Epilogue

The lad keeping watch on the door was the first to raise the warning. Whispers of alarm ran through the small camp, and the half-dozen men and women hurried towards the barrow, snatching up their tools as makeshift weapons as they went. They huddled in a nervous cluster around the lad, raising shovels and pickaxes with frightened determination as they stared up at the great crack in the hillside, so nearly buried beneath earth and blocks of stone.

Soon, the sounds became loud enough for all to hear amid the cold silence of that place. A shuffling scrape, growing louder and louder as if some eldritch beast clawed its way through the hillside towards them. There was a strange soft moan, a series of thumps, and then the sounds died away.

'We were too late,' someone whispered, but the bravest among them, the miller's wife, gripped her shovel and shouted aloud.

'Come out! Come out, demon!'

'Aye!' cried another. 'We'll not hide from thee any longer. Come out!'

They waited in silence a moment longer, then a figure rose up from out of the earth, appearing between the shadows behind the cracked stones. It looked like a spectre of nightmare. Beneath dirt and grime, the face that was drawn and ragged, and its hands and garb were smoke-stained and smeared with blood. A wickedly sharp axe glinted in one hand. The spectre scowled as it stepped out, shading its eyes even from the weak light of the grey sky.

'Is that…' gasped someone.

'L–Lord Gimli?' asked one of the farm hands, nervously.

The strange, wild figure before them nodded. 'Aye,' it answered. 'And who are you? I'm in no mood for games.'

'Torvan am I,' said the miller's wife, who was at the front of the group. 'And here are others come from the village. We thought you dead, my lord.'

'Near enough,' grunted the dwarf. He winced in the weak winter light, as if he had seen neither sun nor sky for far too long, but only night and many dark things. He lowered the axe, and went on. 'Near enough. And some of us might still be. Here, if what you say is true, come help me now. I have wounded here who need bearers, quickly.'

He turned back as if to go back inside the hill, but the villagers did not move.

'No offence, my lord,' said the farm hand. 'But we'll not go in there.'

'No-one will go into that cursed hill ever again.' said the woman Torvan. The dwarf looked back towards them, and seemed to notice for the first time the piles of stones and boulders around the hill, the shovels and carts of earth.

'What is going on here?' he asked. 'What do you mean?'

'We're burying the door,' said Torvan, with defensive bravado. 'This hungry earth has eaten too many of our folk. My mother's father.'

'My brother, Rickon,' said the farm hand. 'And Master Holder too.'

'The tanner's lad,' said another.

'And then there was you and your Elf-lord friend, and that nice ranger Strider what was sent by the king.' Torvan went on. 'If great warriors can go inside and never come out, then what chance have we? We'll not have this damned place on our doorstep any longer.'

The dwarf looked at them, and then at the great boulders they had been dragging over to block the cracked stone. 'Good,' he said. 'The thing that haunted this place is gone, I think. But there is something…terrible…' he broke off, suddenly. He looked utterly spent, but after a moment gathered his wits back together. 'But the living come first. You must help me with the others. We must get them to the village.'

'There are more alive?' asked Rickon's brother.

'Aye,' said the dwarf. 'The men– it grieves me but they were slain long 'ere we came here. But my companions live yet, and so too does the boy, Alfy Tanner, though he is hurt close to death and needs urgent physic.'

Two of the women and the blacksmith's son, the one who had been on watch, all cried out in joy at that, and the group came a little closer to the mouth of the hill, though none would follow the dwarf when he went back inside. A moment later not the dwarf but a man emerged, tall and dark, and reeling as if he could barely stand. They recognised the ranger who had led the odd little group when first they had come to the village. The man had called himself Strider, and had spoken then with a quiet authority. The farm hand and the blacksmith each took an arm to help him walk and the ranger smiled weakly at them in grateful weariness, but he did not speak a word. The villagers looked back fearfully over their shoulders.

Then the dwarf came back out twice more, and each time he was bearing a body. The villagers thought at first he had been mistaken, for both appeared to have been dead for some while. The tanner's son was curled up in the dwarf's arms, small and silent, while the Elf sprawled on the grass where he was laid, pale as old milk and dripping blood from a gruesome wound in his gut and from his cracked and scalded lips. But the Elf's eyes were open still, though they were glazed and focussed poorly, and when Heide and Bor lifted Alfy Tanner up they found he was breathing still and seemed only asleep.

They loaded the Elf, the man and the boy into one of the waggons, and they all set off right then for the village. They would return to complete their work here once the living were cared for, but now they had to take Alfy home to the family that grieved him, and it was clear also that the Elf needed urgent aid and might yet succumb if the bleeding could not be stemmed. The Dwarf and man hovered anxiously over Elf and boy, though as the waggon rolled out of the dell, both turned back to look once more at the dark door-stone in the great grey mound as it shrank away behind them. The winter wind was cold.

'My lord,' said Torvan. She was speaking to Gimli, but looking at where the quiet ranger was cradling the Elf in his lap against the bumps and jolts of the cart. 'My lord, what happened inside the tomb?'

'I won't speak of it,' said Gimli, quietly. He suppressed a shudder. 'It is over now, that is all that matters. But I want to know why you were going to seal up the entrance to the tomb when you knew we had gone inside?'

Bor the Blacksmith answered. 'We thought you dead,' he said. 'Or worse. We chose not to wait for the earth to claim another.'

'That answer makes no sense,' Gimli argued. 'We would not have been able to get out at all!' He looked as if the thought would make him ill.

'We thought you dead,' said Torvan again.

'It has only been a day,' Gimli said, hotly. 'Two, at most. Don't you think that was a little eager?'

'G-Gimli,' said the ranger, so softly it was barely more than a whisper. The dwarf turned to look at him. 'Gimli,' Strider said, again, more strongly, but he was pointing at a far-away tree, its winter-bare branches black against the iron sky.

The dwarf stared at the tree, and then the villagers. Then he looked back once more towards the barrow, seeing the trampled and rutted grass, the frosted leaves, the laborious piles of rock and earth that had been gathered all about. Days of work.

'What day is it?' he asked, hoarsely. 'How…how long?'

The villagers looked uneasy. 'It is the 11th of December, my lord. You've been missing almost a month.'

In the back of the waggon, the three strangers huddled together, sharing a glance of horror and exhausted, empty desperation. The Elf's pale hand gripped the dwarf's sleeve, weak but insistant. Strider nodded.

'I think,' said Gimli, shaken but unmovable still. 'We would be appreciative if you would come back tomorrow and complete your work. And perhaps throw a few pounds of iron nails in amongst the stones too, when you bury the entrance. Just to be sure.'

The waggon rolled away, and on towards the village. The wind picked up, cold and mournful, and above them the vast sky looked endless. Behind them, the dark mouth of the tomb was lost from sight, swallowed up behind a fold in the land.

So no-one saw it when a shade, which looked almost like a dark-haired man, slipped out from the narrow sliver of black between the cracked stones of the tomb's entrance.

Then, it disappeared.

The end...