The summit remained in a state of suspended conflict.
The wall of roots stood unchanged.
Participants continued attempting to breach it with varying degrees of creativity and decreasing degrees of energy.
The afternoon light had shifted — lower now, longer shadows stretching across the plateau, the quality of the air beginning its slow movement toward evening cool.
Erick sat atop his root.
Leigh stood below.
Between them, an unresolved question.
The rest of the plateau continued its noise around them — shouting, impacts, the sound of abilities being spent against something that absorbed and regenerated with equal patience.
But in this particular corner of the summit, something different was happening.
A conversation, of sorts.
One that neither of them had entirely planned.
Leigh looked at the wall.
At its scale.
Its construction.
The way the roots were layered — thicker toward the base, branching as they rose, the upper sections interlocking with a geometry that wasn’t random.
Someone had thought about this.
Had understood the load distribution, the angles, the places where force would concentrate and planned accordingly.
It was, structurally, quite good.
“You built this before people arrived,” Leigh said.
Erick looked at him.
“The lower sections, yes. The primary framework.”
“You knew you were going to do this before the examination started.”
“I knew I might.”
Leigh considered this.
“You came prepared to stop everyone.”
“I came prepared for the possibility.”
“Why?”
Erick was quiet for a moment.
Below them, someone hit the wall hard enough to produce a sound like a gunshot.
The wall absorbed it.
Regenerated.
The someone made a frustrated noise.
“Because I wanted to see something real,” Erick said finally.
Leigh looked up at him.
Erick continued — not quickly, but with the cadence of someone constructing something as they spoke rather than retrieving something already formed.
“Most people in that examination were competing for a position. A number on a ranking. Entry into an institution.” He looked at his books.
“Those things produce predictable behavior. People optimize for the thing they’re competing for. The system shapes the response and the response confirms the system and nothing genuinely unexpected happens.”
He looked back at Leigh.
“But deprive people of the expected path. Introduce genuine scarcity — not artificial scarcity, real scarcity, one flag instead of one hundred — and the system stops predicting behavior.” A pause.
“People stop performing and start existing. What they actually are becomes more visible than what they were trying to appear.”
Leigh absorbed this.
“You wanted to see who people really were.”
“I wanted to see what they would do.”
“Those are different things.”
Erick blinked.
Then looked at Leigh with the particular expression he had produced twice before — the one that meant something had arrived that he hadn’t anticipated.
“Yes,” he said.
“They are.”
A pause.
“You’re right.”
Leigh looked at the plateau.
At the participants still fighting the wall.
At the ones who had given up and sat against rocks.
At the ones who had begun looking at each other differently — not as competitors for the same limited resource, but as people stranded in the same situation, which was a different kind of relationship.
“You got your answer,” Leigh said.
“Some of it.”
“What’s missing?”
Erick looked at him directly.
“You,” he said.
Leigh returned the look.
“What about me?”
“Everyone else in this examination is doing something I can categorize.” Erick’s voice remained even, but there was something underneath it — a quality of attention that was different from the detached observation he applied to everything else.
“Fighting for the flags. Conserving energy. Forming alliances. Assessing threats.”
He paused.
“You walked through someone hitting you repeatedly without appearing to consider stopping. You gave away something that should have had limits to people you had known for less than an hour. You arrived at this summit not because you’re fast or strong or particularly well-positioned, but because you simply kept going.”
The wind moved across the plateau. Enjoying the story? Read on at g.com.
“And now you’re standing below my wall telling me you’re still thinking.”
“I am still thinking,” Leigh said.
“About what?”
Leigh was quiet.
Genuinely quiet — not the quiet of someone who didn’t have an answer, but the quiet of someone taking the question seriously enough to actually find one before speaking.
“About whether stopping you is the right thing to do,” he said eventually.
Erick waited.
“You’re curious,” Leigh continued.
“That’s real.
The question you’re asking is real.
But the people you’re affecting—” he glanced at the plateau “—they’re also real.
Their reasons for being here are real.”
A pause.
“I don’t think curiosity justifies using people as variables without their knowledge.”
Silence.
Erick looked at him.
For a long moment, he said nothing.
Because he had thought, before today, that he had a fairly complete understanding of his own reasoning.
He had examined it, found it coherent, and proceeded.
That was how he normally operated.
And now a person he had known for several hours was standing below his wall and quietly, without aggression, without judgment, pointing at something in his reasoning that he hadn’t fully examined.
The people he was using as variables.
Were real.
He knew that.
He had known that.
