The rubble shifted.

The boulder settled.

He was there, and then he was not — not in the sense of his community, not in the world of daylight and seasons and human connection, trapped in the dark forever.

His community could not recover him.

The cave that had been a working environment, a meaningful space, a destination worth repeated dangerous journeys — that cave became the place that kept him.

The cave that had been theirs for three thousand years held the body of someone who went into it and could not return.