Chapter Text
The series of thoughts you had before falling off the mountain went something like this:
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You can already tell you're going to be feeling the burn from your ankles to your shoulders for days after this hike
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Seeing the sprawl of the mountain range makes you feel unfathomably small
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You'll never forget this trip to Alaska
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Your boyfriend is coming up behind you to give you a hug
Then you were weightless. A force between your shoulders makes your head whip back as your entire center of gravity is flung off the side of the mountain trail you just spent the day climbing.
The first impact takes all the air from your lungs and you will not get it back until you finally land in the bloodied, broken pile you make in the valley below. The world becomes flashes of color and lashes of pain. Sky blends with the dirt, rock blends into your tattered windbreaker.
White, hot pain snaps along your nerves as your bones break and fracture while your flesh rips on the rock and trees breaking your fall.
By the time your body stops moving, your vision still spins with vertigo. The pain and shock make you nothing more than a dumb, dying animal incapable of doing anything but blink at the sky.
The introduction of air to your lungs comes in a wet, red gasp. Along with precious oxygen it also fills you with the full, awful awareness of the extent of your broken body, of the hot blood leaking from you steaming in the brisk Alaskan air.
A noise, reedy and jagged, escapes from your bloodied teeth and is absorbed by the pines that tower over you. Nothing sounds back.
Your boyfriend doesn't call out for you. You don't hear the sliding gravel of someone following your descent after you. Just your pounding heart and the pitiful noise that leaves you on each wheezing exhale.
Though you have become nothing but a singular point of agony where each injury bleeds into the next, you have one final thought:
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You're going to die here
How you haven't already is a mystery you will never solve. How your neck didn't snap during your fall or how you didn't get impaled on one of the countless branches you barrelled through.
Part of your vision is gone. Not as a black spot, but gone entirely. As if someone took the fabric of the world and folded it in half in the corner of your sight, hiding away whatever is there until you move your eyes to look at it from a different angle. Your chest feels like it's caved in, like a thousand pound weight anchors your spine to the earth. Your leg is so shattered you can see the bottom of your boot pointing towards your face.
And you are alone. Lying like a pile of ground meat in the cradle of this mountain range, invisible from the one singular trail so remote that you hadn't seen anyone else on it the entire day you walked it. A cruel death.
You hope you bleed out before the bears find you. The only mercy that can be hoped for in the last, suffering moments of your life.
The sun moves across the sky as your vision continues to sway and your blood turns the dirt muddy. The forest and its sharp-topped pines loom over you like teeth of some great beast holding you in its mouth. As the sky darkens so do the trees, so does your vision. The coming cold strangles what little air you're pulling in.
Hours and minutes feel the same. The march of time skips and retracts. You don't feel the pain anymore.
The gentleness of the twilight's descent on the mountain appears in grotesque contrast to your own. It lays its soft, graying light over you like a veil. Swaddled in its stillness.
The last bright moments of consciousness compel you to look around what will become your grave. The fading light caresses the outlines of the forest around you, beautiful in its apathy. Shadows deepen the world. You feel them like a physical thing, like sinking into a summer-warmed sea.
Every mechanism that exists for no other reason than to keep you living fires off in one last Hail Mary. A finale of desperation from a failing system. It takes the pain from you, keeps you from feeling the ground and the blood and the air and anything. It vignettes your vision so all you have to do is rest one final time.
And along with the soft darkness, it gives you the image of a pair of eyes watching you from between the trees before all of it is gone.