Now it was an impenetrable blackness that they faced. They knew something was there, of course. Something… But that something didn't feel like the villagers. It felt considerably darker than that. It was easy to let the imagination play tricks on them.
Even their young commander found himself unnerved. He felt a gnawing in the pit of his stomach. A feeling that he'd felt several times before. The emotion stirred an old memory that he hadn't thought about in a while. An old Yarmdon coming-of-age ritual, that he'd been forced to undergo in his fourteenth year.
Alone, in the wilderness, with nothing but a weapon of his choosing – for the task, he chose a spear – he had to bring back the pelt of a Grey Bear. Bigger than the brown bears that inhabited the Black Mountains, they were terrifying foes, even for those of Yarmdon descent.
