The stairway from the Fifth Gate to the Ninth was the longest ascent in the mountain.
He understood this within the first minutes of climbing, the steps accumulating at a pace that made clear the distance was different in kind from the previous transitions rather than just in degree. The mountain's interior above the Fifth Gate was not the enclosed stone passages of the lower levels. The stairway here was open on one side, the mountain's face present as a vertical wall to his left while the right side opened to the sky, the potential-color present not as ceiling or ambient atmosphere but as the immediate environment, the stairway ascending through it.
He was climbing through the potential itself.
