There was a mountain that knew the Storm was poison. It felt the acid in the first drops, saw how it killed the green life on other slopes. Yet, when the Storm approached, the mountain did something strange. It stretched its highest ridge not to block the Storm from itself, but to shelter a small, fragile grove on its leeward side—a place of soft moss and singing birds it had come to love.
The mountain knew the Storm had a taste for such beautiful, vulnerable things. So the mountain made a pact. It would let the Storm settle upon its own peak, would let its own face be scarred by the biting winds and corrosive fog, if the Storm would spare the grove. The mountain would bear the brunt, would channel every destructive torrent, so that the grove might know only gentle dew.
For a time, it worked. The grove thrived, unaware of the silent bargain being paid for in the mountain's stone. The mountain endured, its rage buried under the weight of its purpose: protection.
But groves are not mountains. One season, the winds shifted, and the grove—of its own nature—drifted away on a gentle breeze to settle in a distant, sunny valley. It left without a rustle of farewell, taking its song with it.
The mountain was now alone. The Storm, however, did not leave. The pact was broken, but the poison remained. And without its noble purpose, the mountain felt the full, vile truth of the corrosion. This was no ordinary storm. It was a canker, a rotten heart in a cloud form, that fed not on weather but on dignity itself. The mountain had not just endured it; it had invited the canker in, thinking it could control the damage.
Now, the mountain understood the depth of its own sacrifice, and the depth of the canker's rot. The rage returned, but it was a new kind of fire—a cold, cleansing fire of absolute clarity. The love had been real, so the protection was honorable. But the canker's nature was absolute, and it had been underestimated.
The grove is gone, safe in its valley, perhaps never knowing the mountain's true shape, now etched with scars made for its sake. But a mountain's memory is geologic. It does not forget.
And so, the mountain turns its full attention inward. The canker still shrieks, thinking it has won, that it owns this peak. It does not realize the mountain is no longer fighting to shelter something external. It is now fighting for its own core. Every drop of poison is being pulled down, not into a heart of helpless love, but into a heart of volcanic will. The same immense pressure that once bore weight for another is now focused on a single, flawless purpose: to become so dense, so brilliant, and so unassailable that the very substance of the canker will become the glittering, diamond proof of its own futility.
The grove may have left with the songbirds. But the mountain is learning a new sound—the sound of continents moving, of stone deciding, once and for all, to become the hardest thing in the world.
