Hall of Infinite Doors
Kneeling by the riverside and improvising a net with two long-ish sticks and your sheet of hide, you dip your materials into the river and hold it there, trying to catch the hand-sized silvery fish as they swim downstream. It's tiring work, as not only is your apparatus not exactly light, but the flow of the river is swift and taxing on the strength of your arms. Often the fish bump against your screen but swim away before you can wring them out of the water, and the water constantly rushes over your hands and knees, chilling them with a bone-deep cold that comes from the holy mountain, a herald of the coming winter frost and a reminder of the desperate urgency of your mission. Still, you manage to wrangle several small fish out of the stream, sometimes catching two or three at once, and by the time it becomes too dark to be able to maneuver your net with reliability, the pile beside you has grown significantly. You look on them hungrily, shake off your improvised net, and carry the small parcel of food back to your cave with a sense of growing triumph.
As predicted, winter arrives swiftly and brutally, though not soon enough that you can't make a few trips down to the stream again to collect. The small, bony fish aren't the most nutritious of food, and you only have a small store of the berries and fruits gathered before winter to vary your diet, but you're doing a lot better than some of the other prideful primitives who've relied solely on hunting to furnish them with food. Your singularity of diet brings problems, though, and though your belly is full, you aren't getting the nutrients you require with a balanced diet. The months drag on, and the pass to the forest and the river chokes with snow despite the many rituals and celebrations held by your tribe in the bowl-shaped canyon. You begin to lose your teeth, and your mate loses some of their hair, and your child screams constantly through the winter, yelling peals and peals of confused noise and then, most disturbingly, growing very quiet, as if the energy he needed to continue simply wasn't present anymore.
Spring comes after a disastrous winter in which many of your fellow tribesmen die. As usual in disaster, the children suffer most, and many of the youngsters of the tribe perish in hunger and cold and disease and misery. Your baby, however, pulls through, though even your inexpert eye can tell that it is smaller and weaker than it should be. His eyes do not focus, and he cannot follow your hand, though he is now almost two years old, and still quiet as the snows that doomed him.
Even worse, the source of the lean winter, the thing that drove the game away and ate the vegetables and fruits in the valley has not been found. Once more the gatherers gather little, the hunters find no game, and by the time the heat draws on the hunger has not abated, and you once again find yourself sketching crude figures into the wall of your cave, laying down the life of the person you were so that your son might know you, if the sickly, cursed-looking creature does not die before you do.
As predicted, winter arrives swiftly and brutally, though not soon enough that you can't make a few trips down to the stream again to collect. The small, bony fish aren't the most nutritious of food, and you only have a small store of the berries and fruits gathered before winter to vary your diet, but you're doing a lot better than some of the other prideful primitives who've relied solely on hunting to furnish them with food. Your singularity of diet brings problems, though, and though your belly is full, you aren't getting the nutrients you require with a balanced diet. The months drag on, and the pass to the forest and the river chokes with snow despite the many rituals and celebrations held by your tribe in the bowl-shaped canyon. You begin to lose your teeth, and your mate loses some of their hair, and your child screams constantly through the winter, yelling peals and peals of confused noise and then, most disturbingly, growing very quiet, as if the energy he needed to continue simply wasn't present anymore.
Spring comes after a disastrous winter in which many of your fellow tribesmen die. As usual in disaster, the children suffer most, and many of the youngsters of the tribe perish in hunger and cold and disease and misery. Your baby, however, pulls through, though even your inexpert eye can tell that it is smaller and weaker than it should be. His eyes do not focus, and he cannot follow your hand, though he is now almost two years old, and still quiet as the snows that doomed him.
Even worse, the source of the lean winter, the thing that drove the game away and ate the vegetables and fruits in the valley has not been found. Once more the gatherers gather little, the hunters find no game, and by the time the heat draws on the hunger has not abated, and you once again find yourself sketching crude figures into the wall of your cave, laying down the life of the person you were so that your son might know you, if the sickly, cursed-looking creature does not die before you do.
