The pass opened from the cave mouth, a narrow plateau on the face of one of the giant mountains looming over their village. The mountains carried the village’s wealth, with rich iron ore veins. Before the goblins had conquered most of the countryside, they supplied most of the nation with their ore.

The goblins had massacred the hamlets, the villages and towns, and there were rumours that even some of the cities had fallen. There had been goblin wars fought in the past, but they had never been so organised and relentless as to go this far, and they had never had such a great host to besiege their village with its mighty walls, while also holding other towns in the region. Darius had hoped the Great Wars would diminish the threat for good, but the goblins had somehow managed to recover much faster than the humans had.

Darius peered over the edge to the dizzying depths below. The sharp descent was inches from the other side of the ledge. He wondered how far a man would fall before crushing himself on the rocks below. He wondered if it was far enough to crush a man at all. On this lightless night, the cliff disappeared into darkness well before he could see any flat ground. He shrank into the ascending cliff face, swallowing his fear. The pass had narrowed to barely the length of his boot. He looked out further from the cliff face.

A half hundred red and orange dots littered the plains below, plumes of smoke rising from the sieging army’s camp, mingling in the cool night air hundreds of feet into the sky. For the first time since their siege began, Darius felt a lump rise in his throat. A host of a thousand goblins, he figured. Equipped with axes, swords and spears, ready to kill, ready to die. He could barely raise a militia of a hundred, and might arm and armour half of that. He realised how important his quest was, and how true his words to Timm had been. It really was their only hope.

In the half light of the campfires, Darius could see the great goblin siege engines, preparing for war against the great walls of the village. He knew the goblins had not figured out the mechanisms of human inventions like ballistae and catapults, but they had great rams which could be pushed by twenty goblins at once that would be capable of reducing the great wooden walls to rubble.

Hundreds of tents surrounded the fires, mostly small ragged shelters but some larger, more imposing command tents. Beyond the tents, Darius could see crude fortifications - wooden barricades and hastily constructed watchtowers.

Although they were too far up the mountain to make out individual goblins, there was a frenzy of action in the camp. Goblins scurried around working on the siege engines, preparing their arms and armour, patrolling the perimeter of their camp and the village walls, ensuring no escape from the townsfolk.

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Darius swallowed again, and placed a reassuring hand on the ascending cliff face, steadying himself against the great abyss beside him.

‘Don’t worry. It gets better from the next bend,’ Alaric, sensing his worry, reassured him. Alaric forged ahead, possessed by duty, as if he was walking through fields and not a tiny plateau on a great mountain. Darius’ gaze shifted from the camps to Alaric. Not for the first time since their departure, Darius eyed him a little suspiciously. Alaric knew of a secret tunnel that led to a secret pass, and how to evade the keen eye of both the village watch and the goblin scryers, and he had been so dogged in this journey. Darius wondered whether it was devotion to the village and its safety, or something else was at play.

Alaric’s eyes never strayed from the path ahead, his head never turned to the great host down in the valley. Darius started to wonder if it wasn’t determination, but fear that had overcome Alaric - fear of the goblin threat the likes of which they had never seen, not even years prior in the Great Wars. The same fear that had gripped Darius when he first saw the great camp. He hadn’t been reassuring Darius, he had been reassuring himself.

A cold wind howled through the pass, snapping at Darius’ heels, bringing his mind back to the task at hand. Once again he yearned for the comfort of the cave and the torchlight, but he put that aside, marching on in step with Alaric, always one hand on the cold stone of the ascending cliff-face, his feet as far as possible from the sharp descent. That same cold wind brought the faint sounds of the goblin camp to their ears, filling them with a sense of dread and foreboding.

Nobody in the village would be sleeping anyway, out of fear of the imposing threat, but the goblins ensured this by the beating of dozens of heavy drums. A discordant racket of goblin voices joined a chant that was also carried by the wind, impossible for Darius to decipher. The grating, toneless crooning, to the beat of the drums, set his teeth on edge.

Fortunately, Alaric had been right about the journey becoming easier around the bend. As the pass turned away from the camp, deeper into the mountains, the drums and chanting faded away, and the descending cliff was replaced by another vertical sheer wall of rock. Although they were halfway up the mountain, they were at the bottom of a huge ravine with two great mountains towering over them.

The ravine, although narrow, was much more comfortable than the ledge they had just traversed. It eventually wound back towards the goblin camp, but they were now covered on both sides, safe from scrying eyes or falling to their deaths.

The pass was descending now, still twisting and turning, but they were making their way south and east, towards the gloom of the Spiderwood.