Exiles & Tyrants: Exodus

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Pronunciation Guide................................................................................................................................................................ ii
Important Characters ...........................................................................................................................................................iv
Prologue: Day of the Bleeding Sun.................................................................................................................................................... 1
Act I
Episode I: The Silent Stone ................................................................................................................................................................... 13
Episode II: Shadow Within the White Garden ............................................................................................................................ 29
Episode III: By the Gown of the Moon ............................................................................................................................................ 45
Episode IV: Contest of Glory................................................................................................................................................................. 69
Episode V: Temptation ........................................................................................................................................................................... 85
Episode VI: The Assembly of Heirs .................................................................................................................................................. 91
Episode VII: Refutation ....................................................................................................................................................................... 105
Episode VIII: The Head ........................................................................................................................................................................ 116
Episode IX: Audacity of Desire ........................................................................................................................................................ 130
Episode X: The Isle of the Holy ....................................................................................................................................................... 140
Act II
Episode XI: The Exiles .......................................................................................................................................................................... 153
Episode XII: Against the Red Doors ............................................................................................................................................... 158
Episode XIII: The Weary Host .......................................................................................................................................................... 181
Episode XIV: Mistress of the Underway ....................................................................................................................................... 190
Episode XV: Wandering the Halls of Giants ................................................................................................................................ 198
Episode XVI: The Vengeful ................................................................................................................................................................. 217
Episode XVII: Journey to the Kingdom of Death ...................................................................................................................... 222
Episode XVIII: Pass at Bállȧch ......................................................................................................................................................... 239
Episode XIX: Mountain and Sea ....................................................................................................................................................... 252
Epilogue: Scent of the Trail .................................................................................................................................................................... 260
© Copyright 2010 J.Y. Bradford www.worldofei.com

All rights reserved.
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Pronunciation Guide:
The characters of this novel speak a single language in various accents, all of which have been translated. Only
certain words have been left in their authentic form as seems appropriate, especially in the instance of names. For
those interested, a simplified guide has been provided below to help with pronunciation. A more comprehensive
resource on pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary can be found in the lore article „Gēulȧn Árnėch Ísil: Language
of the West Árnich,‟ available for free at www.worldofei.com.
Consonates:
Representation: Sounds like:
b boy
c cat
ch choir
d dog
f fat
g get
l let
m man
n not
p pat
ph phrase
r rat
s sat
t tap
th than
v vote
*Note: „ch‟ is more accurately pronounced as in guttural Scottish loch, or (when following same syllable i, e, ae, or
eui) German dicht, but is listed as an approximation above to be a hard „k‟ sound for easier pronunciation.
Also, „r‟ is rolling unless preceded by a vowel with a tone (falling-rising), but is simplified above.
Furthermore „d,‟ „t,‟ and „n,‟ are more authentically pronounced with the tongue touching the bottom of the upper
teeth rather than behind them as in some Spanish dialects.
Vowels:
Representation: Sounds like:
a ball
e set

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i see
o hope
u moon
ae site
ai bit
ea cat
ei say
eu moon
eui boy
oe boy
ou out
*Note: „eu‟ and „eui‟ are more accurately pronounced as in Scottish Gaelic caol and naoi respectively. The sound of
„eu‟ can be described as pronouncing underlined vowel sound pool without rounding your lips. „eui‟ is an extension
of that sound, as though the underlined vowel sound site is added to the unrounded pool sound. Check above for
simplified versions of each.
Diacritics:
Description Represented by Examples
rising tone á, í
falling tone ˋ ,
falling-rising tone ,
long flat tone ā, ī
neutral tone ȧ, i
*Note: All marks represent tone rather than accent. More specifically, they signify a stressed change of pitch, or in
the case of the tone (long flat), an extension of pitch. Tonal characters are always listed above the vowel of the
syllable they affect. For simplified pronunciation these tonal marks may be ignored or treated as stressed syllables
with the neutral tone articulated as an unstressed syllable.

