The Table Above the Clouds

By the time Lukas reached the village of Hohenfels, mist had already begun to seep down from the mountains like slow, pale rivers. The air smelled of woodsmoke, wet stone, and something sharper beneath—pine sap, perhaps, or the bitter tang of anticipation. He tightened his scarf and pushed open the door of the village tavern.

Warmth and noise rolled over him in a wave: clinking glasses, low laughter, the hiss of logs collapsing in the fireplace. The innkeeper, a stout woman with iron-grey hair pulled into a bun, glanced up and fixed him with a quick, measuring look.

“A stranger,” she said in German-accented English. “You’ve come early in the season.”

“I prefer the cold,” Lukas replied, in the same careful English. “I’m looking for a room. And for stories.”

That drew a few side glances. Hohenfels was a small village, cradled among steep slopes and fir forest, somewhere between Austria and Switzerland if the maps could be trusted. Lukas was not here for the skiing, or for the quaint church and its crumbling cemetery. He was here for the mountain above the village—peak unseen, always hooded in cloud—and for the legend of the table that stood on its summit.

He had read about it in a half-forgotten travelogue, a passing reference buried among tales of Alpine marmots and local cheeses: On the highest crest of Hohenfels stands a table of stone no one can move, no one can break, and no one can remember placing there.

The innkeeper slid a key across the counter. “Room three. Supper is at seven. If you want stories, sit by the fire. Old men and old mountains talk most when the weather is bad.”

Lukas took his backpack upstairs, dropped it onto the narrow bed, and then returned to the common room with a small leather notebook in hand. He chose a stool near the fire and ordered a mug of hot wine.

Not ten minutes passed before a man with a weathered face and wind-reddened eyes lowered himself into the chair opposite him. He wore a thick wool coat and smelled faintly of snow and tobacco.

“You’re the writer,” the man said, without introduction.

Lukas blinked. “Journalist. Sometimes.”

“It’s the same thing. You came about the Tisch, yes? The table.”

“That obvious?”

The man shrugged. “You arrived with a notebook, and you keep looking at the mountain like it owes you an answer. My name is Emil.”

“Lukas.”

They shook hands. Emil’s grip was strong, work-roughened. A man used to rope and rock.

“You’re a guide?” Lukas asked.

“I was.” Emil’s gaze shifted to the window, where the dark outline of the mountain loomed beyond the wavering reflection of the fire. “Before my son fell.”

Silence settled for a moment. The crackle of the fire filled it, along with the distant murmur of drunken cards in the corner.

“I’m sorry,” Lukas said quietly.

Emil waved it away like smoke. “Everyone here has a story about the mountain. And about the table. You came for one version. Perhaps you will leave with another.”

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees. The firelight carved shadows into his face, deepening the lines at the corners of his eyes.

“The table has been there longer than anyone remembers,” Emil began. “My grandfather climbed to it as a boy. His father before him. Always the same: a slab of dark stone, smooth as water, standing on four legs that grow from the rock itself. No carvings, no joints. Just… there.”

“Natural formation?” Lukas suggested, though the description made his skin prickle.

“Natural things have explanations,” Emil said. “The Tisch does not. Sometimes it is covered in snow; sometimes it is bare even in the coldest winter. Sometimes climbers say they see things on it. Objects. Letters. Once, a ring. When they turn around and look again, it is empty.”

Lukas’s pen hovered above the open page. “You’ve seen it?”

“Many times.”

“And?”

Emil’s jaw tightened. “The table gives you what you want most. Or it takes it away. The stories never agree which.”

Laughter burst from a nearby card table, loud and slightly forced, as if someone had told a joke no one entirely understood. The innkeeper shot them a warning glance. Outside, wind flexed against the shutters with a low, animal moan.

“There is a… rule,” Emil went on. “You do not climb to the Tisch alone. And you do not touch it.”

“But people do,” Lukas guessed.

Emil’s eyes met his. “Yes. And sometimes they do not come back. Or if they do, they are not the same. My son—”

He stopped, swallowed.

“He said he heard a voice on the wind,” Emil finished. “He laughed about it. And then, that night, he went back up alone.”

Lukas wrote the words voice on the wind in his notebook and underlined them twice.

“Did he touch it?” he asked gently.

“We don’t know,” Emil said. “We only found his rope, half-buried in the snow. The rest, the mountain kept.”

The fire shifted, sending up a shower of sparks. Lukas felt the weight of the mountain pressing through the walls, through the very air of the room—a presence, silent and waiting.

“You still climb?” Lukas asked.

“Not for tourists,” Emil said. “But if you want to see the Tisch, I will take you. One condition.”

Lukas raised an eyebrow. “Which is?”

“If the table shows you something, you do not touch it.” Emil’s gaze hardened. “And if you hear your name on the wind, you turn around. You go back down. No story is worth more than that.”

Lukas thought of his empty apartment in Vienna, his stalled career, the book proposal his editor had dismissed as “too vague.” He thought of the yawning, private question that had gnawed at him for years: What if I had chosen differently that night? In another life, he might have been married now. A father. Not a solitary man chasing legends in villages that smelled of snow.

But that gnawing question was precisely why he was here.

“I agree,” Lukas said.

Emil nodded once. “At dawn, then. The mountain speaks most clearly at first light.”

As Lukas finished his wine, a gust rattled the windows so hard the glass quivered. For an absurd moment, he imagined something vast and unseen pressing its face to the pane, peering in at the small, flickering humans below.

Above them, somewhere beyond the layered clouds, a stone table waited on the crest of the mountain—unmoving, unchanging, and very, very old.