A ragged gasp torn from my dry throat.

The caked blood on my face and over my neck cracked with my movement as I woke.

I was alive, if just barely.

My head hurt so badly, even keeping my eyes closed wasn't enough to block out the after-images of the grimoire.

I lay there for a long time, trying to settle what I had unwittingly forced upon myself.

Althalan.

A man, a wizard from who knows how long ago.

His knowledge was within me now, incomplete and absolutely total in random ways.

I knew things now, I also knew enough to know that there was so much, so very much more that I did not know or didn't understand.

I felt as though I knew Althalan intimately and at the same time knew not enough about him.

A stranger and a lifelong friend?

Groaning I rolled onto my side, coughing plumes of dust from the stone floor.

This place, the maze of endless halls and corridors, rooms without purpose and a ruin.

I knew now that it had been something of an occasional private retreat of Althalan's creation.

A place he had shaped himself using the very stone of the mountain, both filled with useful things but by his perspective also of no real value save that the solitude it provided him.

To me or anyone else it would have seemed an ancient wonder, a place filled with mysteries but to Althalan it had little more than a rough hut in the wild, a place that could be improved upon or not, visited often or abandoned without any real care.

The halls I had explored that held no doors or reason for being actually had plenty of rooms in them, I had just not known how to find or open them.

Like this room, the stone seemed to seal it away but a touch, a whisper of magic in the right place would open the very stone itself.

I knew this.

I knew some of the layout of this place and yet other parts of it were still completely unknown to me, what had come to me from the grimoire about this place had been just as sporadic and random as everything else it had contained.

This room, its furnishings that seemed to have lasted longer than the other rooms. I knew that grimoire and the power it held had played a roll in preserving it.

I knew that for a fact.

I also knew that I didn't know why exactly.

I simply lay there, the mess of my mind still swirling.

I just lay, wishing for the vortex of madness to truly end.

I had survived this and yet I still suffered, physically I was exhausted, I had been exhausted before I had even managed to crawl my way up through the floor.

I was starving and my thirst was almost unbearable.

Even the lump on the back of my head that had been my bane throughout my journey through the depths of the mountain seemed like nothing compared to the twisting visions, the echoes that still roiled within.

One eye cracked open and I could just barely see my hand, I knew that the power of the grimoire, the light it had produced was spent and soon darkness would return to this room as the remnants waned.

Hushed words pooled in my mind, something that wasn't quite thoughts nor was it quite a feeling but something else. It rose up in my mind and as it did I saw water begin to trickle from the palm of my sore hand.

I felt the water run down my wrist, I managed to pull my hand to my face.

I coughed up water and pulled in as much air as I could before I managed to swallow a few precious mouthfuls of the water.

Then feeling spent in a way I had never before, I slept.

*******************

I awoke once more to darkness, a familiar thing by now.

I still lay on my side and after struggling I managed to get myself onto my feet.

Turning around, knowing in which direction I needed to head I moved on shaky legs towards the seemingly solid wall.

Even in the absolute blackness I knew what I needed to do, my sight wasn't what I needed to use.

An application of will, from within me at first them pushed out towards the 'wall' I knew was before me.

I felt rather than saw the wall respond.

Soundlessly like a curtain being opened what was once solid stone melted to each side of what was now an arched opening.

Not wanting to stay here any longer, wanting to see the outside world once more I moved quickly and with confidence through the dark halls.

Left here, follow down to the end then right.

Up the stairs then right again, another push and a wall that melted away to reveal more stone stairs.

A left this time once I reached the top, another wall that transformed by my will an a set of stone stairs that were much longer this time.

I began to pant as I ascended them, stopping once part way up them, weak having been without food for so long.

I finally reached the top and knew that even in the blackness that the narrow hall I stood in now was very short.

It was my way out, it was in fact the only real way in or out now.

I almost died.

It was a combination of dumb luck and a desperate impatience that saved me.

I sent out an effort of will to what I knew was the hidden entrance to this place before I even began to cross the hall itself.

As the stone melted away to form an entrance, hundreds of years, perhaps thousands of years worth of rubble that had collected outside the hidden entrance began to spill into the small entrance hall.

A flash of light managed to shoot through the moving rocks to hit my sensitive eyes, I recoiled backwards slightly raising my arm over my face.

The first part of my luck was that I was still too far away from the rocks that fell inside to reach me and the second part was that a large rock, more of a small boulder happened to be part of the debris from outside.

It became the foundation of all the falling rocks behind it, causing them to jam and tentatively lock into place, halting what would have been a small avalanche.

I sat down my heart racing as my eyes tried to recover from the brief flash of light that had blinded me.

Breathing heavily from this latest brush with death I settled myself and began to think.

I tried to order the still as yet unsettled and unfamiliar knowledge I now held, looking for a solution while trying to keep my desperation from rising up.

I knew that I could do.

I stood.

Raising my hand and gesturing forcefully at the blocked opening, I felt wind rush come from behind me, as if the mountain itself blew, the small gale that moved around me as a wall of air slammed into the blockage.

I immediately felt dizzy and dropped back down to my knees.

The sound of the boulder and the many rocks being hurled away was almost deafening, as the gale slowed and a few smaller stones clattered into the hall I wondered when I had last actually heard something so loud.

As the last movements stopped, it seemed almost fitting that I would crawl from this mountain on hands and knees as most of my journey had been.

Into the blinding light I moved and felt cold wind, filthy and ragged as I was my mad laughter was whipped away by the winds.

Free.