[h2]Chapter Two: The Mountain Hall[/h2]

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The first week out of Ealdormuda was easy.  Well beaten roads cut through farms and villages with pleasant roadside inns where a weary traveler could rest by a cheerful hearth and enjoy a warm meal.  The group drew more than a few looks with its odd mixture of peoples though Hagen was able to invariably able to charm the locals.

However after the first week they began to work their way into the foothills of the Grey Mountains and villages gave way to rugged hills with increasingly scattered farmsteads and scattered flocks of sheep.  It became necessary to find shelter in the wild and set up a camp fire.  Aderynel was clearly impatient, unused to travelling with people who couldn't fly.

Flight became a useful skill as they reached the mountains proper, with the Sylpharim needed to scout a route that was walkable between the jagged peaks and plunging valleys.

On day fifteen, with dusk approaching, the group finally reached a snow-filled valley that looked up to a massive hole in the rock face where once a colossal door had hung.

"Where is that door?" Aderynel fussed, digging into the snow with the heel of her boot, skipping back and forth as she tried to remember the exact location of the fallen object that had drawn her attention from the sky.

"Shall we go up to take a look?" Tárwen suggested.  Despite being, probably, one of the oldest in the group, she was filled with a, sometimes foolish, youthful enthusiasm, that she had demonstrated on several occasions during the trip, most memorably when she'd tried to skip across a series of stones that she figured would allow her to avoid wading a stream... and ended up falling in.

"One moment," Quintus called from where he was standing staring up at the door with a furrowed brow, "Dusk is fast approaching and we will need to rest.  We know there are troglodytes in the cave.  I would advise, that unless we want a midnight battle, that we move as far away from the cave as we can, then make camp."

"Maybe not so far," Hagen chipped in, stepping over to the main group, his thumbs hooked into his belt, "I don't like the look of some of the clouds on the horizon and if it comes to it I'd rather have to fight a few trogs than freeze to death."

"Thoughts, everyone?" Tárwen called to the group at large, "If it's a big enough system the trogs might have movd away from the entrance by now anyway."  She cast a wistful glance up the hillside, towards the entrance.