Author: Sean M. Cox
     (Continued from Unrelenting Rain.)

     Michael’s rest was deep yet uneasy.
     Michael dreamed of rain and hills, but the landscape was somewhat different. Michael sat under a shelter near a large hill; a hill he had never seen before. He had a journey planned and was making preparations to leave, though he felt ill prepared for the excursion. Food he had little of, though for some reason that was not a primary concern for him.
     A lizard ambled around near him and Michael felt that it was a pet of some kind, his pet, though the shelter was not his and Michael noticed that he was not alone. He discovered that he had with him a kind of sling and the other person present, who seemed to own the shelter, had a store of smooth stones at the back. The lizard ambled around and seemed quite disinterested in the cache of stones, and at first John was inclined to feel the same, but then thought better of it. The hills, after all, were not completely desolate places. There was, here and there, a hill that served as home to one of the various beasts that roamed and hunted in the rainy valley and a good sling, a club, or some sort of knife were the only real weapons available to make defense.
     Checking his sling, Michael found that it already carried a rock. Somewhat oddly shaped, it looked unfit for service, so he asked the shelter’s owner if he might barter for a few stones. The owner seemed inclined and went to his pile of stones to pick out a number for trade.
     Suddenly, the man collapsed. Michael was dumbfounded as to the cause until he saw a swarm of gliding leeches which had just popped out of the mud along with others still coming. Gliding leeches were strange creatures. They burrowed in the shifty mud and came up to the surface when hungry to find a host and feed. One usually didn’t find them in such large numbers, but there they were all the same.
     There was no feasible way to reach the shelter’s owner in order to help him, so Michael ran from the shelter as quickly as he could. He noticed that there were swarms of gliding leeches all over the terrain. Soon he came to a patch of small mounds where a boulder stood. Noticing that a large bush of red water moss grew on the boulder, Michael grabbed as much as he could and yelled, in a madness, to a couple of nearby mounds to help him. He threw some moss to one and took off running back towards the shelter.
     Red water moss, it should be noted, has a strong smell when squeezed or otherwise roughly handled, and the smell is found to be particularly distasteful by gliding leeches. It was Michaels thought to get rid of them by sprinkling the shelter owner with the moss.
     Returning to the shelter he quickly tossed the moss onto the shopkeeper. The affect was meager, but Michael grabbed the shopkeeper and dragged him out of the shelter and away from the gliding leeches anyway.
     Then Michael woke up.

     It was still raining of course, as ever it did and Mount Zion towering in the distance gave Michael his bearings. All the same, he continued to lie on his watershed and stare. He imagined what it must be like outside of the rain and that pleasant lingering thought weakened his will to continue walking and yet motivated it at the same time. It arose within him a great conflict until eventually he moved quickly and stood.
     Once again he lingered in thought standing there, and as he stood he stared down the road at the mountains that provided him some distant hope of shelter.
     Fickle Friend thundered in the distance and Michael shivered. It seemed odd to shiver amidst the constant thunderings. It gave Michael a mildly puzzled feeling until quite suddenly he heard a loud screech. It had been there before, but this time separate from the thundering of the mountains it stood out. It shook the ground and the proximate hills. It reverberated through Michael all the more and chill.
     Looking up, Michael could see a dark form in the sky and he imagined it a dragon, dark and gray. It passed slowly in the sky and as Fickle Friend thundered yet again, the creature changed course so that it flew into the storm.
     “So”, thought Michael, “Fickle Friend has attracted a companion in its tempestuousness.”
     The dragon drew near indeed to Fickle Friend and as he began to dance round about it a shock surged through the ground and nearly threw Michael off of his place on the watershed. Then a tempest began to form around Fickle Friend; a whirling tornado. To Michael it seemed he saw Fickle Friend arrayed for battle. Lightning lashed out here and there, mostly in the immediate vicinity of the mountain herself and more than once it seemed the lightning struck too close to the dragon causing it to falter ever so slightly in its flight.