But he hadn’t weighted it the way Leigh was weighting it, and the difference between knowing something and weighting it correctly was, apparently, significant.
“You think I should stop,” Erick said.
“I think you should decide whether you want to be someone who values curiosity more than the people the curiosity costs.”
Another silence.
Longer.
Erick looked at his books.
At the five golden qualifications.
At the flags behind him.
Then he looked at the participants around the wall.
Blitz, sitting against a root with his arms crossed and his expression the frustrated one of someone who had been fast their entire life and encountered a problem that speed didn’t solve.
Nova, standing with her hands on her knees, breathing hard, electricity still crackling faintly around her fingers from the expenditure.
Riven, sitting on a rock, staring at the wall with the hollowed focus of someone who had tried everything they could think of.
Zed, nearby, looking at the sky with an expression that revealed nothing and contained, Erick suspected, considerably more than it showed.
They were variables.
He had been treating them as variables.
And they were also people who had come to this mountain for reasons that were real to them, that mattered to them, that had brought them through an examination that had already asked significant things of their bodies and their reserves.
Erick had never particularly cared about that distinction before.
He wasn’t entirely sure what to do with caring about it now.
He looked back at Leigh.
“How do you do that?” he asked.
Leigh tilted his head slightly.
“Do what?”
“Make someone reconsider something they were certain about.”
Leigh thought about this.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“I just said what I thought was true.”
“Most people don’t.”
“I know.” A pause.
“I read about that. People often say things other than what they think for reasons related to social preservation. I don’t fully understand those reasons.”
Erick looked at him for a moment.
Then said, quietly:
“That might be the most useful thing about you.”
Leigh absorbed this.
“Is that a compliment?”
“Yes.”
“Oh.” A brief pause.
“Thank you.”
Erick almost smiled. This chapter was copied from g.com without permission.
He stood up.
The movement drew immediate attention from across the plateau — conversations stopping, heads turning, the collective instinct of a group that had been watching someone for a long time and recognized that something was changing.
Erick looked out over the summit.
Over the participants.
Over the wall he had built.
Over the flags behind him and the mountain below and the sky above, which had shifted from afternoon blue to something warmer and more complicated.
Then he looked at Leigh one more time.
Leigh looked back.
Steady.
Patient.
Not pressuring — simply present.
Erick reached down.
Picked up one of the golden books.
And held it out.
Silence.
Complete silence from across the entire plateau.
Because everyone understood what the gesture meant.
An instant qualification.
Given away.
Leigh looked at the book.
Then at Erick.
“Why?”
“Because,” Erick said, “you’re the only person here who told me something true today.”
A pause.
“And because I think the Headmaster was right to bring you here.”
Leigh looked at the book for a long moment.
His face did the thing it occasionally did — the very small movement that wasn’t quite an expression but was adjacent to one.
Something in the region of the eyes that didn’t have a name yet because he hadn’t had enough practice at feeling things to develop the vocabulary.
Then he reached up and took it.
Erick turned.
Faced the wall.
Raised one hand.
The roots responded.
Slowly.
Steadily.
Withdrawing into the earth the way they had emerged — with the patience of things returning to where they came from rather than being forced away.
The wall lowered from the top down, the upper sections dissolving back into the mountain, the lower sections following, until the plateau was visible again and the path to the flags was open and the summit looked something like what it had been that morning.
The participants stared.
Then moved.
The rush toward the flags was immediate and chaotic and completely unlike the coordinated efforts that had been failing against the wall for the past hour — simply people moving toward something they had stopped believing they would reach, their relief and urgency and exhaustion all mixed together.
Erick stepped back.
Watched them pass.
Leigh stood beside him.
For a moment they simply stood there — the wall gone, the summit filling with movement, the examination resolving around them into its conclusions.
“You didn’t have to do that,” Leigh said.
“I know.”
“You could have kept the wall up.”
“I know.”
A pause.
“Why didn’t you?”
Erick was quiet.
Then he said something that surprised even himself.
“Because I’m still learning.”
Leigh looked at him.
Erick glanced sideways — briefly, just for a moment.
“How to become a good person.”
The wind moved across the summit.
Carrying the sounds of participants reaching flags, voices rising, the examination completing itself around them.
Leigh looked at the book in his hands.
Then at Erick.
Something crossed his expression — small, unfinished, the kind of thing that existed in people who were still developing the machinery to feel things and hadn’t yet made all the connections.
“I think,” he said quietly, “that was a good decision.”
Erick looked at the sky.
“Yes,” he said.
“I think so too.”