at the bottom of the mountain then you all may live wonderful lives. Otherwise, you'll die before even making it into the mainland. Do you have any questions?”
Silas shook his head, knowing if he said anything he too would be met with an arrow to the head.
“Then go,” Barron said. Silas turned quickly and gave the crowd of a hundred or more a look telling them to follow. He did not know why he had been chosen for this, but it didn't matter. Their fate was not in his hands. They were all dead anyway. What could be the point of a second life in a different world? By now, most of them were looking for someone to tell them what to do. Many of them were so confused they barely knew their right from their left.
Silas motioned Dink to walk next to him. Once out of earshot, Silas whispered to him from the side of his mouth.
“I’m going to need your help.”
“Any way I can,” Dink said as he tried to wrap himself tightly against the freezing wind. “I’m not sure why Barron thinks we need a leader.”
They followed the path silently and they were soon out of view from Barron and his two cronies. The snow fell thicker and the cold bit harder. Silas wasn’t sure they would make it to the bridge at all. Perhaps Barron’s way of ‘weeding out’ people was by making them walk through the deadly storm. Maybe there was no bridge.
Eventually the path leveled off into a flatter terrain, but they were still high up. Several stragglers stopped along the way to wait for their second death, even while others prodded them forward. Silas encouraged them to keep moving, but there was little motivation to keep going. After a while, he began to lose his own enthusiasm. Dink too had gone quiet. The endless sea of white scattered with a few trees in the distance foretold only death for the nomadic sufferers. The path before them was only apparent because of the snow that had been trodden by previous travelers. To his surprise, Silas never noticed any bodies of others. Perhaps Barron and his band came through and disposed of them. Maybe animals ate them. Whatever the case, his own group would be leaving their trail of dead bodies, even if only temporarily. After an hour of slogging through the ice, those eighty or so that were still breathing began to complain more. One man, who had a scruffy, red beard with clumps of ice forming and tangling within it, spoke out to everyone.
“Barron’s just marching us to our deaths! I don’t think any of us are meant to survive.”
The crowd began to murmur among themselves asking each other if they thought it was true or not. Silas looked around at the weary group. They shouldn’t be stopping. They needed to keep going so their blood would pump. Silas quickly moved within inches of the man’s icy face.
“What do you expect to gain from announcing there’s no hope?” he said quietly. “Do you think we should just sit here and give up, or do you think we should keep walking to the river?”
“The river isn’t there! I’m telling you, he’s sending us to our graves!”
“We’re in our graves!” Dink snapped, standing next to Silas. “In case you haven’t noticed, we all died a few minutes ago. If we don’t keep moving we’ll face the same fate again.”
“Are you proposing that we do something different?” Silas asked the man. His question was drowned by a cold tremor in his body’s attempt to ward off the numbing pain.
The man had nothing to say. Silas could tell he was trying to formulate a plan in his mind, but nothing would come. They were resigned to move forward and if every last one of them were to die once more, there was nothing that could be done. Silas and Dink moved to the front of the group and everyone followed. Their pace lagged and their bodies were ready to give out. Silas was beginning to accept the inevitable: a second death.
Silas shivered violently as he walked, hardly noticing the once knee-deep snow now only covering his ankles. His delirium nearly caused him to walk face-first into a rock wall.
“A cave?” someone shouted in the wind.
Past the haze of a chilly fog, the wall could be seen, and through the wall, the path led to a cave, and hopefully to the other side. The cave would have to