Cold and Broken [Closed]

[bythegrace]

WHO: Johanna D'Arcote and Father Normand
WHAT: An easy trip to God's Reach.
WHEN: Backdated before Spooky.
WHERE: God's Reach Mountain Top
NOTES: Swearing, Blasphemy, the classics.

God's Reach.


She had traveled for months to be here and had stayed on the path to this point for a year. She had lingered, had waited, had been comfortable, even something like happy, sitting in her remote little house in this remote little village. She had been almost reluctant to travel to the peak, to finally finish her journey, and Johanna hated herself for that reticence.

Was this place her home now, just because she had stayed? Was that how that worked? Did she owe her family less because she had found somewhere comfortable?

It was very nearly the anniversary of their deaths, the deaths of everyone she had ever known, and so she'd requested they finally head up to the summit. The pass was clear in late summer, snow had not yet started to clot the roads. It wouldn't be an overwhelming trial for them to travel. Adhemar, her only friend in this place, or at least the dearest of them, had agreed to take her without much pause...and had tolerated her increasingly surly nature as they neared the summit.

It was...more spartan than she expected. There was less fanfare to it, less pomp, and it left her feeling a bit empty as she looked over it all.

A bleak rim replaced the peak at the very top of the mountain. It stretched to the horizon, where the world dropped below and into the bluish distance. Just below the line of rock and heavy packed ash that made up the rim, there was a murky colored, uneven cap of ice. It had formed from the snowmelt, no doubt, refrozen over cold nights and made brittle and uneven at the high altitude. She stared across it, across this place, and had all the impression that she was looking out over a muddy lake. It was pathetic and she couldn't muster anything but a sneer and the hate that had been distilling in her veins.

The altar was old, carved by faithful hands a long time ago, and she stared at it like an animal staring at a baited trap. If Adhemar wondered what it was she would do, he wasn't waiting long to find out. They were alone here, at the top of the world and the seat of the gods. She waited once they'd reached the top, took in the sights as they were, and then promptly and with all the force in her thin frame, kicked that altar over.

It was heavy and stone but she was full of rage. She had certainly bruised her foot but the ground had sunk behind it as its weight shifted and the whole object was sent sprawling. It hit the ground with a brittle sound of cracking stone and the dish, awaiting new offerings and still laden with the old, dried and frozen gifts from other travelers, tumbled and skittered across the ice just below the earthen rim of the volcano.

It stopped moving, after a moment, and she spared another few seconds before spitting in the wake of it.