After a few more moondays of recovery, Aarvo headed toward Tromm Kor and reached it in three moondays of walk.
As soon as he arrived, he started climbing it. In the distance, he saw dawn slowly creeping over the horizon, raising arched fountains of pale light that danced against the darkness of night in space. It was a nice welcome. Light started revealing craters, mountain ranges and vast lunar plains all around in endless shades of gray, brown and black. It was a nice welcome, he told himself once more, and he had been this close to never see it again.
He reached the top and sat down, massaging his foot that had finally started growing back. He shuddered, thinking about what he had been through: the terrible pain, the delirium, the state of almost total prostration in which he had been trapped... And the nightmares, the horrible open-eyed nightmares that had tormented him... He hunched his shoulders and hugged his knees, rocking back and forth. He didn't know how he managed to find his way in that state. He succeeded, it was true, but he felt no sense of triumph, no relief. Every time he thought about it, he felt sure it all might very well have ended up quite differently—with him dead somewhere along the way—and the thought terrified him. It had been too close a call, way too close for comfort. He never wanted to go through such a thing ever again. From now on he ought to be more careful—he was alone and couldn't afford biting off more than he could chew.
He looked up at Eera that was waxing gibbous in the sky. What was he going to do now? How was he going to reach her? He had been mulling over it relentlessly for a couple of moondays now, but couldn't make up his mind. Not that he had all that many choices. Jumping again was out of the question, so all that was left was building the starbridge his mother had suggested in the dream. But how long would it take to get to Eera? Would it even work?
He laid the bridge he had in mind across the vast expanse in front of him, saw it rising to unthinkable heights, until it pointed straight at Eera in the sky. It was only a matter of time and work, he told himself, so it started right away.
At first slowly, as his foot finished growing, then with ever greater confidence and speed, he began to stack one rock on top of another from the base of the mountain, gradually moving up to the top, thus extending his bridge a handful of steps at a time. Soon, the rocks he collected from the ground were no longer enough, so he started taking what he needed directly from the nearby mountains, dismantling them piece by piece.
After about thirty moondays of this grueling work, Aarvo stopped, exhausted, and let his gaze drift toward the horizon. The enormity of what he was trying to achieve materialized in front of him as an immovable boulder. If it had taken him all this time to extend the bridge by only three hundred steps, how long would it take to reach Eera, which was so far away? All his life? He wasn't even sure he'd live long enough.
He swallowed the knot caught in his throat. Why did it have to be so hard? Was it really impossible what he was trying to do? He immediately blocked out those thoughts: he didn't want to know—he just wanted to leave!
With wild stubbornness, he resumed stacking one rock on top of another. At least the effort made him feel alive, made him feel he was working toward something, that there was still hope. He didn't want to give up what little he had left and plunge back into despair.
Blocking all other thoughts, he worked tirelessly for a hundred and twenty moondays, saw ten cycles of Eera's seasons going by, and managed to extend the bridge by almost two thousand steps.
His efforts greatly changed the landscape around him. His sharp hands dug enormous rifts into the flanks of Tromm Kor, until they actually detached it from the rest of the mountain range. The mountain ceased to be such and instead took on the appearance of a platform that stretched for almost two thousand steps through the silvery lunar plains. It looked like a solid foundation for a bridge that could extend to the stars.
Since it took too long now to get rock from the sides of the range around Tromm Kor, Aarvo turned his attention to a closer mountain, whose stocky profile suggested that it could be an impact crater, in which case it would be composed mostly of shifted earth and broken stone.
He laid eyes on a boulder sticking out on the eastern ridge and started removing dust and debris around it. He freed one side and continued to dig, following its outline, but without being able to find its base. It seemed as though his hunch had been right: the slab of rock must have been thrown into the wave of earth and debris blown up by the impact of a boulder of deep space. He had never dug an impact crater and couldn't be sure, but he was going to pull out this rock anyway and use it for his bridge. He didn't want to spend the whole moonday digging though, so he decided to try to get it out by force. He took a step back, gathered his energies, planted his feet, and pulled with all his might.
The rock slid forward almost immediately. Aarvo jumped back to avoid being run over. The boulder turned over, setting off a huge landslide that started rolling down the side of the mountain. Aarvo stood back and in the cloud of dust and electrostatic discharge that tumbled down briefly caught sight of a few glimmers and the outlines of some indistinct objects. Intrigued by the fleeting vision, he caught up with the landslide and once the dust settle down found himself surrounded by a number of round transparent crystals scattered on the ground together with a series of green, red and purple objects that looked like bones of some strange and huge animal of the past.
The crystals immediately caught his attention. He approached one of the largest ones, which sat almost perfectly upright, stuck halfway in the dust, and noticed something bizarre: he could see clearly through the lens, but on the other side everything looked enlarged and very close.
Now, that was weird! He had never seen anything like that. Did this crystal slab really make things look bigger, or was it just a trick?
He peeked around the edge of the strange object and saw that everything looked normal on the other side. He scratched his chin, then slid his fingers behind the crystal and watched them growing huge in front of his eyes. "Ha!" He turned his hand from side to side, studying the strange shapes of the grains of dust on his skin. He bent his fingers and watched in awe as the curtain of black soot started sliding down in waves. The specks almost looked alive as they bumped into each other and went flying in every direction. Aarvo leaned his face against the crystal to see better, but everything suddenly became blurred and confused: the lines bent into strange curves; the colors frayed as if they could no longer stick together; the bumps on the ground became as gigantic as sand dunes; and everything took on a strange and eerie look.
Aarvo pulled back, stared perplexed at the crystal for a few moments, then shrugged and picked up the most beautiful moonstonehe could find around him. He put it behind the lens and watched in amazement as the metal veins in its porous body becamemagnified to the point of turning into glittering rivers that stretched through a crowd of pinnacles and gigantic cavities.
It was almost like holding a planet in his hand, Aarvo thought. With a flick of his hand, he might flood this little world with light or sink it into darkness, if he so chose. If that clump of stone were inhabited by small creatures, he could become the master of their lives. He laughed at that idea. He knew very well that if there were living creatures on that rock, he'd much rather be their friend than enslave them to his cruel whims.
These thoughts flashed in his head and did not linger very long, swallowed up by the infinite possibilities of wonder that this lens offered him. His curiosity opened up like the jaws of a giant beast and bit into him: he started collecting the strangest rocks he could find, the dust in all its shades, and then lost himself in this study for several moonhours of infinite delight.
Then, all of a sudden a thought reared up in his mind and jerked his eyes towards the sky: What if, he thought, what if instead of looking at what was tiny at his feet, he pointed the lens towards the distant objects in the sky, towards Eera, bringing her so close that it'd almost be like being up there...?
****
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