With the light almost vanished, Wilhelm’s sight returned, though he was not immediately aware of it, as he had fallen back into memory dreams while Hap considered him. He was only vaguely aware of his diminutive host’s motions and absence. It was the slow quiet that woke him, the outside world, with its whining wind scurling about the walls was suddenly loud and seemingly violent, but he recognised the haunting sound as the wind’s usual envy and felt no concern within the heavy stone. It could not reach him here. Instead, it was the steady movement, in and out of the room, of the mother dog with her pups that roused him sufficiently to notice all these things.

He was, at the least, glad to be divested of the worry of inadvertently crushing one of the pups, but Krell’s movements did little to ease his worry about her sharp teeth and his current inability to escape them. But just as suddenly as she came, she vanished, and there was no more warmth at his side. No more tiny squirming life. Just darkness. The thin absence of light, his mother. And air rushing in and out of his lungs. 

With his belly as full as it wanted to be, a strong swallow of fermented seed lulling his mind and relaxing his body, his exhaustion had finally ceased being exhaustion. Now, although certainly still far more tired than otherwise, and with no greater reserves of energy, he found that without the incentive of too bright light enticing them to close, his eyes had less difficulty remaining open. Wilhelm blinked twice and slid his third eyelids back cautiously, to discover anew the place where he’d been brought. Now, he could see the details. The fine bunches of herbs, with their distinguishing leaf shapes and seeds, the bulbous roots that might have been tubers or bulbs. Some he recognised vaguely, as though they had been pulled from his memories without reference to the actual plant he remembered. Some he could not name at all. 

The rafters were thick with them, and after assessing each bundle he could make out, the troll turned his attention to the ceiling itself. To the wooden joins and settings, the supports that held up the structure around him. A strange thing indeed, to see the same handiwork as the humans he knew, but above ground and large enough to fit him, even now he was fully grown. That he could not stand erect within the building was of no account, he should not have even been able to fit through the door, had this been a human house. He had tried it, once or twice. But more astonishing was this notion of light held within stone. Light that did not come from fire, but from the home of light itself. Beneath the ground…

He had understood very little of Hap’s explanations concerning this place. And now he reached out a shaking hand to tap a horny nail against the metal grating keeping the light within. Or maybe it was without… He could not have said. The grate was a concept he’d never encountered before. And his brain was not capable of absorbing the idea just then. In the end, having exhausted his capacity to take in his surroundings for the moment, the troll closed his eyes again, let his head drift sideways, and fell into the dark and his dreams as the wind continued to wail outside.

It swept nimble, cunning fingers along every crevice and sought out any hint of weakness between the stones. It faded in disappointment when finding nothing, before redoubling its efforts until its own surge of motion carried it away, beyond the wall, across the snow and into the night. Past sled tracks slowly filling in and dusting the top of deep divets that had one been a different trail, crossing over the sled runners and going no further. It ruffled the clean white fur of a little fox, digging at one such depression where its nose told it blood had been spilled. It tangled and tore between the dead branches of grasping trees and howled against the vast lift in the earth that forced it to go where it did not want to go. And when it wrapped around the furclad forms of human and dog huddled around twin fires, they knew little of its journey, and only brushed aside its companionable stroking of their hair to resettle the strands in place. Only the dogs whined as they pointed their muzzles into it, uncertain of the world it had passed through. 

The wind, in turn, brought a wash of cool air into a world that was not expecting frost for another month, at the least. The humid air quickly stifled the wind’s moan and kept the creeping crystals at bay, marking out a strange half circle covered in fog through which a troll and his, as yet unknown, hunters had wandered.