She walked into the vines, passed through tearing thorns, and found herself at the foot of a moonlit slope. Shallow steps switchbacked three thousand feet up the mountainside to the balconies and overlooks that ringed Kavekana’ai.

She took the climb slowly. As a novice, she’d sprinted up the stairs until her legs jellied and she almost tumbled off into space. Older now, and injured, she broke her climb into twenty-minute increments counted on her pocket watch, with five minutes’ rest between each. Her blood sang, and her legs burned, and her wounds, too, a sharper wire-pain compared to the muscles’ fire. The fat moon laughed overhead, outshining stars and the burning city below.

She prayed as she climbed. With no idols to care for, she prayed to the old and absent gods, who’d run off to the God Wars and not returned: Makawe, Heva, Maru, Aokane, all the rest. Mako had gone with them, fought his youth away in foreign lands. Last human survivor of the Wars on Kavekana, but even he was not immortal. Soon his strength would fade. The Rest would lose its heart.

The old gods’ songs had good rhythms, and she sang them to keep her pace. Makawe’s journeys below the world, seeking fire from the older powers of the depths. Heva comforting the first humans as they scraped, lost and cold, at the mud in which their souls were trapped. The war between Maru and his siblings. She climbed the long stair until the moon hung full overhead.

When she reached the lowest balcony of Kavekana’ai and found it vacant, she sagged against the railing, breathing hard. She wasn’t in mountain-climbing shape anymore. Her leg had ached during the climb, but she only used her cane for the last few hundred feet. Should have used it the whole way. She’d regret all this tomorrow, or later tonight.

A delta of sweat ran from her collar down her shirt to her stomach. As her heart calmed, the chill of wind and heights raised goose bumps on her arms. She wrapped herself tight in her jacket. The thin fabric did little to cut the wind, but little was better than nothing.

Kai stepped forward, and stumbled. Her leg gave way. She cursed, caught herself, and stood still again, listening to the wind and the silence of the slope, wondering who might have heard. Leaning on the cane, she tried again to walk, and this time held her balance. Three-legged, she proceeded to the wall, and stepped inside.

The stone accepted her. She knew its secret name, and it knew hers. This mountain was formed when gods and humans first rose from the earth. Men and mountain were made of the same stuff. For those who knew its secrets, the stone itself was a gate, and this gate had not been closed to her. Yet.