Lucy stepped up to the door first. When she found that it was locked, she heard a sigh of frustration from behind her. She turned to see Will. “Well,” he said, “I guess we came all this way for nothing!”

        “Don’t say that!” Valdis said.

        Lucy reached into her jacket pocket and produced the key. “I’ve got an idea,” she said. She slid the key into the lock and turned. The mechanism clicked. The door popped open just a little bit, and Lucy pushed it the rest of the way, pulling out the key as she did so.

        On the other side was a forest. There were leafy trees, two or three stories tall, with bird nests up top and bushes down below. Lucy turned and saw that the door was set into the side of a hill.

They stepped out. Lucy found it to be chillier than the inside of the tunnels. Her jacket no longer seemed superfluous.

        “Since no one else has said anything,” Valdis said, “I guess I’ll go ahead and say, wow!”

        “The Narnia analogue was correct,” Will said, with a self assured tone. “We’ve stumbled straight into it. Where’s the guy with the bag of groceries? The goat guy?”

        Lucy gazed into the woods. There was a hunting path width trail cut from the bushes leading away from the door. She went forward while the others began to discuss the forest in further Narnian terms. After a second they’d noticed that she left, and followed.

The path took them on a roughly straight course; sometimes veering left, sometimes right, moving around ponds and boulders and trees. From above, Lucy could hear the never ending calls of birds and bugs.

        “Where do you suppose this leads?” Valdis asked.

        “Hopefully it leads to my family,” Lucy said.

        Valdis was silent.

        “A clue, at least,” Lucy said, trying to mend her harsh response.

        “It’s fine, Lucy,” Will said. “Just know that we’re all here to help you, if you need it. Whatever we find, we’re here for you.”

        The path widened, after ten minutes, to the size of a two lane back country road. Though it was not paved, there were pebbles strewn upon it to suggest it was more than a hunting path. Lucy wondered who they might find there, thinking faintly centaurs and other fantastical creatures.

        Lucy stopped thinking about all that upon seeing the altar on the side of the road. There were two names carved into it; Lucillius and Talheart. Lucy recognized neither, but did recognize the vinyl case lying on the ground, propped up against the grave.

        “It’s... it’s one of my dad’s vinyls,” Lucy said, as she knelt down to pick it up. “And...” She turned it around. A white piece of paper was taped to the black with black sharpie writing on the back.

Lucy,

we are headed for the the Cave of Forgotten Sorrow.

please find us there.

Love, Dad

        Lucy stared at it for a moment. She realized that Mark and Will were reading over her shoulder.  She turned, intending to scold them for invading her privacy, when she realized she’d inevitably have to tell them what it was. “Right,” Lucy said. “So how are we supposed to find this... Cave of Forgotten Sorrow?”

        Mark shrugged.

        “We could ask for directions,” Will said, in a completely serious voice.

        “Ha,” Lucy said. “Good idea. We can ask this altar, perhaps. Or maybe the vinyl will have the answer.”

        “No,” Will said, “There’s some people approaching from up ahead.”

        Lucy looked up the road. “Oh, sorry.”  There were indeed two men walking towards them, side by side, ahead on the road.

From a distance, Lucy had difficulty discerning their faces. As they drew closer, however, Lucy realized that they wore plain masks, with only indents to suggest the facial structure underneath; a bump for the nose, creases for the lips and valleys for the eyes. One mask was orange with two blue stripes, and the other was red with three white stripes. They wore leather armor pauldrons and curiasses over long brown trenchcoats.

        Lucy was relieved to see that neither of them were armed. She was thinking of a proper greeting when Will waved. “Hey! We could use some help!”

        They drew closer, and stopped. They did not make any vocalizations. Valdis’ hand was on the hilt of her sword. Mark’s hands were in the pockets of his jacket.

        The man with the orange and blue mask looked down at Will, slightly turning the head to indicate curiosity. “Sir,” Will said, his voice wavering , “I was wondering if... I was wondering if...”

        “If you could tell us how to get to the Cave of Forgotten Sorrow?” Valdis asked sweetly. Will gave her a grateful look.

