The World and Thorinn

Feverish with impatience, Thorinn hopped back and forth in the belly of the engine, trying to get used to his unaccustomed weight; he had been so long away that his limbs were heavy, and even his leather garments felt as if they were made of lead.

The engine came to rest on a high ridge overlooking a town; the door opened. Thorinn hopped out and turned. The door closed silently, the engine rose into the darkness and was gone. Thorinn stood and waited for dawn.

All around him, in the breathing night, in the earth under his feet, he felt how wide the world was. It was not at all like the safe, small world he had known in Hovenskar. And indeed, if he told anyone all that he now knew, who would believe him?

An eye of brightness opened in the eastern sky and swept fanwise toward him. The land brightened, the trees turned from gloom to green; birds began to sing in the branches. Distant and dreamlike as the Underworld and all its perils seemed to him now, in a curious fashion Hovenskar seemed even more remote. Once he had meditated vengeance—tricking Goryat and his sons to the well-curb, toppling them in. Now that seemed no longer to matter; let them live or die as it pleased them.

Down below, he could see the peaked roofs of the town, the threads of smoke rising from chimney-pots. Presently the gates opened and he saw a procession with banners winding toward him up the defile. After all, there were parts of his adventure that no sensible person could believe. To imagine that this great globe could be only a mote in some unthinkable cavern, for instance: that could not be true. But then what was true?

Thorinn tilted his head to look at the bright canopy of the sky. Were there other caverns up there, or was there a shell of stone that went on forever, as the wingmen believed?

One day, perhaps, he would go and see.