It’s well hidden, her dark cabin on the mountain. A house shrouded by old-growth forest. A refuge that is meek but sturdy. It is her sanctuary from the world of men, the ones who have for many years congregated at the foot of her mountain.
A mountain that knows her all too well.
It has become her ally, for it knows what she learned as a child. A child who became a woman too soon.
The men try to climb with ropes and pegs, stabbing the mountain’s weathered face with their worldly claws until the rocks beneath their boots begin to tremble. Waves of stone crash upon them. Ropes break. Pegs bend. Heads crack.
They try with pickaxes and knives, talons clinging to the mountainside. Lolling tongues moisten their cracked lips as they climb higher. Her cabin’s fire begins to dim and grow cold; they are letting in the world. She sets to work to wake up her mountain with fresh kindling, but it is already stirring. It uses her fear as an avalanche. Years of ice wash over the men. Frost that bites them back.
The men employ an ox buckled and reined to a heavy carriage coated in obscene colors. They climb faster now even though the ox is heaving against the frigid winds. Its hooves grind a message into the mountain’s bones, and it answers with a colony of snow-white eagles. They release the beast from its burden, and it is welcomed at the very top where a roaring hearth and a haybed await. The men retreat, pecked, bloodied, and blinded.
The dark cabin is a haven for the ones that are free, for the ones that dream, for the ones who have suffered.
But the men do not give up. They set up camp in the valley to try again tomorrow. And again the next day. And then the next, and then the next.
But the mountain is strong. Each attempt from the valley makes the mountain stand taller and the forest grow darker. Soon they will obscure her cabin from the world of men, and the mountain will become her sentinel, her fortress.
Her backbone.
Mysti Gayle 
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