     However, not even Michael was safe at his distance. His little watershed was struck repeatedly and the distance between he and Mount Zion was occasionally hit with such storm that to step off the path would mean sudden death almost assuredly.
     Greatly was Michael dismayed except that Mount Zion also seemed attracted to the storm. The dazzling display of light and the flight of the dragon seemed, oddly enough, to stay her flight so that Michael could see himself growing ever closer to boundary of her hills. The road drew near indeed, so that were it not for the electrical activity, Michael could’ve reached out and touched the walls of Mount Zion’s fortifications; those hills which kept out all outsiders against her hurt, but little did nearness avail him, for in some respects Michael might just as well have been a thousand miles away for all the access he had to enter into that place.
     There was then a break in the wall. More accurately, it pulled away from the road for a short space, so that really the distance between Michael and Mount Zion became something daunting indeed, but only for a short space and then it made contact with the road again.
     Strange, it seemed, for here the wall came so close that Michael really could reach out and touch it. This he did, and he told the mountain he would be no foe to flee from and guard against, but then the wall flickered before his eyes, a sudden onrush of heat swept through him, and then all was dark.
     Michael lay flat on his back in the darkness for only a short time before he started to regain some sense of his bearings. His vision remained blurred and there was a ringing in his ears.
     Once again he cried. He cried because of the stupidity and the selfishness of his Fickle Friend. He cried because of the mountain which he had seen before him, which had fled from his touch.
     He cried and for a brief period was angry. All the while he could hear over the ringing in his ears the sound of thunder in the distance. He could hear the sound of the dragon as it screeched in flight around Fickle Friend, which friend had paid him no heed and threatened to destroy him if ever he threatened to approach Mount Zion’s walls of protection.
     Mount Zion wanted to be alone and Fickle Friend would help her stay that way.
     Getting up, Michael wasn’t sure quite where he had been ended up relative to where he was when he touched Mount Zion’s perimeter. He stumbled a bit in muddy water trying to find his watershed and then suddenly he was sliding down a steep muddy slope. He quickly hit bottom, and for a time sat motionless, trying to regain some sense of where he was before attempting to move.
     After about an hour, Michael looked around and could see that he was in a deep pit. Water trickled down the sides adding to the rain. The water was about one and a half feet deep at the bottom making things more than a bit uncomfortable.
     Trying the sloped walls of the pit, Michael found them generally too slippery and steep to navigate, so he sat down and tried to take a nap, however, his sleep was restless and cold. He cut his nap short and made renewed effort to find a way out of the pit and after a while of searching found a rock that jutted out of the mud. It was difficult to reach and to put his weight on, but despite the difficulty he managed to get the job done and began the search for another foothold.
     Just then Michael heard the sound of another creature. It was similar in sound to the dragon which circled Fickle Friend and from his place on top of the rock he could see that it was headed in the direction of Mount Zion. Michael’s heart sank within him as he thought of what this would likely mean and he thought hard as he perched there of the impossibility of the task; beating a dragon to the top of mount Zion. Just then his foot slipped and once again he was sliding, this time a short distance, to the bottom of the pit.
     Suddenly he could hear the sound of the first dragon screeching loudly in the distance over the noise of the thunder and the distant tornado. And when the screeching stopped, the world seemed to grow silent as only the rain created any sound at all now and Michael had long ago taken that sound for granted. It was at once apparent that the dragon had found a resting place in Fickle Friend and there would be some peace for a season for travelers in this region. Little good it seemed to do him now though at the bottom of his pit with naught but a single rock to cling to in order to make his way out; and what then?
     The second dragon grew distant and its screech was echoed back to Michael, as if in report, off of the walls of Mount Zion. Michael felt the hope drain out of him as it seemed all too likely that he would still be in his pit when this new dragon found refuge on Mount Zion, which seemed to offer no hindrance to an airborne traveler.
     “Oh, that I were an angel” he thought, and then stood up again, because in having seen Mount Zion, he knew quite well that the sun shone, somewhere, and he would never find it anywhere at the bottom of a pit.