A Cold Cry

A Trap

Stillness was around Eithur when he woke: an utter silence, black and dead and rotting. He was in a wide, sheer-sided pit with broken rock all around him. The moon above seemed shrunken, giving scant light, but opposite him he glimped what appeared a rift in the rock, a passage dark and ominous; yet it sprang hope in him.

"Mayhap that will show a way out of this place," he wondered aloud; but he wished he had not spoken, for a wind blew, and the mountain seemed to stir in its sleep under him.

He picked his way eagerly over the tumbled ground, yet drew back when he saw the hole, so foreboding, so thick and dark–

"But I must go," he whispered firmly. "I shall not be kept from seeing my family by the guile of this fell mountain."

So he walked in. And though it was open to the sky, the moonlight scarcely reached the bottom of the gorge; he felt his way blindly, tearing his hands on the rough rock walls, always holding to the steadfast hope that in the next moment he would come into the clean night air and smell the pines as they grew on the hills of Bhern.

And so he encouraged himself for minute after dragging minute. Then suddenly it came to him, and he staggered to a panicked halt, that he was not coming out, and it was a lie that he had spoken to himself for hours on end. But worse than all, when he looked up he saw that a roof had closed over the sky. For then he knew indeed that he was not leaving the mountain at all, but entering deep into it.

Why he went on then, he did not know, unless it were that he could see no hope in going back.