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I followed the bandit guards into the throat of the cave,
to a confusing depth where all light had vanished except the
glow of candles wedged in rocks and later only the torch
that guided us. In a great rotunda hundreds of feet below
the surface they left me, the last of the guards covering their
tracks, candle by extinguished candle, and their footsteps
echoed over each other until the cavern resounded of a
passing, vanished army.
I sat in a darkness most absolute. After only a moment,
I heard a voice.
The language was quiet, insinuating, weaving with the
fabric of my thoughts until I could no longer tell, especially
in this darkness, what words lay outside me and what
within.
OH, TO A WANDERING EYE ... it began, a fragment
of song in the darkness.
I scrambled to my feet and lurched toward, I hoped, the
passageway. Bones clattered beneath my feet, rattled
against rotting wood and rusted strings, striking a hollow
music. Spinning blindly in the dark, I realized I had left
father's harp behind, and knew at once that I could not find
my way back to it.
A second voice caught me standing stupidly in the same
place, huddled in my cloak, expecting the fangs, the
monster's fatal poisons. At the new sound, I jumped,
flinging my pitiful knife away into the darkness, where it
clattered much too loudly against the rock wall.
"EST SULARIS OTH MITHAS ..."
And then, behind me, or what I thought was behind me,
another.
BUILD YE THE WESTERNMOST WALL IN THREE PARTS
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