They had warned me the path was broken.

That no map reached the high places.
That some stones above the clouds were best left unnamed.

But the old instinct still stirred.
The one that speaks not in words, but in weight.
In silence.
In dreams that return, year after year, unchanged.

And so I climbed.

The world thinned. Trees gave way to lichen, then to wind.
The sky narrowed to a line between peaks, and even sound seemed lost behind me.

And then—through the fog—it rose.

Not just a mountain.
A shape.
Deliberate. Designed. Remembered.

Red stone wound like armor around the cliffside. Towers perched in impossible stillness.
But it was not the fortress that stopped me.

It was the form it took.

At first, I doubted it. A trick of mist and shadow.
But as the light shifted, I saw it clearly—cut into the mountain’s very face:

A rounded crest. A single hollow eye. A soft, spectral curve.

Not carved.
Not added.
Born of the rock itself.

I knew that symbol.
Not from books. Not from stories.
But from somewhere deeper—
From that ancient space between knowing and forgetting.

And in that moment, I understood:
This was no ruin.
This was no myth.

This was Phantom.
Not a name, but a presence.
A memory so old it had taken root in stone.

I fell to one knee, not from reverence,
but from recognition.

It hadn’t called me.
It had always been there—
waiting for someone to see.

Crypto is everywhere.

But here, above the clouds, I learned the older truth:

Some ghosts never left.