A Kobold, Summer 1899
A Kobold, Summer 1899
Ahead, he could see the mouth of the mine, a dark and forbidding void incised into a moon-whitened wall of rock. Now that he was here, he found he was afraid to enter into its daunting maw, though not from concern for what creatures - fox, wolf, bear, or mountain lion - might be lurking inside. As he had climbed the narrow path from the town below he had persuaded himself that the smell of the men who had been working there that day would keep such predatory animals away. Nor was it a childish dread of the dark that halted him momentarily; of the unnameable demons darkness could conceal. During his climb, with the accompanying echo of every step, the possibility of being followed each of those echoes had contained, he had gradually come to lose the certainty of his enterprise. He still did not know if it was a good thing or bad, where it might lead.
