A Cold Cry

Conflict

"Hana, I am here."

Hylfher turned and looked silently on his son. His eyes were stern, yet not harsh. "What have you to say, dimmur?"

Eithur stared at him, and sorrow played softly in his eyes, and dread, and anxiety, yet when he opened his mouth they dried up, and he could not speak them. "Naught, hana. I have naught to say."

Hylfher looked on him in turn in surprise and disappointment. "Eithur, what mean you by that?"

Again Eithur's lips parted, the tempest of repentance and fear roiling within him: that he was sorry for his carelessness, and that he was afraid to always fail, to always be unready; afraid he would never be a man – but the torrent was too strong, and could not flow through the small opening that was his mouth. "Loch," he said roughly.

"Eithur!" said his father sharply.

But Eithur turned grief-stricken, and fled the house and ran over the mountainside, ashamed that he had spoken so to his father.

And Hylfher watched him go, and Llega his wife came to stand by his side.

"You must speak gently to him when he returns," she said. "A fear has been growing in him many days now."

"A fear of what?"

She looked up at him and her brows lifted wonderingly. "I am not a man," she said with a laughing glint in her eye. "It is a man's fear that he has."

Hylfher smiled, and they went into the house.

________________

hana: father

dimmur: son

loch: no