Memory is the Key

Death below, the unknown above.

One choice.

A moment's inattention or a single slip and I would be dead, broken on the knifed-bladed rocks below.

My fingers were bloody, gripping the cliff by the narrowest handholds. The muscles in my calves were vibrating like plucked strings, and my arms burned with acids, though I had no memory of exerting myself.

How had I come to this place?

I had no answer to that, nor did I know much of anything save that the rugged wall rock before me was slick with water and vanished into the mists of rain above me. All I knew was that I was finally out of the god forsaken cell and, what's more, I was no longer blind nor dead.

What lay at the top of this cliff? No answer was forthcoming, but what lay at the bottom was clear enough. My right hand was cramping, and I eased each finger from the rock with the gentlest effort, trying to lessen the pain in each joint.

Long black hair hung before my eyes and I shook my head to clear my vision. The motion almost hurled me from the cliff and I clamped my fingers even harder onto the rock. I spat rainwater and looked up into the grey swirl of misty clouds. How close was the top of this cliff? Would it be easier to climb or was the ground, distant as it was, closer?

There was no way of knowing, but I had to make a decision soon.

A bad decision was better than no decision, and I understood that I had only two options. Retreat to a known fate or climb to an uncertain future. Though I had no memory of myself, I knew that going backwards was not in my nature. A decision, once made, had to be seen through to the end, for good or ill. How I knew this about myself I didn't know, but with the decision made, I knew it was the right one.

I lifted my right hand and slid it up the cliff, looking for a higher handhold, and, finding one, gripped it tightly. Gently, I eased my left hand up and took hold of a thin protruding rock. With my hands safe, I lifted my foot, the bare sore torn open (by climbing this far?) and placed it securely. I pushed down and lifted my body higher, feeling a potent sense of victory at even this small distance.

With agonising slowness and patience, I climbed upwards again, each movement painful and dangerous, but achieved with a relentless determination that I would not fail. The rain intensified and lashed my body with icy needles, as though spitefully seeking to dislodge me from the rock.

Rain, exhaustion and pain all conspired to weaken my resolve, but the more their combined efforts attempted to prise me loose, the harder I gripped. Hand over hand, one foot after the other, I pushed myself higher and higher. Each moment of ascension was a rebirth, each continued bresth a revelation. The rocks below diminished as I climbed, yet the clouds above seemed to climb with me, revealing yet more of the cliff, but no sign of s summit.

For all I knew, there might never be an end to the cliff. I might climb until my strength finally gave out and I fall to my death. The thought did not trouble me much. Better to fail after all efforts have been expended than to die never having found the limits of my endurance. That gave me strength, and I climbed onwards, faster now that the mountain had become my enemy, a thing to overcome. With an enemy to focus my thoughts, my strength grew and my will to succeed sharpened to a razor's edge.

Now all I could see above or below my was the cliff face, an implacable black wall that wanted me to fail and die. I gritted my teeth and spat at the rock before me in anger. Blood ran down my arms in thick runnels, my hands torn and opened to the bone by the jutting slivers of rock bearing my weight, but the pain was nothing compared to the thought of letting this ascent beat me.

Why the thought of defeat should be so painful to me when I did not fear to die, I did not know. After all, what did a man with no memory or future have to fear? The thought faded, but with its departure another feeling stole upon my thoughts.

I was not alone.

Someone - or something - was watching me.

That was surely ridiculous, for who else would be so foolish as to climb a sheer cliff in the rain?

Yet the thought persisted. Finding a ledge where I could rest without tearing open the many gashes on my feet, I eased my body around so that my back was to the cliff. The mist descended, and an impenetrable sheen of moist fog obscured whatever lay before me, but in descending, it had revealed a measure of the sky above.

I saw the stars.

A veil of beauteous darkness strewn with pinpricks of brightness, sprays of light from unimaginably distant suns. I knew of stars - what they were and the chemical anatomy of their life-cycles - but where I had obtained this knowledge was as mysterious as how I had come to be on this cliff.

They wheeled above me in a sweeping arc, constellations and auroras like sunbursts.

And at the heart of it all was something else, something that had always been there, always watching me, and which always would. Dimly I sensed that this was no benevolent guardianship, but the patience of a hunter stalking its prey.

Like an ocean maelstrom lifted from the seas and set amongst the heavens, it spun with sickly colours and diseased froths of matter and light. A region of space that swallowed time and spat out its doomed fragments, it stared down at me like the eye of something monstrous and colossal, a power young to the universe yet which would outlive the stars themselves.

It made me sick to my stomach to see it and I closed my eyes as a lurching sense of vertigo slipped over me. My legs wobbled and I was suddenly dislocated from control of my body. My back came away from the cliff face and I felt the vast empty space in front of me, the dizzying sense of standing on a slender ridge of stone thousands of metres above the ground.

My hand scrabbled at the rock, but found no purchase. My body leaned out over the abyssal depths as my mind screamed at me to fight this weakness. A scratching finger found a thin crack in the rock and I jammed my hand into it as my body swung out into the empty air.

Pain tore at my arm as my entire weight fell from the ledge. I bunched my fist as I felt my grip slipping, skin tearing back from the top of my hand. I gritted my teeth and fought against the flailing panic welling up within me. Anger fuelled me and forced it down.

This cruel baptism of fire imposed an icy calm on me, and I took a deep breath as I blotted out the pain from my injured hand. I reached up and secured a hold with my free hand, and let out a pained breath as the tension in my other hand eased. My feet found purchase after a quick scrabble, and I eased my bloodied hand from the crack in the rock.

I found fresh reserves of strength to climb. Hand over hand I ascended, my confidence growing with every metre I gained in the war against the cliff. The closer I came to the top, the more numerous the handholds became,bad though the cliff had finally accepted it would not claim my life. I pushed up once more and groped for a handhold, but my ha d met only air.

And I realised I'd reached the top.