Hi, thanks for taking my call. I'm calling from Chile, so I hope the connection holds. This happened in February of 1999. I was twenty-six, working as a mountain guide out of Puerto Natales. That's the gateway town to Torres del Paine, if you know the area. I'd been guiding for three years by then, knew those mountains better than most. My friend Miguel and I had planned a personal climb that week. Not a guided trip, just the two of us. We wanted to attempt a route on the eastern face of Paine Grande that we'd been talking about for years. We'd left our heavy gear at base camp to move fast. The radio, the emergency beacon, most of our food. Just took what we needed for a two-day push. You travel light when you know what you're doing. The weather was perfect when we started. Clear skies, barely any wind. That should have been our first warning. Weather in Patagonia doesn't stay perfect.
The storm came in fast. One minute we could see the summit, the next we couldn't see ten meters ahead. The wind hit maybe seventy, eighty kilometers per hour. Temperature dropped so fast my water bottle started to freeze. We were at about 1,800 meters, still well below the technical section, but the rock was getting slick with ice. Miguel spotted the cave first. Just a dark opening in the cliff face, maybe three meters wide. We didn't think twice. You don't, in conditions like that. You find shelter or you die. Simple as that. I remember the relief I felt just getting out of that wind. The sudden quiet. The storm was still screaming outside but inside it was like someone had turned down the volume. I pulled out my flashlight and we moved deeper in. The cave went back further than I expected. The floor was uneven, wet in places. We were maybe fifteen meters in when Miguel stopped and grabbed my arm. I swung the light forward and that's when my hand started shaking. I dropped the flashlight. It hit the rock and the bulb shattered. Complete darkness.
But I'd already seen them. In that second before the light died, I'd seen them. Two shapes at the back of the cave, maybe another ten meters deeper. They were huddled together, if that's even the right word for things like that. They had three legs each. Not like a tripod you'd set up for a camera. More organic than that, but wrong. The legs came down from a central mass, spaced evenly, thick at the top and tapering to points. Their bodies were made of something like quartz. Rough, uncut, the way you'd find it in the ground. Or maybe diamond. I don't know. It had that same quality, that hardness, those irregular facets. I could see the texture of it, the way the surfaces caught what little light there was. They had no heads. Nothing I could identify as a face. But in the center of each one, there was this glow. This core of light that shifted and moved inside them. It changed colors slowly. Blue to white to something almost pink. Like watching a sunset happen inside a chunk of glass.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]