        The man in the orange and blue mask pointed in the direction that the masked men had been headed. The man in the red and white mask shook his head slowly, and pointed in the direction they’d come from. The men looked to one another, and then back to Valdis.

        “Well?” Valdis asked. “Which one? Answer truthfully.”

        The two men looked to one another and then started walking, at as slow a pace as they had approached with. As Lucy watched them go, she thought about the conflicting directions.

        “Thanks for scaring them away,” Mark said, lighthearted but somehow serious.

        “Well,” Valdis said. “I think they just left because they weren’t planning on giving us any better kind of direction. This... is a test!”

        “For sure,” Lucy said. “But a very easy one. We follow the red and white mask’s directions and head along the path we were previously going. We already know what lies behind us, and while that was a cave, there was nothing forgetful or sorrowful about it.”

        “Maybe there was and we forgot,” Will said.

        Lucy gave him a withering look.

        “What?” Will asked.

        “I’m with Lucy though,” Mark said. “This doesn’t feel like a test though. I think that they were genuinely disagreeing. Those may have just been two untalkative locals, who had different ideas on how to reach the Cave of Forgotten Sorrow.”

        “Let’s compromise,” Lucy said.

        “And what?” Will asked, “Split up? It’s not like whoever finds the Cave can call the other two and say, ‘hey we found the cave it was actually the white and red mask that was telling the truth’.”

        “What I’m saying,” Lucy said. “Is that we can head along the path indicated by the fellow in the red and white mask, until we find something. If the first thing we find isn’t the cave, we can turn around. Unless we get another clue as to the cave’s whereabouts.”

        “If we find something up there that helps us in any way,” Valdis said, “that’d mean that we were on the right track!”

        “So,” Lucy said, “Let’s all head the way we were going originally. Towards the Cave of Forgotten Sorrow.”

        “You know,” Will said, as they started to walk “That doesn’t particularly sound like a wonderful place to be. Sounds frightening, actually.”

        “Were you afraid of their masks?” Valdis asked.

        Will nodded.

        “Why?”

        “Eugh,” he said, shivering in an exaggerated manner. “There’s just something about masks like that, that just...” He threw up his hands. “I can’t deal with it.”

        “You’ll have to get over that fear, Will!” Valdis said. “If the first two people we saw were wearing masks--”

        “Again with the gambler’s fallacy,” Lucy said flatly.

        “So you think it’s stupid to associate the first two masks we saw with some kind of... local fashion thing?” Mark asked.

        “No,” Lucy said, “I just hate it when Valdis phrases it like that. Just because we saw two masks, it doesn’t say anything about the probability of finding that masks are a common occurrence here. Now, if we found a town full of masked individuals, then I would agree with you wholeheartedly that we can infer it is a local custom.”

        “Can we stop talking about masks?” Will asked.

        They continued onward in silence. They passed the corner where the masked pedestrians had appeared. The forest around them became sparser and less cluttered, and it was here that Mark asked to stop to take a break.

        “Are you getting tired?” Lucy asked, sarcastically, as though Mark were a child. “Even I’m not tired yet.”

        “I think we ought to rethink our strategy,” Mark said. “Again. Because there’s a lot of space out there that could be hiding a cave, and how are we supposed to find it?”

        Valdis continued to walk a ways up the road, stopping occasionally to look back.

        “If we keep going on this road,” he said. “Who knows where we will end up? We need to... consider... what we’re doing here and decide if we really want to keep walking... indefinitely.”

        “Think about it,” Valdis said. “The masked men were coming from somewhere. And I guess the tunnel we went through was their final destination. Which is... worrying. But still, that’s where they were headed. This means they had to have come from somewhere. It might have been a campsite beside the road, but there’s also a chance it was an Inn or a town or something!”

        “That is an excellent point,” Will said. “We’ve come this far. We might as well keep going.”

        “I thought that you believed the Cave of Forgotten Sorrow was the other way?” Mark asked.

        “I said it might be that way,” Will said. “I was just playing devil’s advocate. Anyway, this way is prettier. It really is opening up out here. I wonder if we’ll be seeing fields soon?”

