seven humans — the majority of the village.

They were surrounded by a dizzying gallery of blushing ember striations, painted on the walls and ground, always in that perplexing parallel helix. The mantikar was definitely triggering these ember blooms. How was a matter for Arcanists.

And the smell... It was different here. Still floral but also deathlike. A mortician’s catastrophic mistake.

She fought through it and tried to get a sense of the animal. It was big, that was certain. Perhaps a cat-like quadruped. At least the length of two korox, end-to-end. Taller than a Sentinel. Maybe two heads taller than her diminutive Interceptor.

A young one, the girl had said.

She pondered this as she traced the ember up the flanks of trees, over and beyond cliffs, raking across the ground. Again, she noted how the crystalline lines sometimes terminated without leaving any trail. Almost as if —

As if it could fly. A winged predator stinking of necrotized aristocrat. As big as a strider cabin.

A primitive instinct made her take a step backward.

Should have brought the Colossus.

***

That evening, her state of mind was an even split between apprehension and glee. Some of the corpses had been fresh. She knew where the creature ate. She knew that it must return.

As she tore through a wolven leg and pondered the construction of a blind, a wail reached her on the wind. This time, it wasn’t the girl.

She leaned over the edge of the watchtower’s shredded ramparts and peered with the spyglass down through the hole in the barracks ceiling.

The Sentinel was dying now. With wracking seizures and giant white eyes. Absurdly, the girl was shaking him by the shoulders and holding his face. Crying the whole time. Wet streaks flowing down her cheeks. It did little good. In moments, his body stiffened. Then it went slack, for good.  

Kiir watched as the girl embraced the body for nearly an hour. Later, she roused herself and took a shovel outside the palisade. Heavy with grief and lethargy, the girl dug a sixth grave alongside the others.

Kiir watched as the girl struggled to part the Sentinel from his suit. As she dragged the body through the village to the gravesite. As she failed in her attempt. As she was too weak to continue. As she fell half on the dead Sentinel, half in the snow. And as she lay there, still.

This Kiir watched with a pounding heart. The sun passing behind the peaks and the sky turning purple. Suddenly, the girl arched her back and screamed skyward. With renewed life, shrieking like a dying animal, she heaved the body towards the grave.

And then… yellow eyes blazing at the forest’s edge.

They came low and silent, their protruding ribs and sunken bellies betraying a desperate bloodlust. The girl was unaware. Single-minded in her task. Perhaps delirious with grief. Exhausted and starving.

The pack jumped forward, snapping at her hands and hair. She swung the shovel in wild, frantic arcs, both feet planted over the dead Sentinel. But, though malnourished, the wolven were massive compared to her — the leanest was fully ten feet long — their skulls pitted with metallic accretions. No human could stand against even a single wolven. Not without a javelin.

One got hold of the dead Sentinel’s arm and tore the body out from under her. She landed hard in the snow and struck her head on the ice-packed ground. In a heartbeat, the pack ripped the dead Sentinel to bloody, shredded tatters.

Then they were on her. Leaping forward. Snickering and drooling. Baring their gleaming fangs. She couldn’t get her footing. She was in a daze, momentarily stunned by the fall.

Suddenly... a luminous tangle of green light scribbled over a whirl of black, like a murder of crows eating a swarm of fireflies. One wolven was cut nearly in half. Two more died in the split second that followed. Their senses soon caught up to what was happening, but three more lay dead before the pack fled into the forest and Kiir slowed to a visible speed. Her armored chest heaved with tension; her suit’s padding slithered with sweat.

***

The girl woke slowly. She found herself tucked under a blanket by a roaring fire. A spot on her head was oozing and red. A wolven was turning gently on a spit.

Kiir sat nearby. Her usual leer was fixed in a resolved grimace. She laid a plate of wolven meat down beside the fire. “Eat.”

The girl rose slowly and looked all around. At the meat. At the hunter.

“Eat. You’ll need it for tomorrow.”

“... Why?”

“We hunt mantikar.”

***

No one mastered a javelin in a week. But Kiir made the girl a promise. She would shoot. She would fly. She would hunt and defeat the mantikar. All that — in one week.

