Jon moves down the narrow mountain trail like a shadow given shape—quiet, steady, part of the land itself. His boots press into damp earth and scattered pine needles, each step worn smooth by years of solitary passage.

Hannah, his dog, pads beside him, ears twitching at every rustle in the underbrush, her thick coat dusted with frost even though dawn has barely cracked the sky. The air is sharp and thin up here—crisp enough to burn your lungs if you weren’t used to it—but Jon breathes it like old friends.

He’s lived on this ridge for seven years now, since the world below started feeling too loud, too full of voices that never meant what they said. His cabin sits tucked in a high meadow ringed by jagged peaks that catch first light like crowns of fire. No power lines hum overhead; no roads wind close enough to bring strangers calling uninvited.

Just wind through spruce boughs, the distant cry of a hawk circling stone cliffs, and snow that comes early and stays late.

Pines stand guard along both sides of the path—their bark dark and furrowed as ancient skin—and patches of ice glisten where meltwater slows in shaded cracks beneath moss-slick rocks. The scent is clean: cedar resin mixed with cold soil and woodsmoke still clinging faintly to Jon’s wool coat from last night’s dying fire.

He doesn’t speak.

Hannah doesn’t need words.

And this mountain?

It knows his silence better than any name ever could.

The sudden sound of Hannah’s whine jerks Jon's focus from the snow-dusted path. His eyes narrow as he sees her bound up ahead toward the river, paws churning through drifts as she reaches the rocky shore. There, half-hidden in a drift’s shadow, is a still body he didn’t expect to find.

He walks over, every muscle coiled. Closer now, he sees the face—unconscious but breathing.

Young. A teenager, likely. With torn clothes and slick, dirt-engulfed skin.