I shall marry her, once I have become a swordbrother.

“Get on with it, Alaric. I have a woman to bed and ale to drink,” says Edun, Edulf’s oldest son. The men laugh, at Alaric’s expense. Alaric looks to Hrogar, who tries to hide his emotion by running his fingers through his beard. His hands tremble as he tugs at his reddish-brown mustache, straightening it. In the end he joins his swordbrothers in laughter to mask his emotions, each peal of laughter a lash against Alaric’s back.

Alaric places a hand on Hrogar’s shoulder, then turns to those who would be his swordbrothers and attempts to form what might be his final words. No words come.

Lowering his head, he makes his way into the mouth of the cavern.

****

The cave is dressed in midnight and palpably humid. Shards of light knife down from fissures in the ceiling, but it’s not quite enough; it will take some time for Alaric’s eyes to adjust. He steels himself and pauses to take in the cave around him. Nothing stirs. He can hear the men outside laughing, exchanging tales of bravery and battle. In his heart he knows they do not believe that he will survive the test. Even his good friend Hrogar appears to have little faith; he had seemed one breath away from bursting into tears as Alaric took his first steps through the cave entrance.

I sense no power here. The trial is a lie, just as I suspected.

Alaric is overcome with an urge to run from the cave, to return and run down the streets of his village, shouting the truth at the top of his lungs:

There is no draga in the mountain. It is all a lie!

Then he senses it. A force traces across his skin, sensing him even as he senses it. Suddenly Alaric’s intellect is at the mercy of innate fear and superstition. There is something here, after all, and it causes Alaric’s arrogance to fade.

As his eyes adjust to the darkness, he scans his surroundings. The cave floor is littered with discarded bones and broken skulls. Most of them are from small animals. Alaric spots a skull that is human, and his stomach lurches.

A gravelly roar erupts deeper in the cave. It echoes off the stone, which makes it difficult to gauge its distance or direction. Alaric feels a tingle course up and down his spine as fireside legends become reality, the stories of a great cave-beast and worse playing out across the fertile canvas of his fearful mind. Warmth spills down his front and the insides of his thighs. He draws his meager sword and takes his first step toward where he believes the roar originated.

As he moves forward, the roar is replaced by snorting and shuffling sounds. Another low grunt, this one percussive and so close that Alaric believes he can feel displaced air on his cheek. The beast could very well be in the next chamber, he thinks.

It is.

He sees the beast, and the beast sees him. It is an old she-bear, one of the offspring of the legendary Tar-Sun, the oldest and most feared of the cave bears, once worshipped as a god by his people. Alaric knows the creature before him is just an animal, made of blood and bone, but that does nothing to alleviate the fear sapping the strength from his legs. As the clerics have taught him, Alaric speaks the words to summon G’ner, the fire spirit, and G’lumn, the master of earth.

Nothing happens, and he is not surprised.

The bear is at least eight feet tall, her ragged coat thick like the snowdrifts that armor the mountain above and all around him. The fur is caked in layers of dried gray earth, as though the creature has been wallowing in it. Alaric can see that the top of her broad, flat head is bald, the scalp pox-ridden and scaly. The eyes are rheumy but filled with focused hatred.

This descendant of Tar-Sun rises to her full height and cuts loose a bowel-rattling roar, her black lips pulling back from sore-covered gums to reveal yellow tusks wreathed in froth. She drops to all fours and lumbers toward Alaric.

And that’s when everything becomes a drama in which he is but a spectator.

This isn’t happening to me.

Yet the the bear lumbers closer in slow-ticking frames. Alaric can see himself reflected in her eyes now, and for some reason this image snaps him out of his stupor. He begins to backpedal, stumbling over a skull and falling onto his backside. He scrabbles backward on his hands like a crab, but doesn’t get very far before she is on him. Her jaws clamp down on his calf, and he feels muscle tearing and bones grinding together. He lets loose a pathetic howl. It is a primitive roar, shapeless and hoarse, springing forth from deep within the very core of his being. The cave bear jerks her head up and back, and Alaric feels his body become weightless, pivoting on the fulcrum of his leg in her jaws. He feels more tearing pain, and then he is flying through the air, arms pinwheeling. He hits the ground hard, and the air in his lungs explodes out of him.

He is on the verge of blacking out, but the pain in his leg keeps him from losing consciousness. He tries to get back to his feet, but his leg won’t support his weight. Then she is on him again. Massive arms wrap around him, and he feels her claws punch through his thick hide shirt. She lifts him off his feet, and her jaws close on his head.

All he can hear is the horrid sound of her fangs shredding his scalp and raking across the bare bone of his skull. Her jaws loosen, and Alaric feels momentary relief in the thought that maybe she is going to stop, that she has lost interest in him. But she merely repositions her teeth—and this time he feels her fangs puncture his skull. There is no longer pain, just eerie detachment—and a heightened sense of the sights and sounds around him.

It is at this moment that he knows that he is going to die, and he prepares himself. He has disgraced his family, his tribe. He will not be a swordbrother. He thinks about Shena. At least he will not have to see the disappointment in her eyes, nor those of his tribesmen.

YOUR SWORD. HER EYE. DO IT NOW!

A voice in his head. Could it be one of the gods? With a jolt of improbable strength,Alaric raises his arm and plunges the small blade into the bear’s eye. The beast rears back and claps both paws to its wounded eye, gummy fluid running down the fur on her cheek. Alaric falls to the floor in a heap, the gashes in his back screaming as his weight grinds them into the stone beneath him.

GET UP. MOVE TOWARD THE SOUND OF MY VOICE.

How can I move toward a voice that’s inside my head?

Alaric’s mind reels. He feels the urge to just lie there, to give up. The pain has subsided—replaced by a calming haze that descends upon his consciousness. Tendrils of numbness begin to spread through his body, and the instinct to survive begins to disappear beneath a sea of tranquil black.

The dying sleep. It comes for me.

NO. GET UP. MOVE, NOW!

An unseen hand lifts Alaric from the ground, and for the first time in his life he believes that forces beyond the reach of his relatively limited reasoning capabilities do exist. The bear is still in the throes of agony, pawing at the blade that is still lodged in her eye. Alaric attempts to step forward, and he does not fall. The unseen force tightens around his leg, and he gasps as the pain comes rushing back in a flood, more agonizing than ever.

It tries to kill me!

But when he looks down, he sees that this gesture is benign; it has stopped the bleeding. He hobbles forward, deeper into the cavern, his strength and resolve returning with each step. He can hear the bear roaring behind him, the sound of her leathery feet slapping against the cave floor. He no longer cares. Brute survival instinct and the unseen hand guide him forward. There is no light this far down in the belly of the mountain. He has never experienced such all-encompassing darkness; he can taste it in his mouth and feel it pressing down on him with the full weight of the mountain.