Unrecorded

The Mountain Takes What Is Given

The mountain did not open like a gate.

It opened like a wound.

Aeris stood barefoot on freezing gravel, the hem of her black dress dragging through dust and melting frost, the thin fabric offering no warmth, no protection, no dignity, only the quiet reminder that she had been taken exactly as she was.

No coat.

No shoes.

No bag.

No time.

Her father had not allowed her to go back upstairs.

“Don’t make this dramatic,” he had said, as if she were the inconvenience.

The wind cut through the valley and pushed her hair across her face, long black strands sticking to the damp skin of her cheeks. She did not wipe them away. Her hands were shaking too much.

The mountain loomed in front of her, carved and hollowed, reinforced with iron seams that disappeared into stone. It did not look man-made. It looked like something that had swallowed people long before laws existed.

She kept waiting to wake up.

Kept waiting for someone to call her name gently from the doorway.

Aeris.

Not the way they said it in court. Not sharp and official.

Just her name.

But the only voice she heard now was her father’s, calm and controlled, explaining biological liability to the tribunal as if he were discussing faulty machinery.

“She is not mine by blood,” he had said.

“The risks are not mine to carry.”

Biological anomaly.

Potential instability.

Risk factor.

He had handed her over like evidence.

The door in the mountain split down the center without sound. Cold air breathed out from the darkness inside. It smelled metallic and damp and old, like stone that had not seen sunlight in centuries.

Her stomach turned.

“I didn’t do anything,” she whispered, though she no longer knew who she was trying to convince.

A hand pressed between her shoulder blades.

“Inside.”

She stumbled forward. The gravel cut into the soles of her feet. She barely felt it.

The door sealed behind her.

The sound did not echo.

It ended.

And something in her chest tightened so suddenly she thought she might faint.

You are eighteen.

You are not a child.

You can survive this.

But her body did not believe her.

The corridor was carved directly from the mountain’s spine, reinforced with metal beams and plates etched with symbols she did not recognize. The runes were dark against the stone, old and deliberate, pressed deep as if they had been hammered there to keep something from rising.

The air vibrated faintly. Not loud enough to name. Just enough to crawl under her skin.

Her breath grew shallow.

The dress hung loose on her thin frame, sleeves swallowing her wrists. She wrapped her arms around herself, not from modesty, but because she felt as if she might come apart if she did not hold herself together.

Men watched from elevated walkways and barred enclosures.

Too many.

Their presence pressed against her like heat, like weight.

Some leaned forward.

Some went completely still.

Some smiled.

She lowered her gaze immediately.

Good girls don’t make eye contact.

Good girls don’t provoke.

Good girls endure.

Her father had taught her that without ever saying the words.

A laugh echoed somewhere above.

“She’s barefoot.”

“Looks lost.”

“Wrong floor, sweetheart.”

Her pulse roared in her ears.

This is a mistake.

They will realize.

They will correct it.

She pictured her father standing in the tribunal chamber, hands clasped behind his back, explaining calmly that the safest course of action was containment. That she was biologically unpredictable. That her adoption had been charity. That any instability must have predated his household.

She had tried to speak.

No one had looked at her.

The floor shifted slightly under her bare feet as she was guided forward. The vibration intensified, subtle but constant, as if the mountain itself hummed with a frequency too low for human ears.

Her vision blurred at the edges.

The corridor tilted.

For a second she wasn’t here.

She was back in the kitchen.

Tile cold beneath her knees.

Her father’s shadow falling over her.

“If you cannot be useful,” he had said quietly, “you will at least be quiet.”

Her throat tightened.

Back in the mountain.

A hand seized her arm too suddenly.

She flinched so violently her teeth clicked together.

“Name.”

The word was sharp. Impatient.

Not Aeris.

Never Aeris.

That name felt too exposed. Too real.

“Ari,” she whispered, voice barely forming around the panic in her chest.

The guard frowned at her bare feet.

“Crime?”

She opened her mouth.

Political corruption.

Conspiracy.

Financial manipulation.

Biological liability.

The words blurred together.

“I… I don’t know,” she said, and the humiliation of it burned.

Laughter again, softer this time.

Above her, a figure leaned against the railing in shadow.

He had not laughed.

He had gone very still.

Around her, conversation faltered in strange ripples. A subtle disruption. A shift that she was too consumed by fear to understand.

Her heartbeat thundered.

Her skin prickled.

The runes embedded in the walls pulsed faintly.

Once.

The vibration traveled up through her bones and lodged behind her ribs.

For a brief, impossible moment, it felt as if the mountain had recognized her.

She shook her head, breath quick and uneven.

Don’t imagine things.

Don’t draw attention.

Stay small.

She curled her fingers into the fabric of her dress, shrinking inward, trying to make herself disappear between the seams of stone and iron.

But the pressure in the air did not fade.

It gathered.

And somewhere in the shadows—

Someone was watching her not as prey.

But as something else entirely.