Seven, eight. Stay out late.

There's nothing up there. No life at all. Excepting the mountain, of course, and he's an unreliable sort of ally. And there's no sound--or was none that day. No animal movement, or breath of wind. Only the memory of rain for company. And that too was leaving--offering itself back to the sky in great clouds. Leaving along with any remaining light.

The elements plotted against us.

How shall we punish these two sillies caught out at dusk?
Smothering?
Yes, that will do!

It was a gentle suffocation, to be sure--caught between falling night and the pleasantly perspiring earth. Perfectly poetic. But all I could think of was our stone colored dresses, and our clay-stiff hands and how no one would find us here washed onto and into the rock. The lookouts from the castle had been sharp-eyed once--two generations back. The flocks of sparrows were notoriously careless and cruel--if they even remembered us in the morning, it would be with a snicker. The mountain himself might have noticed--but at the moment was cozying up with a floozy cumulonimbus, settling in for the night, curling us into oblivion with his littlest finger.

Just us and the False Folk. And that thought is enough to make a person cry out in terror. But the closing dark left no room for even a squawk, and our muteness worked against us. So the wordless spaces filled with dark eyes and pale fingers and wide mouths that knew neither song nor rhyme, and we despaired of any rescue.