[IC] In the starving time

Lligarond eagerly nods agreement.

---

You continue into the mountains. As you get higher, and approach mid-day, the sun gets hotter. You are approaching snowfields, and the grass on the slope is muddy from trickling melt water.

"There is a pass, that way," says Lligarond. Checking your map, you see a faint line traced in what seems like a corresponding place. "We can avoid the thickest snow."

You proceed across the slope to the mouth of the pass, which is a narrow slot between two steep slopes. Both sides of the slot are coated with ice and snow. The footing is a bit slippery, gravel and ice, but manageable. It is cold around you as you pass into the shadow of the mountain.

The pass runs fairly straight. You walk for about an hour, first slightly upward then slightly downward, before the pass opens out onto the far side of the mountains. You are looking down across a wide plain or prairie; at the northern horizon you see a river glinting in the afternoon sun. To the east of the plain, rightward, are low hills. Closer to your right are the snowy slopes of the mountains. To the left, westward and northwest, the mountains continue - steeper and snowier.

Do you forage? If you do not, it would be twilight by the time you get down to the plains. If you do, you will be spending the night on the mountainside.

The descent to the prairie is tricky but not treacherous. As the cold shadows of the western mountains turn the greenish-yellow grasses grey, you reach mostly-flat ground that is dry enough to be suitable for a camp. It will be a chilly night; there does not appear to be much firewood nearby. But you are sure that you will survive it, and the new day will bring new hope.

You make the best of your provisions, and find that there's enough left for at least another meal tomorrow. Still, it would be good to forage.The night is still, cold, calm. Distantly, wolves cry in the mountains.

Sunrise wakes you in dampness. Dew was heavy. Nearby to the east, maybe a mile away, you see a thin plume of white smoke rising as if straight out of the ground. There is a faint smell of bacon. Do you investigate?

In warlike array, you approach the smoke plume. It comes, with the bacon smell, from a small hole (about the size of Ulf's big hand) in the side of a small rise of the ground.

Now you faintly smell the brewing of tea. You also hear a subterranean voice, barely audible, chanting a morning orison.

As you come around the side of the "mound," you hear a door slam open and there is a fit of coughing. A few more steps reveal a middle-aged man in a bathrobe, wheezing and leaning against the hillside next to the open door that leads into what you now recognize as a turf-house.

The man looks up at you, gasps, and snaps his fingers.

Then he's not there.