[Bêthberry]

His legs shaking from their stiff tension and unable to relax, Ulfwine leaned against the trunk of the pine tree, gulping great quantities of air as if he were starving. Yet he couldn't take in enough air. His lungs burnt from pain of breathing the sparse air at this altitude. They burnt from the pain of his narrow escape. They burnt from the agony of calling to Gurthden after the man had slipped from his grasp. It wasn't enough to have escaped detection from the marauders after they found the orc bodies. The mountain itself was hostile to them.

He looked out over the land spread in front of them, Baranthol, Thenamir, Dwarin, who else? There lay Dunland before them. His land. In the bright sun of late morning, the land shimmered, patches of grassland, lakes, forests shining like a patchwork quilt. He had never seen it before from the height of Methedras. He hoped he never would again.

Calming himself, he relived the moments of Gurthden's fall, the shale suddenly giving way beneath their feet, the pebbles rolling faster and faster, until half the side of the mountain it seemed rolled away under them. How he avoided the rock slide he didn't know, only that he had grabbed Gurthden's hand as the man's feet splayed out in front of him, but in a slow agony of frozen moments their fingers slid, slid, slid away from each other. Gurthden rolled over and over, awash in the shifting rock and battered by the larger bolders which had broken loose, until he could no longer be seen, buried under the detruss of the slide, the dust his winding sheet.

Ulfwine forced the images from his mind and returned to the present. Thenamir was calling to them, to begin the western descent which could prove to be as treacherous as the eastern ascent had been. "When, when would it end?" wondered Ulfwine. But it was not a thought he spoke aloud.