The Sentinel's suit was a Captain’s designation, possessed of a few special capabilities. The ember rings crunched slightly when Kiir inspected them, and a wisp of glimmering orange dust sifted out onto the ground. But she brushed it away and made the suit ready. There was no time for details; there was no proof the mantikar would remain in the valley for long.

In a day, the girl was shooting and reloading. In two, she was recharging her energy shields. In three, she could work the Sentinel barrier, protecting both herself and one other ally from a frontal attack. On four, she had the knack of the Captain’s lightning burst ability. Might come in handy, if she got close enough. Flight would be the challenge. It always was with beginners.

In the meantime, they built the blind. It had to be done carefully. Every time they visited the feeding grounds, new animal corpses had been added. The creature was so near.

On the sixth day, the girl had the basic gist. Years more training was required. All Kiir could do was caution the girl against trying anything complicated. She’d seen more than one novice snap their spine while attempting a wingover.

But the girl was strengthening. Not only physically, but mentally. Her focus was inborn — that much was clear from the outset. But with the javelin under her control and a weapon in her hand, the focus was maturing into a dark resolve. Kiir recognized it well enough.

The power to fight back is the power to seize your destiny. To project your very existence into the future.

“He told me you were evil.”

They sat on a frosty bluff, overlooking the valley while resting from flight training. The girl’s silence had been growing.

Kiir smirked as she polished her SMG. “Who?”

“Sentinel Jenin.”

Kiir shrugged and went back to her work. “Smartest Sentinel I ever met.”

“So you are. Evil.”

Kiir frowned and looked up at the cold sky. “I’ve had my moments.”

“Did she make you this way? The... crime lord?”

Kiir put the gun away. “You speak of her Royal Majesty Princess Zhim. And no — we sort of did it to each other.”

The gap that followed would have normally suited Kiir. But something urged her to go on. “We were abandoned as kids. I’m told we met on a fishing boat. Gutting salt-larkins before I could even talk. That was out of Vadys, in The Reaches. You know where that is?”

The girl shook her head.

“Lucky. Most kids there are slaves. But when we were twelve, we decided slavery wasn’t really our thing.”

“What did you do?”

“Stole everything. Ate whatever we could scrounge. Traded things for favors. Traded those favors for friends.” Kiir paused and stared down the well of those long years. Through all the schemes and traps. Lies and poisonings. Four bloody hands and strangulations in the dark.

She sniffed and rubbed her jaw. “Things kinda escalated from there.”

The girl blinked heavily. “You killed people?”

“It’s how we survived.”

“But now you’re fighting?”

“Hm?”

The girl swallowed and selected her words. “With the Princess? You said you were hunting the mantikar to… ‘curry her favor.’”

Kiir looked sharply away. Sometimes this girl was too smart for her own good. It reminded her of Zhim.

It stabbed her square in the heart.

She stood. “Tomorrow, we go. Get yourself ready.”

***

They soared through the freezing air, rocketing towards the mantikar’s feeding grounds. Kiir pointed down at the overhang, at the concave dent in the hillside. The girl nodded. The blind they’d built was still there.

A cloud passed overhead. Something moved in her peripheral. She smelled it before it struck.

Death and flowers.

Her visor was blinded and every alarm in her suit blared at once. She was tumbling through the air and shouting inside her helmet. But there was no communication except in person; there was no cypher to relay those words.

Everything was dead. Her rockets became useless weights on her back. Gravity loosened its pull as her heavy steel body dropped like a stone amid the snowflakes. The world spun around and around, in total blackness.

A series of hard crunches. Everything gone still. She thought she was dead.

Then her faceplate blew off. The electrical system had sensed that she was running low on oxygen. But everything powered by the ember rings was offline. All her weapons had been flung away. All but maybe one…

White wilderness surrounded her. Snow fell in a lazy whirl. Not a thing stirred. All she could do was struggle hopelessly, and call for the girl.

If your suit dies, you die. One of the less cheerful Freelancer sayings. But it was true. A dead suit was just a lead-lined coffin.