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Important Characters
Clan Tàephȯr (ty-fohr)

Tánȧ (tahn-nah) king of M dȧ father of Fáemȧr and F inu
Clan Dáedȧlāch (dy-dah-lahk)

Théi (thay) queen of M dȧ mother of Fáemȧr and F inu
Fáemȧr (fy-mahr) prince of M dȧ elder son of Tánȧ and Th i
F inu (fay-noo) prince of M dȧ younger son of Tánȧ and Th i
Clan Tàen (tyne)

F rȧr (fahr-rahr) warrior father of Òrmȯlc, Bórdȧ, and Dūl
Òrmȯlc (orm-olk) champion eldest son of F rȧr, father of Cáenul
Bórdȧ (bor-dah) champion middle son of F rȧr
Dūl (dool) champion youngest son of F rȧr
Cèmrė (kehm-reh) warrior cousin to the sons of F rȧr, father of Fěrm
Cáenul (ky-nool) son and apprentice to Òrmȯlc
Fěrm (ferm) son of Cèmrė and apprentice to Dūl
B cȯg (behk-ohg) apprentice to Bórdȧ
Clan Bēphȯm (behf-ohm)

Fābum (fah-boom) warrior cousin to Éphȧim
Éphȧim (ef-im) warrior cousin to Fābum

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Others of Mìdȧ
Ūvthȧch (oov-thak) high priest of the Òmȯr cult and Tánȧ‟s advisor
Sóethȧ (soy-thah) foster-daughter of Tánȧ
Sūndȧ (soon-dah) alias of Sóethȧ
The Hound an Ocsrae captain of Tánȧ‟s slave guard
Gānbȧ (gahn-bah) Sóethȧ‟s nursemaid
Mūnmȯǐr (moon-mo-eer)
Cáegid (ky-geed) king of Mūnmȯ r
Róeni (roy-nee) queen of Mūnmȯ r
Ùthėnmōr (oo-then-mor) prince of Mūnmȯ r
Rácȧg (rahk-ahg) sailor
Peoples
g elėmbēch, pl. g elėmbīch (guy-lehm-behk, guy-lehm-beek) – warrior of West Árnė
inėnēch, pl. inėnīch (ayn-eh-nehk, ayn-eh-neek) – boy apprentice to g elėmbēch
M dȧch, pl. M dȧich (mee-dahk, mee-dik) – blood-born citizen of M dȧ
Mūnmȯ rėch, pl. Mūnmȯ rich (moon-mo-eer-ehk, moon-mo-eer-eek) – citizen of Mūnmȯ r
Vēuch (vook) – spiritual order comprised of numerous cults
Òmȯr (oh-mor) – spiritual order once counted among the cults of the Vēuch before banished
Ocsrae* (ox-rye) – people who dwell among the Giant‟s Spine Mountains
Urmurl* (erm-er-ul) – race of giants long ago pursued to extinction
All entries marked with * are not from the Árnėch language and thus do not follow the suggestions set forth by the pronunciation
guide.

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Prologue: Day of the Bleeding Sun
“Mother!” a wild, desperate cry burst the still air.

Fáemȧr stood at the drawn entrance of the tent, two armored men on either side of him.
Blood seeped from the broken chinks in his muddied mail. One of the young warrior’s eyes was
wrapped in a red-stained sleeve that had been torn from the arm of an accompanying man. The
other was fixated on the woman for whom he had come searching.
The young warrior shook himself free from the men who guided his limping body.
Without them he fell violently, awkwardly inside. But there was still some strength left in him.
Some strength and a great deal of passionate hate. He caught himself on his hands and knees.
In the shade of that lavishly decorated tent, a barely visible wisp of steam traced the prince, his
armor and blood still hot from a day spent fighting beneath the sun. He was the sharp scent of
salt and warm metal reeking in a cloud of lavender-sweetened incense.
His smattered head bent below the wafting, pungent smoke, toward a floor richly
carpeted in furs. As he spoke, the savage irony in his voice was unmistakable.
“Lost…lost…lost,” through rigorous pain and disbelief, Fáemȧr repeated that biting,
burdening mantra of his failure. “I have lost,” his face contorted with each ragged breath, every
painfully true syllable.
“I know,” she said evenly. “I’ve already sent your brother off.”
The casualness of the answer was curious. Fáemȧr lifted his battle-fogged, gore-sullied
head to look at her. The simple movement was more painful than anything he had ever known,
taking almost every bit of his withering strength. But his will was keen, the only sharp part of him
left. He raised his head enough to see her.
In a gown of violet silk, she sat with her back to him upon a pillowed bench before a
small bronze tray. While she watched, a perfumed slave in fine clothes poured tea from a kettle
into a small cup resting on the tray. Fáemȧr had not expected to find her so leisurely waiting on
tea.
“Why have you not left yet?” he grunted.
“I have no intention of leaving.” She took the cup delicately into her hands when the
slave finished pouring.
The sounds of tumult grew louder outside. The desperation of men and women, and the
terror of children shook in Fáemȧr’s ear.
“Father’s army is coming,” he growled through clenched teeth.
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“I know,” she said between sips.

