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"Finally, almost at the summit..."
After a full five hours, walking from the first light on the horizon until the sun stood overhead, his solitary climb could finally pause for a while. Leaning on a very straight branch he had picked up along the way, Leonard caught his breath, planning to rest a little before continuing.
There was no voice in his mind, either. Perhaps Pallez was resting, or perhaps he was thinking about something. In any case, he had neither spoken to Leonard nor answered his rambling monologues along the way. So Leonard slowed his pace, walking through a relatively gentle stretch of the mountain and admiring the scenery to pass the time. After a while, he suddenly spotted signs of human activity ahead.
Suspecting his eyes were playing tricks on him, Leonard stopped and craned his neck to look ahead. He really did see a path amid the mountain's dirt, gravel, weeds, and trees.
The path was extremely plain, even crude, merely stone slabs laid over the dirt. The slabs were not uniform in shape, but their cuts were reasonably even. Just like that, a seemingly severed stone-paved path, a little over a meter wide, appeared four or five meters ahead of Leonard.
Ruins? Leonard did not find it particularly strange to encounter ruins in these remote, uninhabited mountains. After all, this was the Hornacis Mountain Range, the site of the "Nation of the Evernight," which Pallez had told him had primarily worshipped Duke Antigonus during the Fourth Epoch. And if people lived here, signs of human activity would not only appear this close to the summit.
After confirming there was no danger nearby, Leonard clicked his back teeth together once, summoning a spirit he had contracted to hide nearby. Then, leaning on his branch as