She swore to herself not to panic. To breath and shout and hope the suit reset itself. But all she heard was the quiet clicking as the engines cooled and the metal contracted. And so the panic didn’t listen to her. It just did its thing.

Then the mantikar slammed down into the snow before her.

It was enormous. Like two ursix back-to-back. A cat-like body: long and low, with clawed feet, sinewy tail, and thick muscles. There, the similarity to back-alley fort cats ended.

It had a huge, heavy canine head with massive looping horns and a wide, thin-lipped mouth with multiple arcs of shining teeth. Its slate-grey body was covered in alternating rows of shining indigo scales and patchy fur. Five tiny. glowing pink eyes arranged in a diamond pattern on the front of its head. All five were looking right at her.

Kiir hollered for help as the beast stalked closer. The powerful odor intensified with every inch. Roses. Decaying meat.

But what she saw next was like something out of a Shaper myth.

Two pink tendrils — rope-thin and transparent — snaked out from the beast’s shoulders. They spiraled and twisted above it, forming into shapes. Diagrams. Figures.

Shaper words.

They wove and drifted as though underwater. And wherever they touched the ground, lurid, pink ember blinked into existence, fully formed.

She suddenly felt the suit twitch and the motors actuate. Like a dead body enslaved to a dying brain. The ember rings in her suit were hissing a screechy little song.

It’s talking to the ember.

In a flash of reason, she remembered the Sentinel’s crunchy ember seals. They’d been altered by the mantikar’s attack — probably warping and changing shape, grinding against the ceramic fitting. Even the slightest misalignment of ember could destabilize a jav. How could she have been so foolish as to have not seen this coming?

As if sensing this distraction, the mantikar growled and bowed its head low. Its hindquarters angled up and shifted back and forth. It would pounce next. Batter her body to death. Tear her out of the suit piece by piece, like a clam from its shell.

Assault rifle fire rattled out and a shadow landed nearby. The mantikar withdrew under a hail of bullets, the pink tendrils weaving themselves into a deflecting barrier. The girl in her Sentinel suit rushed forward and stood over Kiir, activating her shield barrier.

“Get up!”

“I can’t! Don’t let the tendrils touch you! They’ll glitch your suit!”

But the mantikar roared and leaped forward, drawing a double path of crystalline growths in the snow. It pounced over the barrier to swipe at the girl with a snarling, deep-gutted roar.

She dodged with incredible alacrity. Managed to flip the release buckle on the back of Kiir’s suit before drawing the beast off.

The suit unfurled. Kiir clambered out and grabbed at the suit’s thigh compartment. The bolt lance fell into her hand and she whipped it aloft. From the palm-sized cylinder, white lightning erupted from both ends, crackling with power. Then she took off through the snow, pursuing the two combatants.

The mantikar threw its flank towards the girl, deflecting all bullets with its indigo scales and snapping the gun from her hands with one swipe of its thick tail. All around them, pink crystals shot up from the ground, like geysers of frozen glass. The girl dodged another pounce, rolled in the snow, snapped up the gun, and came up at max boost. The deadly pink tendrils flung out at her, missing by mere inches.

In a flash of action, Kiir wound her body up like a piston and prepared to hurl the lance. But she hesitated; she would only get one shot — she had no suit to recharge the weapon for a second try.

The mantikar seized the moment. In a split second, the pink tendrils formed into wyvern-like wings, and the beast launched upwards.

The girl went after it, both of them rocketing skyward, disappearing into the clouds.

Kiir ran forward and looked above. The clouds thundered with blasts of pink, blue, and the stuttering flash of assault rifle fire. All she could do was watch. Listen with a heaving chest.

Suddenly, pink crystals pelted down all around, slamming into the snow with deadly force. Kiir ran for the trees. The creature had turned the clouds themselves into an ember hailstorm.

The mantikar punched out of the clouds and tore down through the deadly rain like a rider on the storm. It spotted Kiir and torpedoed straight towards her. The girl was in its claws, limp and lifeless.

