Silent Tears Unshed

Sunlight just began to heat her neck as she rode up the frosty trail.  Her horse had begun to show signs of tiring, surely overworked after the ride through the night that she had taken across the plains.  Even with her vision limited to starlight, the rotting fumes of the battlefields around the area had kept on reminding her why she rode, and the grim consequences of being caught, of failing, of not getting word through.

All the other passes were guarded, watched, and certain doom to try.  Few knew of the old trail through the vale of mist, and fewer still would dare pass it.  She herself had never thought to go up the trail, warned off by talk of ghosts or other unnatural sightings around the area.  Most of it wasn't true, she kept reminding herself, the armies behind her were more of a monster than any child-snatcher that haunted her childhood nightmares.

Perhaps the horse was just tired from the ride, and so it slowed its pace, perhaps it sensed her unease, or maybe it too wasn't quite so anxious as to travel too much farther up the path.  Would she have dared to go through the pass in the night, if she had arrived earlier?  Would she have waited until the sun rose higher?  Did she even now wish that more light accompanied her on her journey?  Well, of course.

She had a duty, or a mission as it were, to bring news of the army.  The capitol city would need to know, and she didn't guess any of the army had made it back.  For the calamity of war to fall upon two unsuspecting farmlands that fall would have been too much to bear.  She hadn't been able to do anything as her fields burned, as her family bled into the dirt.  A horse and her clothes were all that was left.  The crunch of hoof on snow turning to a clop of hoof on rock woke her from her memories.

Ahead the snowy path gave way to a hard, jagged black stone, warm to the touch and devoid of snow.  The sides of the canyon leading upwards into the mountains had edged closer together until she could touch both sides of the sheer walls with her hands.  Turning in the saddle, she saw the smokey plain, covered with bloody mud and ashes more than a small layer of snow that came weeks past.  Her eyes tried in vain to form a tear, dehydrated as they were.

A snort from the horse, and the trot onward continued.  Before long the trail reached zenith, sloping downwards between the mountain sides.  There was a deep silence over the area; no birds to chirp, no wind to rustle the strange vines grasping at the cliff walls, and even the sound of the horses hooves were muffled in the mist that filled the vale like water in a glass.  The pathway widened, expanding outwards slowly until a two well-traveled lane pulled away from the center, hugging the cliff faces.   Her horse stopped.  The question of who, or what, had been making trails in the vale disturbed her, but the stone held an imprint for a long time, and so she hoped they were not recent, were not pathways leading to a monster's den, be in two-legged or four.

Still waiting for a direction, the horse snorts, as if voicing it's own disapproval of the place.  They go right.  Forward and down, straining her eyes at shaped in the mist which, invariably emerge as rocks or hanging vines, or small bushes nestles into cracks in the black stone.  A quarter mile of riding more and at last they reach the vale floor, flat for the most part, but sloping downward towards the center.  Still widening, though she knows it more as a feeling, the sun's track vague and hazy through the mist, when she can pick it out at all.

Off on the left a small glimmer, bushes and vines giving way to a flat expanse.  Water, a lake, the vaunted lake of the vale of mist.  Thirst and caution, and the horses thirst wins out against her own caution, though after dismounting, she waits to see if the horse is dragged under by tentacles or slimy hands.  Popular myth loved to switch between a troll and a sea-beast that got stranded in the mountains.  The water is warm, a tasteless warmth that slips down her throat, as silent as the rest of the vale.  No rest beyond the drink, she must go on.  Were it a regular stop the horse might have protested more, but it seems as eager to continue as she, sore and weary as she is.

Hoof-beats echoing across the lake's surface, still muffled by the mists, the silence wears on, and wears on her.  Putting the water behind her helps little.  The similarity past the midpoint is eerie, the paths finally meeting on the other side of the lake, black walls pressing in once more.  Where the ride not so short she would have claimed to have turned around, and so she rides on, up and out of the mists.

This time she does not glance back, seeing the hilly country on the other side.  Down from the black hills, onto snow and dirt again.  She still feels the warm-nothingness taste on her tongue, a puzzled look on her face when she thinks on it.  No matter.  She must make haste.  The land must be warned of the armies. Down she rides into the setting sun, hoof-prints leaving silent tracks in the new-fallen snow.