Fáemȧr coughed then, in shuddering tremors of agony. When he recovered his gasping
breath he told her, “If we don’t leave now, we will never have another chance against him.”
Thei looked slightly over her shoulder with one ravishing, bright gray eye to spy her son
bowed and fouling her fine rugs with his filthy wounds, so wretched with shame and anger. She
turned back to her tea and sipped.
“There is no fight left for us,” she announced with vague regard. “No one will follow a
half-blind prince to the throne. The rabble of helot sheep that followed us is a scattered flock. All
the true men I’ve been given power over I have already dismissed. Only the two you entered
with remain.”
Fáemȧr had been denying the full truth of defeat from himself, deceived by his own
ravenous will to dominate his father’s kingdom. But it was inescapably plain how she had
spoken it, and the truth of her words struck him a more bitter blow than any he had received that
ferocious day. One pain lent him another, and his griefs quickly changed.
“What of Cét? Has he returned from the field?” his excruciation did not mask the
desperate need of the question.
“An eye, a battle, and a throne. And now you’ve lost your instructor as well? All in one
day, no less.” His mother paused to sip. “It’s of no matter now. He is only one man lost among
many,” there was no note of malice in her words, but Fáemȧr was struck by the remorseless
meaning of them.
Fáemȧr’s failing neck slumped so that his face fell toward the rug wrinkling beneath him.
He ground his sweaty, grimy fingers into the fur. A tear came, surprisingly quickly, rolling down
his dusty cheek and struck his cringing thumb. It came so sudden after a lifetime of guarded
sorrow that he thought he might have mistaken it from a bead of sweat. But he could feel his
other torn eye trying to cry behind its makeshift bandage. The salt seeped into his wound and
stung him bitterly.
Impotently he asked, “Do you propose then that we wait to be captured? Wait for
humiliation and torture?”
“I have suffered one already, but I shall not endure the other.”
Barely able to angle his vision at her with his flagging head, insufferable pain beginning
to roll his eyes back into his skull, Fáemȧr asked, “What do you intend to do then?”
“Enjoy one last pleasure.”

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Fáemȧr watched her take the final sips of the soothing beverage, savoring it until its
small cup was empty. Then he saw her hold the still-warm vessel to her breast, feeling the dying
heat in her hands like some cherished, failing dream.
“I’m sorry,” Fáemȧr managed before his arms gave way.
He slumped to the ground, and rolled to his back.
He lay there breathing heavily, his eyes cast upon the roof of a tent that suddenly
seemed impossibly huge and ornate. As he gazed at them, the lights of the lantern-strung
ceiling wound further and further away from him like a vortex of stars, and he thought of all he
had forfeited vainly to fight a man more powerful than him. He realized, even as the delusion of
his exhaustion and injuries washed over him, why Cét had warned him against such prideful,
haughty ambition. Of all his terrible faults and flaws, which seemed so manifest in that odd
moment of clarity, Fáemȧr considered his worst to be the coercion of his warrior-mentor to such
a miserable end. Despite Cét’s better wisdom, Fáemȧr had obligated the man by his unswerving
notions of loyalty and responsibility to a disaster of his own princely arrogance. Now a man
worthier than any throne was doubtless dead upon a slaughter-field of Fáemȧr’s fashioning. If
Cét was living he would have found him by now. The prince felt dizzy and adrift without his
guidance. Now there was nothing left to do, but be collected by his father’s army and to share in
the degradation and torment of failed rebellion with his mother, even if a strange denial told her
otherwise.
Fáemȧr heard her softly set down her cup and stand. Her movements were nearly
inaudible as she moved quickly across the floor. Only the slight shuffle of her gown betrayed her
silent, expedient grace. She had always been a delicate, vigorous woman, Fáemȧr found
himself marveling to realize so blithely just then.
Her gentle tread halted by his head. He no longer had the strength to turn and look at
her. Instead she sat down and placed his head into her lap. She looked down at him and her
face filled his vision with its slender, lofty features, those sparkling, bold gray eyes. There was
an expression in them he hardly recognized, for he had forgotten he had ever known it – a
gentle affection. She began to hum a tune, a lullaby from Fáemȧr’s cradle days with rhymes he
could not recall.
The young prince gazed at her with one quizzical eye, an eye normally inherited of the
same vivid silver, now Dulled with pain and muted wonder. She had never shown him so much
tenderness. Not since he was a child. Not like he had seen her treat his younger brother. She

