Soni’s reluctant to talk about the mountain. Mumbles, murmurs a couple excuses but his resistance is no match for your collective charisma.
“We’re not disturbed here. What’s in the mountain stays in the mountain, except once every ten years. Even then he harms no one. We’re fishermen, and the mountain is no good for sowing – too many rocks. So we don’t go there.”
“My grandfather said that it wasn’t always that way, but many years ago a god hollowed out a mountain and jailed there an evil spirit, and that the guardian he left there comes and asks all these things in the list so he doesn’t grow bored.”
“Nobody in the village has been ever there. Buy I knew someone who did. A man whose daughter fell ill and died. He was so desperate that he though the the spirit in the mountain could have the power to bring her back, poor fool. He went there to bargain for her life. He said when he came back…”
Soni makes a pause
“That there was a big stone door. And that a giant guarded it and the giant was dead, but moved. And when he turned to flee a man, dead too, came out of the ground and caught his arm. He said he could see his face closer than you are of me now, and how the dirt fell off the eye sockets and the holes in his face. The dead creature pointed at the way down and let him go. And he showed him the arm where the dead creature touched him, and it was pale, and all the hair in it turned white”
“He left the island soon after with all his family and his daughter’s corpse, and I’ve never heard of him again.”