Kiir ran desperately into the forest, straight for the densest patch of trees. The mantikar followed at freefall speed, its tendrils releasing from the wing shape and instead dancing and raking across the ground and trees, decorating the forest with humming garlands of deadly crystals.

But the trees did their job. The mantikar crashed headlong through them, snapping some in half and tumbling across the ground, kicking up a pall of whirling snow. The creature grew confused. It lost sight of Kiir. It did not notice her slip behind it. It did not notice her raise the lance.

A supernova of flashing electrical arcs, blasting snow, and erupting ember spikes suddenly consumed the creature. Kiir fell back and shielded her eyes.

When the storm quieted, she looked again. A crystalline garden of rosy ice had grown tall and expanded outward in rings to obscure all within; at the center, blue light and sparks zagged into the air. A low moaning ricocheted around the valley.

No sign of the girl.

Kiir walked carefully through the maze of standing, translucent stones, hands shaking from the battle, and beheld her quarry.

The mantikar was trapped in a glittering web of blue starlight. The blast from the bolt lance had condensed like a net around the monster, trapping its limbs and stunning it into a stupor. The tendrils floated lazily above, no longer under any conscious control. Its five eyes twinkled with sedate rage.

The girl was there. She stood over it, her suit steaming in the snow. The rifle was in her hand.

“You killed them,” she mumbled, as though in a surprised stupor.

Kiir knew what came next. The resisting pull of her own survival begged her to intercept. To stop the girl before the hunt fell to ruin.

“Everyone… everything I had.” She touched the barrel to the creature’s forehead, in the center of the diamond eyes. Pressed it down with the full weight of her body, as if to punch straight through into the creature’s brain. Her finger trembling on the trigger. Her face seized in the red heat of vengeance.

Kiir was paralyzed. She needed the creature alive. From the barrel of the girl’s gun, Kiir envisioned her future forking off into two very different directions.

But then the girl buckled. The gun tumbled from her grip and fell along with her knees into the snow. There, she wept, and the red heat washed away.

In Kiir’s eyes, she was again the wailing child at the village grave. Fighting with all her might against the cold dirt even as it drove her down into the earth. Next in line to join those who’d failed.

In that moment, Kiir knew this girl.

***

The fanfare blew and the page announced her entry. “The Lady Aushkiir.”

The “nobility” parted as the hunter — in her shining black armor, bristling with weapons — entered Zhim’s court.

“Well, well, well… the hunter returns from her legendary deed.” The lanterns waved in the cave wind, casting the princess in a shifting golden light. She smiled darkly, as ever.

Kiir glanced sidelong at those gathered and bowed. “Your Highness.”

Zhim smirked theatrically around the room as if playing hide and seek with a child. “What? No mantikar on a leash?”

The court tittered. Everyone knew the mission had been a sham to get rid of the Lady Aushkiir. A suicide mission. The hunter who had disappointed the Princess one too many times. The friend turned failure. “Instead, all I see is a bedraggled rat. And… phew!” she waved her hand before her nose. “One in need of a bath. I wonder where you shall ever find one,” she laughed, heavy with meaning.

But Kiir saw the tired resolve behind Zhim’s eyes. A commitment to her new “royal” role. Of the need to expunge any appearance of sympathy. Especially for an old friend who couldn’t pull her weight.

Kiir straightened up and produced an engraved box. The stink in the room grew exponentially. Even the Princess seemed to lose her sense of humor. For a moment.

“I found the mantikar — or one of them — in a mountain valley north of Helios. It had devastated a local village, killing all Sentinels, many villagers, and hunting the local wildlife near to extinction. I tracked it to its feeding lair and... it did not survive. I made a number of sketches for the Arcanists.” She produced a scroll case from her cape.

One of the Arcanists adjusted his spectacles and rushed forward to seize it. But Zhim held him back with a wave and a stern frown. “I wanted a pet. Not a picture.”

Kiir nodded. “On the hunt, I met the only survivor of the attack on the village. It had taken everything from her. Everything... but her will to survive.”

Zhim’s stare grew gloomy. It was a dangerous business this, cutting a crime lord to the quick.

