The Man On The Mountain: Book Novels & Stories

"The mountains are extremely chilly. The cold bothers me." Caiden examined his wounded leg."What is wrong with your leg?" He saw how horrified the man grew at that inquiry when he glanced at him. He blurted, "I was bitten by a dog," which Caiden found quite odd. "I was heading toward the hospital in my car." Then Caiden approached him while staring. The man's face went pale, "I'm searching for four kidnapped boys, and I've been told they're in the mountains." The man was trembling all over.

None of the books he had read mentioned anything like this, and it all seemed too deliberate to be coincidental. The next day, Bellamy returned to the same place, but instead of testing the cold on himself, he continued to climb the mountain. He encountered an avalanche but miraculously escaped. Undeterred, he pressed on, convinced that there was something extraordinary about this mountain. Otherwise, how could he have stumbled upon such a mystery? Suddenly, Bellamy spotted someone in the distance—a figure dressed in flowing white robes, standing with their back to him. The wind added an ethereal grace to the figure’s appearance.

"Montana in winter is beautiful and brutal, much like hunting a desperate Alpha who knows he's cornered." The snow comes sideways off the mountains, sharp and fine, finding every gap between collar and skin and staying there. The small plane rattles through turbulence on the descent and I watch the white landscape expand below us and think about a man who funded a monster for thirty years and is now hiding in a cabin twenty miles from nowhere, hoping nobody comes. We came.

A statement. They stood at its base, a tiny cluster of figures against the immense, silent bulk of the mountain. The wind here was a constant, roaring river of cold. "Well, boy," the man Kael said, his voice almost swallowed by the gale. "This is it. Can you talk to this one?" Kael, the child, stepped forward. He was twelve, but he seemed both smaller and infinitely larger before the mountain. He didn't answer. He simply walked to the rock face, still streaked with old snow, and placed his bare hands against the stone.

His hand went limp, dropping beside him on the hospital bed. In an instant, my parents’ cries echoed through the hospital. Amid the chaos, a hand, slender and cool to the touch, grasped mine. “Let’s go home,” Isolde said. I murmured a soft “Mm,” tightening my grip on her hand. Stepping out into the autumn sunlight, I squinted instinctively. Isolde shifted me to her side, letting her shadow shield me from the glare. Thayer’s death was like a stone tossed into a lake: it rippled briefly before the surface returned to calm.

For so long she had imagined meeting him in reality but never did she imagine it to be like this. Asher was too stunned to speak. By his sister’s description, he already knew that standing before him was the man they have been looking for and the reason they came to the mountain. Never in a million years would he have imagined the mystery man to be buried in a cave in the Eastwood Mountain.

Celeste whispered. This felt insane. My brother hadn’t been taken over by a demon. He was having a psychotic break from PTSD and the lingering effects of the fumes in that mountain. Nothing more. And I was going to bring him home and help him get better. I closed the book and handed it back to Karl. Sure enough, by the time the sun started to break over the horizon, my men and I were back on the path. We moved just as quickly as before, and eventually, the mountain’s peak came into view.

The Giant of Kandahar moved like a collapsing building, slow, inevitable, every step cracking the earth beneath it. When it roared, the sky trembled. The storm above responded, winds howling louder, Dirt curling into tornadoes of memory and malice. Mont didn’t flinch. He stood there, shoulders squared, rifle slung across his back like it was just another tool, not his lifeline. Beside him, the Green Man shimmered, not with light, but with presence. Like a thousand leaves stirring at once, he felt ancient, rooted to the world and beyond it.

She handed it to a man who was sitting on a stone by the hearth—a man who had just arrived from the valley, his clothes dusty from a long journey, his face lined with an old, familiar wisdom. He didn't have a name, but as he took the pen, he looked at Xander and me with eyes that were a deep, natural brown. "The manuscript is clean," the man said, opening a new, leather-bound book that had no numbers on the pages. "Who wants to tell the first story that isn't about money?" Xander looked at me, and for the first time since Chapter One, there was no ledger between us. "Once," Xander said, his voice carrying across the new world, "there was a man, and there was a woman. And they had absolutely

However, what came instead was news of a blizzard sealing off the mountain and a search team returning with nothing but a damaged hiking boot. I clutched that boot at the funeral and fainted three times from crying. To find his body, I sold our home and hired a private rescue team, staying at the foot of the mountain for half a year. From there, I developed severe bipolar disorder. The scars on my wrists layered over each other, one on top of the next. A broken laugh escaped me, and I couldn’t stop the tears from falling. “You’re right. People should look to the future.” I wiped my tears away and straightened my back, forcing myself to look composed.