The Petrified Mountain - Gathering intelligence

[Alex's POV]

The next morning, Alex was feeling a lot better. He had lain down on his bed and had fallen into a deep asleep.

In contrast to what he'd expected, there had been no dreams, no tossing, nothing. He must have been more exhausted than he'd realised.

As he walked down the stairs, ready to grab a bite to eat for the day, he noticed Yahya was already sitting at the table. He looked very tired.

"Didn't sleep too well, did you?" Alex asked with a grin as he watched Yahya accept a cup of hot coffee from one of the shabti dolls.

Those little flying statues were really amazing. When one chore was done, they instantly floated off to start the next chore. They never stopped to rest, they never complained and they didn't seem to tire. For example; the doll that had brought Yahya's coffee, was now bringing over a plate with bread and grapes for Alex.

"Thank you," Alex said out of habit as he accepted the food, but realised he'd done something unnecessary as the doll couldn't even hear him. It really was just a floating statue with moving arms.

"I can't believe you slept at all," Yahya grumbled in low spirit. "I've been haunted by old memories all night long. It was horrible!"

"Ah yes, you were going to tell me about them," Alex said. Yahya looked at him as if he'd grown a third eye.

"Shouldn't you be the one to know best?" he asked, not even trying to hide his annoyance.

"Honestly, I wish I could," Alex said as he raked his hands through his hair in thought. "I can remember how I got here, but I can't remember how I left. Which is strange, to say the least."

Yahya humphed in annoyance.

"All I know, is that one moment, we were all looking for mother, and the next thing I know, there is this BIG explosion and you and brother are nowhere to be found anymore. You left me behind, didn't you? I should have known. You never c-"

"Yahya!" Alex interrupted Yahya's destructive rant in a scolding way. Yahya snapped his mouth shut so fast it made his teeth click. "I want you to listen very carefully, because you seem to have forgotten. Maybe Amon could have been self-centred enough to leave his own son behind, but Intef would have never abandoned his brother. Never!"

Yahya looked properly startled this time.

"Now, tell me about that explosion."

"Yes," Yahya said seriously. He seemed to have acknowledged Alex's reasoning. "It was massive. I've never felt anything like it."

"Felt?" Alex asked. "What a strange way to describe an explosion?"

"Well, the shockwave, to be exact. I bet it could be felt all around the world."

"Wait, you mean you weren't there when it happened?" Alex asked, a note of surprise in his voice.

"No, actually, I was pretty far away from the impact-point."

"Were Intef or I with you when it happened?"

"No, we'd finished searching for mom for the day, so I was exploring the town with some friends."

"Have you been to the explosion-site?"

"Yes, just once. After I'd realised you had probably caused it," Yahya said, unconsciously hugging himself as he remembered the occasion. "It was a horrible scene. Everything in a twenty kilometres radius had been turned to stone. Trees, animals, humans, you name it. Most of them had never even seen it coming. As if they were frozen in time."

"I think Intef might be one of them."

"Brother?!" Yahya asked, his eyes wide in shock. "You mean as a statue? No! It couldn't be! Brother was clever, he would've avoided the danger."

Alex thought of Intef's ghost. He'd looked so out of it. So unlike his usual bright self. So damaged.

"Not if he was trying to prevent it."

Yahya's eyes widened in realisation. Then his eyes turned to slits, his brow furrowed in thought and his gaze drifted from the right to the left and back.

"Damn," he finally cursed. "I hope you're done eating, because we have a long way to go."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Instead of going by foot, they traveled by horseback. The border of what Yahya called "The Petrified Mountain" was forty kilometers away. If they'd travelled by foot, that distance alone would have taken them half a day to travel. By horseback, it was reduced to several hours.

Alex honestly hoped his intuition was wrong. Because the prospect of him causing a pompei scale disaster wasn't exactly keen on his mind. But the closer they got, the more he knew it was true. Even an hour before they'd arrived at the border, Alex could see a tall mountain top peek over the treetops, with something that looked like a scourge mark on it.

"We're here," Yahya said after two hours of riding. "This is the border."

A shiver ran down Alex's back.

If he'd thought the scourge mark on the mountain had looked bad, nothing could have prepared him for seeing the actual thing up close.

At the foot of the mountain lay a small town. Nothing special. About twenty houses around a town-square with a water well.

As they steered their horse down the road leading to the towns square, it already quickly became clear the town had been abandoned, many, many years ago.

All the houses around them showed some form of decay; cracked wood, broken windows or crumbled roofs. But except for the fact that it had been abandoned, that part of town looked perfectly natural compared to the other half.

Starting at the water well, everything was petrified. Right on the border stood a statue of a man, probably the local toy maker or smith judging from the leather apron he was wearing, with a huge smile on his face and tears at the corners of his eyes, waving at a dearly beloved one who had long gone.

The petrified half of the town stood full of statues like that. The houses immaculate, down to the blooming flowers on their windowsills. It must have been a beautiful day the moment it had happened, because a lot of people were doing things outside and lots of them had bright smiles adorning their faces.

Yahya and Alex had left the horses in the non-petrified area, because Yahya said the animals would start to panic if they'd force them to go any further.

Alex understood why the horses would have panicked the second he set foot on the petrified ground. It felt unnatural and eerie. As if they were risking becoming statues themselves.

The petrified part of town was beautiful, but the little voice in the back of Alex's head was screaming for him to get out of there and never look back. As if it was trying to repel everything that lived.

Alex stopped to stare at two kids playing tag with huge smiles on their faces, frozen in time forever. He had barely enough time to turn around and walk a few paces away, before his breakfast decided it didn't want to be in his stomach any longer.

"There, there," Yahya said as he rubbed Alex on his back in comforting slow strokes. "Are you sure you want to do this?"

"Yes, I have to," Alex said once he could breathe again and wiped his mouth with his sleeve. "I owe it to these people. They've been trapped here for far too long."

He watched as a few thoughts washed over Yahya's face, but whatever they were, he didn't say them out loud.

"What now?" Yahya asked instead.

"There's only one place we can go," Alex said as he pointed. "There. To the center of the disaster zone. To the top of the mountain."

"Please tell me you're joking?" Yahya asked hopefully. But when Alex raised an eyebrow at him, it became clear he wasn't. "You want to climb the Petrified Mountain?!"

"We don't have a choice! We have to find Intef. But you don't have to come if you don't want to. I understand that it's dangerous. And the fact that we can't die here only makes it worse."

"Will you stop using reversed psychology on me already?!" Yahya complained. "I'm not a kid anymore! All it does is annoy me. And just for the record; I'm coming because you need me, not because your little trick worked!"

"Whatever floats your boat,"Alex laughed. Had he used reversed psychology? Maybe unintentionally.

"I just wished I'd brought some rope," Yahya sighed, but they took off anyway. And then they walked, and walked, and walked.