“I gave her the mantikar, Your Highness. She needed it. More than us.”

Zhim stared at her in the face. Kiir felt it all hanging by a thread.

“As an apology, I brought a gift,” and she lifted the lid on the box.

Inside was an organ — some combination of starfish, mushroom, and squid — wriggling, squelching and smelling for all the world like a rose bouquet rolled in fermented carrion. “The pheromone sac of a young mantikar.”

Three nobles and the court Colossus vomited on the rugs. Most others bolted from the room. Soon, only Zhim and the Arcanist remained, the latter constrained by Zhim’s iron grip.

“I just felt you’d find a use for such a singular treasure.” And Kiir offered the box to the Princess.

Zhim smiled slow and wide. She closed the box and gestured at the Arcanist. He reluctantly took the box, snatched the scroll case from Kiir’s hand, and fled.

Then Zhim took her by the arm. “Aushkiir…” she spoke low and honestly. “You have reminded me that it is your gifts which I value most among all the treasures in our realm.”

Kiir breathed deep and started to bow. But Zhim denied her the motion and instead guided her into the tea lounge. “Now, about this mantikar. You must tell me everything. Spare no detail.”

They sat and drank. The tea disappeared and was refilled, accompanied by multiple plates of rare and imported delicacies. Kiir recounted the whole story — every detail. Zhim listened with growing attention. Soon they were laughing and reminiscing about other adventures from the long well of their years. And, for the first time in ages, Kiir felt content.

But, more than once, Kiir’s mind drifted back to the girl as she’d seen her last: standing on the bluff overlooking the shattered remains of her village. Clad in a bone-white javelin, the greatest weapon humanity had ever made. Projecting her very existence into the future.

With that image in her mind, Kiir smiled to herself and wondered if her quest would be told to children someday. The villain who came to capture a beast, but instead forged a hero.

On the surface, it seemed a tale worthy of a constellation. A story told with stars for words.

Special thanks to Jessica Campbell.

[rainiervolunteersnps]

As most of you know, Washington Trails Association is one of our major partners here at the park and we are grateful for the work they put in year after year. Below is a letter from one of WTA’s representatives, Whitney,  summarizing their year at Mount Rainier.

“... I wanted to send you some informal stats about WTA's work in Mount Rainier this summer; I know last year crew leader Hannah Tennent compiled a great year-end report. In bittersweet news, Hannah has accepted a job at different organization. We’re happy for her to find the year-round employment she was searching for (seasonal work can be challenging), but are very sad she won’t be hosting work parties again next summer.

This summer, WTA hosted a whopping 54 single-day work parties, the vast majority at the South Puyallup trail. In addition, we did about a week’s worth of work at each Eagle Peak, Rampart Ridge (Wonderland section), and Narada Falls/High Lakes (Wonderland section).

We also hosted three week-long volunteer vacations, two of which were shared identity youth trips; one for LGBTQ+ identifying youth and one for Latina youth. Mount Rainier National Park provides such an exceptional backdrop for these youth trips, and is a key element in fostering a love for the outdoors that will last, hopefully, for their whole lifetime. We are thankful to have partnered with Latino Outdoors and Washington National Park Fund to make these trips possible.

Additionally, we hosted our first ever Fireside Camp at Mount Rainier as well. Donors from our Fireside Circle joined us for three days and three nights of camping and work parties. It was a wonderful way to introduce some of our financial donors to our volunteer program, and help build more of our wonderful WTA community. This was also my first time hosting a summer camp, and indeed hosting an outdoor program, and for that I will always remember that weekend.

All in, 414 individual volunteers contributed 840 days on trail, or 7,600 volunteered hours – WOW! By my math, that’s the equivalent of nearly eight seasonal employees in the park. Double wow!

We wouldn’t be able to do this work without your support and your passion for our trails. Thank you so much for continuing to place your trust in WTA to protect our trails and public lands. I look forward to working with you more in the future – we have some exciting work planned for Tacoma and Snoquera that you might find interesting (as the gateways to Mount Rainier).”

To find out how to get involved with WTA, visit their website.