Everyone remembers where they were when the mountains woke up. The day when they grew tired of us small things crawling all over them. No one knows how long they slept, only that they had awoken with an insatiable appetite. For millennia humans traversed their peaks, trod upon their slopes, stuck our spiked flags into their summits.

Everyone remembers. Everyone remembers where they saw their first rolling behemoth of rock. The first instance of the crushing of reality under the weight of the impossibly quick undulating of cliff faces advancing ceaselessly. Me? I was at sea and I wasn’t alone for long. Many fled from the mountains, seeking solace where they thought they couldn’t be reached. Swimming or sailing, the method didn’t matter when the choice was between the cold waters or being pulverized and swallowed by stone. Idiots, the lot of us. We had all forgotten the biggest mountain, the greatest danger lurked below.

A great yacht, full of old rich men, saw it before the rest of us. A flare, fired by one of the occupants, painted the blue sky red, its smoke drifting towards a jagged fin of grey basalt cresting the rising waves. It was one of these wild waves that saved me and my crew. Those of us dispersed far and wide were the lucky ones. The others? I can’t help but wonder how quick the end came for them. Do the mountains chew? Or do their victims slowly dissolve in the magma within? I don’t think I’ll have to wonder for long. Our stores dwindle to nothing. Our mental state is as frayed as the torn flags that once adorned Everest. We are losing the will and means to keep going. The mountains are catching up.

My crew question my writing of this account. They ask who’s left to read our story. Who, except the fish, will ever see these pages? In truth, I don’t think I record these words for anyone save myself. Perhaps this is my attempt at capturing the unfathomable, believing that if I can set these words down in ink, they’ll be in some way comprehensible.

Ah. There it is at long last. A knock at my cabin door. I do not need to answer it to know what it means. They have come.