Elrik lay, slumped against the rock wall, passed out.

A thin line of fishing wire looped around his finger and stretched up. From his hand, it stretched up, looped around a limestone overhang and stretched across the opening of the tiny subtunnel. A web of taught lines warded the opening.. Anything bigger than a rabbit should brush past a line trying to enter, tugging at his hand when it did.

It was a poor excuse for an alarm system, but it was what he had.

The remains of a small fire smoldered close by.

Elrik’s head was bandaged. Rough cloth wound around his head, caked with blood. A sleeve of his tunic lay in tatters, the arm beneath bandaged.

He looked in rough shape.

With a start, Elrik jerked awake and checked his surroundings.

He didn’t look very rested. Nevertheless, wearily, he picked up his spear and supplies, undid the fishing line and set out into the tunnels again.

...

It had been close to five days he’d been wandering around in these caves. They seemed to go down and go into the mountain for miles, as far as he could tell.

The caves were dry though, not flooded. The snowmelt had to escape somewhere. There had to be an opening somewhere deeper, where the water could escape to. Elrik just hoped it was large enough to squeeze through.

He continued walking, just putting one step in front of the other, following the downward slope of the cave floor with his feet. Ever deeper.

Elrik was bone-tired. His legs felt like they had lead weights strapped to them. His head hurt. He had slept a scant handful of hours since waking up here. Underneath caked blood and bandages, a wicked gash ran down the side of his head.

His stunt with the limestone stalactites had put that gash there - when a falling rock caught him. To be fair, he was lucky to have just gotten away with just a light flesh wound. His arm, he was a little more worried about. A wolf had gotten its teeth into him, and torn up his arm. He still seemed to have function, but he worried about an infection. Every so often he’d sniff the wound on his arm, to try and tell.

But even with all that, his mouth was quirked in a smile.

There was a strange lightness in his heart.

All this time - walking around in the dark - had been strangely meditative. It occurred to Elrik that for the last few years, he'd just been going through the motions of keeping himself alive.

For the first few years after.. well, after it happened, Elrik had still had some hope. Maybe he'd bring it back somehow. But eventually, as the life he knew disappeared, bit by bit, he'd just kinda slipped into a kind of autopilot.

He’d been… for the longest time - just barely existing. Doing the very least he needed to to keep himself alive - without really knowing why. Sometimes he wondered if only reason he was still alive was that he was too much of a coward to put himself out of his own misery.

But here..

It came to him when he lay there - four days ago - panting - gulping mouthfuls of ice-cold delicious water from the snowmelt - after having fought off two giant wolves..

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He didn’t want to die.

He wanted to live.

This? This march through darkness felt almost fun. Almost. After years of spiraling from one disastrous mistake to the next, screwing up the lives of the people he cared about, this… felt like living again. After a very long time.

Maybe he was dead and this was the afterlife. Wherever he was, he knew one thing: finally there was nothing left for him to screw up. No one left to fail.

After all, what was the worst that could happen? It wasn’t as if he was particularly attached to his own life.

Which conversely, after so long, made him want to live again.

For the first time in a long time.. He was curious again.

He wanted to know what happened next.

He was grinning to himself as he crawled through a narrow opening in the cave floor and made his way deeper down.

…

It had been an eventful five days

Elrik had fashioned himself a makeshift spear, though calling it a spear would be generous. Really it was a sword on a stick. He’d cut a notch deep in one end of a stave he found in the tunnels, and wedged his shortsword in there, bound tight with a leather cord. It was badly balanced, top heavy and frighteningly unwieldy.. but it gave him the reach to stab and poke at the wolves from outside arm’s reach.

He had started laying a kind of early alarm whenever he took a minute to rest. He’d tie some fishing line across the tunnel opening - and to his finger - so that it would tug at him if the wolves came.

The first time he tried, it had been a desperate, makeshift thing. Something to let him rest for a few desperate hours. He hadn’t expected it to work, but he was bone-tired and about to pass out on his feet. He’d fully expected he’d be taken by the wolves in his sleep.

It made him feel safer somehow, so he kept at it, wedging himself into narrow little nooks and crannies, warding himself in with the fishing line.

The third time he’d done his little ritual, just as his eyes were about to drift closed, he’d been startled awake by furious growling.

A wolf had tried to sneak up on him and by sheer luck, gotten entangled in the line he’d set. It had managed to get itself even more entangled as it thrashed to get out. Holding himself out of its reach, he’d given it a few painful gashes with the world’s shittiest spear before it took off.

He’d had two more encounters with the wolves, after that first run-in at the snowmelt. The second time the wolves came for him, he was within a stones throw of another stalactite tower. He’d kept them at bay with his spear till he could repeat the trick with the stalactite cascade.

Later, when he’d gad time to think it through he realized that the wolves were just not hungry enough to bother with him. If they’d been starving or short on easier game, or if he hadn’t fought them back - they would have taken him. For all his flailing with his sword, he'd barely manage to scratch a few of them. For now though, they seemed to not think him worth the trouble.

It had been hours since he'd caught any sight of them.

...

Finally, Elrik rounded the corner and came to it: another cave opening. It was a narrow crack in the cave wall - taller than two men - but narrow enough he had to squeeze sideways through it. Elrik squeezed though, dragging his little oilcloth bundle of supplies behind him.

The sudden presence of fresh open air almost felt like an assault, as he stumbled out from the mountain. Elrik blinked open his light-starved eyes and finally looked.

The valley opened up before him.

The sky was the first thing he saw.

Finally walking out through the low mouth of the cave - the sky immediately filled his vision. It was the dark inky purple of a cloudless night.

The sky sparkled with a billion stars - clearer than he’d remembered seeing it, perhaps ever. It was as if he’d never seen the sky before.

A short expanse of rough stubbly grass - then woods, dense and dark, stretched before him. Tall trees, with dark, green needle-like leaves. Already, the scent of pine and earth filled his nose. In the dark, the trees looked close and impenetrable, light one giant dark blob of shadow. He felt, if he entered those woods now, he would scarcely see the sky.

The mountains stretched on either side of him cupping the valley like a giant’s hands. From where he stood, they seemed very picturesque - dark, distant, sharp peaks, stretching as far as his eyes could make out in the darkness.

The last thing his gaze turned to was the fire, a scant hundred feet from the mouth of the cave.

Several figures sat around it.

One hunched close to the fire tending it. The others sat or stretched out on the ground. Several of them held food or drink, clearly halfway through dinner.. One of them held a spear lazily behind his neck, his hands resting over it, walking back and forth, before he caught sight of the figure stumbling out of a cave.

Now, all of them were staring at Elrik.

One of them, was broad-chested and large - built like a black bear.

He waved cheerfully to Elrik