Out of the old shaft
On the first night the camera showed the old shaft from the wrong side of the mountain. Now it looks into its mouth, and the Ashpaws come out with fire that trails behind them.
On the first night of a new game, at 22:00, the old shafts stir. A card says so, “The old shafts stir. The nights are yours no longer.”, and the camera glides over to the first shaft, so you know where the trouble will come from. In my last play-test the camera got there and showed me the back of a mountain. The shaft was on the other side, facing away. The camera always came in from the same angle, whichever way the shaft looked. Now it turns with the shaft and comes in from the front, looking into its mouth.
Once I could see the front, I did not like it. It shimmered when the camera moved. The shaft’s timbers lay exactly on the cliff’s own faces, and when two faces sit in the same place the screen cannot decide which one is in front, so it flickers between them. On one of them you could even see the mountain through the mine. The shaft now sits half a block down and half a block back into the rock, so the rock always wins.
The door did not look open either. The tunnel behind it ran back into the rock, but the cliff’s own wall stood right behind the opening and covered it, so you looked at mountain where the dark should be. Now the tunnel ends just behind the door, in black, and the lumps of the cliff wall that stood in front of the opening are gone.
Then the Ashpaws come out, on the third night if nobody boards the shaft up. They are the smallest of the Cinderkin and the first to come, and they burn green. Their fire was three thin tongues, two blocks high, bent a different way every frame, and on screen they wriggled like worms. Now it is two taller tongues with a smaller lick on each side, and it does what fire does. When an Ashpaw walks, its fire trails back behind it. When it eats or fights, the fire flares up, two blocks taller, and flickers twice as fast.
They also stopped dawdling. They used to stop at the berry bushes on the way. Now a bush counts as twice as far away as a field or a store of food, so they walk on past it, toward the town.
In the film they come out of the first shaft at 22:00, one every quarter of an hour, and walk straight for the guard post at the edge of the town. Guy Oakley and Florence Oakley keep watch there, a club each from the post’s rack. When the first Ashpaw reaches the gate its fire flares up, and Guy clubs it down. Then the next one comes.