He had felt the coldness enter him again; the rock walls rising up around him, not like a prison but a cocoon, a sanctuary. The darkness, so fearsome before, was comforting here; its vice, the familiar grasp of a not-so-long forgotten friend.

He felt the cords tying him back to the world tense, then slacken, as though cut from a distance. He bundled them around himself and, in the grasp of the cold darkness, wove them into a net; each knot, a connection half-remembered; the potential of a glance, a smile; the quiet echo of loss, not as a scream, but a fading whimper.

He clothed himself in half, and cast the other into the dark, but it caught only on the rocks around him, brought back only twigs and dirt. He repaired it, in earnest at first, tightening and expanding the weave in the hope his luck might turn; but eventually, he cast it out one last time and gave it up to the quiet.

Unfamiliar voices and thoughts echoed in, and then drifted past, their fading syllables plucking at his cloak. He gasped as it tightened around him, the memory of its original design tensing and twisting at the sound.

He wrenched it off but, weakened, could only cast it at his feet.

“At least there is peace here,” he said.

And the cloak replied, “In this hollow, there can be no peace, only silence.”