        Valdis continued to walk forward, and soon Lucy shrugged and followed, as did Mark and Will.

Lucy appreciated the open forest more than she thought she would. The denser forest from earlier had felt claustrophobic, and more likely to be hiding some kind of terrible animal. In this forest, where the trees were wider apart, it made it easier to see for greater distances.

        They rounded a group of rocks, and that’s when they heard a rustling in the branches over their heads. Lucy jumped forward with Will and Mark and Valdis leapt backwards. They looked up in time to see it fall down.

        The beast had fallen on its feet, and slowly straightened up, pulling a wooden cudgel from its belt. Lucy thought that there was something canine in its facial features; a cross between a wolf and a pug. Yet, Lucy figured that there was something more simian or even human about the rest of its body, and its pose suggested that it was confident that it could take all four of them on.

        It also demonstrated a show of intelligence by launching itself towards the closet unarmed opponent.

Lucy jumped backwards, almost tripping over her own feet. The cudgel swung, passing through the air where her face had previously been. When the creature swung again, Mark pushed Lucy out of the way. Lucy looked out of the corner of her eye to see Valdis had already drawn her longsword, and was swinging it in a diagonal arc into the creature’s neck.

        The blade connected and sliced through tissue enough to leave a gout of thick, goopy black blood to pour out down the front of the creature’s chest. It stumbled and fell, dropping the cudgel in the process. The entire event had been so quick that Lucy only realized afterward how fast her heart had been beating.

        “Damn,” she said, between breaths.

        “Someone ought to grab that mace,” Valdis said. “So we’ll have three armed combatants.”

        Lucy looked at Will, who held up a fist in a silent proposal of rock-paper-scissors. “Nah,” Lucy said, “If you want it, you can take it.”

        Will walked over to the thing and slowly knelt down next to it. He reached for the club, frozen, and then snatched it away. The creature’s death grip only held on for a second before Will had acquired his very first weapon. “I guess it’s better than nothing,” he said.

        “Like you were saying. Level one enemies!” Valdis said. “I guess that means level one loot, too. We should find something for Lucy too.”

        “I’ll just take the club once we find something better,” Lucy said. “I don’t really think I’m going to be much good in a fight.”

        “You go to the gym though,” Mark said. “It’s not like you don’t have any strength. And, this thing seemed pretty slow, all things considered.”

        “I thought it seemed pretty fast,” Lucy said. “Did you see the way it came at me?”

        “But you were able to back up in time,” Valdis said. “Your reflexes are good. I could see you using a staff someday!”

        “Are reflexes good for staffwomanship?”

        “I don’t know,” Valdis said. “Those statements were pretty much unrelated.”

        “Oh.”

        “So, no reason to stay here, right?” Will asked, taking a look into the forest around them, especially up into the tree branches.. “It’s not like this guy dropped any gold or anything?”

        Mark was kneeling down beside the thing. “Actually,” he said, grabbing five gleaming steel coins, each about the size of a half dollar, from the ground next to the thing.

        “I hate to think where it was storing those things,” Lucy said. “I mean, I wouldn’t even be touching them if I were you.”

        Mark shrugged, and slid them into his pocket.

        “Also,” Will said, “Valdis was the one who killed the thing. Don’t you think she should be the one to get the money?”

        Valdis shrugged. She was wiping her blade clean of the creature’s sludge, using a now dirty white cloth. “I don’t really care. It’s not like Mark is going to go running off with it. The money belongs to all four of us, because all four of us were here.”

        “Yeah,” Lucy said. “That seems fair. But let’s get going before any more show up, yeah?”

        They set off again, continuing along the gravel road.

It was evening when they glimpsed smoke rising, a thin pair of lines too thin to be bonfires or buildings burning, coming from the other side of a hill. As they walked up its side, they came upon the sight of a very small community. There were seven houses, each looking much alike a cottage, gathered around a central domed structure. The backyards of each of the houses faced out, and were fenced. Lucy could see livestock; mostly cows; grazing in the backyards.

“I wonder who lives there?” Mark asked.