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had to be hard with him if he was ever to become a king of warriors, he knew that. But he
realized then with more revelation how jealously he had watched her love her other child.
She continued to hum, and caressed his cheek. And showed him a slight, reassuring
smile that made whatever would come next tolerable. Fáemȧr considered how remarkably
beautiful she seemed then. He was sorry for his failures for many reasons, but at just that
moment he was sorry to have disappointed her.
And at just that moment the blade she had been holding in her other hand drew quickly,
easily across his throat. Fáemȧr felt it almost as a dream. He stared at her intently, his
remaining eye one great question without any coherent thought. He gave up trying. Instead, he
lay there and savored that last pleasure of her beauty and the soft song meant for him, and he
tasted that final approval of her love until all pain and care bled from him, and he was empty.
For awhile she held the warm vessel of her son against her breast, feeling his fading warmth in
her hands as though he were a cherished, failing dream.
The close cries outside had dimmed, and new ones sounded in the approaching
distance. Without wiping the blood from her hands or setting her son aside she glanced at the
two bleary-eyed men who waited in disquieted silence at the door. They remained by loyal oath
for their queen’s command, but there was a horror there too as they gaped at her, a woman
they had once thought more beautiful and worthy than any other, her sumptuous dress, her
slender wrists and delicate fingers stained irreparably in their chosen king’s blood. It was a
terrible way for a man of Mìdȧ to die, by a woman’s hand, but they would permit this concession
to a boy’s mother.
“Before you run to find your families, you must do the same for me,” she commanded
holding the blade out to them. “But you must be quick. I will flinch.”
Though the summer sun sat high, nothing about it seemed bright. It bulged in the sky,
bloated and red, painting the day crimson to match the plain below. Despite the deadened light,
the day was warm and sticky, though whether it was the heavy hood of summer heat or the
thick vapor of sizzling blood was difficult to tell.
Piles of blistered bodies scorched the clouds gray with their smoke. Boys and young
men scrambled over the debris of the battlefield, stacking the dead in burning pyres, pausing in
their tasks only to pry some treasure from the wreckage – a bracelet or bangle gleaming in the
fires’ burnished light.

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There was hardly anything of worth among the refuse, however. The men and women
that littered the plain had little to offer. Farmers, milkmaids, craftsmen and weavers comprised
the carnage with their unadorned bodies. None of them were garbed in fine garments, nor
bedecked with precious trinkets. Just unostentatious sackcloth and wool. Indeed, few of their
stiffened fists had any weapon worth prizing. Many were armed only with the tools of their
profession, no match for the armored spearmen they had fought – the mighty of
Mìdȧ.
Those few g el mb ch warriors that had fallen were already cleared from the field and
buried beside it in careful ceremony. They had been placed in the stained earth to the solemn
tune of the dirge, still wearing their iron breastplates, chain mail, and helmets. Rigored hands
clutched sword and pike with cold devotion. Any article of their panoply was worth more than a
score of the peasantry they had slain. Their collective grave was sheltered and marked by their
grooved shields – a cairn decorated with the purple and black insignias of the clans of Mìdȧ.
Only one clan’s heraldry was relatively absent from the mass.
Stacked just as neatly in a nearby pile was what remained of those who had provided
the only real stroke of opposition. The wayward g el mb ch of Clan Dáedȧl ch had fought
uncompromisingly against the other clans of their former comrades. Dáedȧl ch was an honored
kinship of Mìdȧ’s warrior caste. That was before most of their numbers were persuaded by their
queen into the service of rebellion, before they were convinced to act as bodyguard for the
queen’s young son, before they stood with an army of helots whom they once oppressed,
before they met their peers and kinsmen in hard combat, before they were wrecked to the last
man. Despite audacity and bloody pride there was a respect between the two factions of Mìdȧ’s
warriors – the loyalists and the defectors. Neither had wanted to contend with the other, but
differing perspectives of duty would not permit them to make peace except through the struggle
of arms. Even in death there was an honor accorded to the recalcitrant warriors of Dáedȧl ch by
those who had defeated them. Though a gruesome display, it was evident that great care had
been taken in the arrangement of their disembodied heads – a vast mound of vanquished faces.
No dirge had been sung over their stacked skulls. Traitors could not be mourned, though silence
conveyed its own profound brand of grief.
Those faithful of Dáedȧl ch who survived their kinsmen’s treachery stood with the
g el mb ch of Mìdȧ’s partisan clans, amassed on a heather-crested hill that sloped down to the
fuming plain. They were still armed for war, their faces masked by the iron nose guard of their

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plumed and feathered helmets. But their eyes were intent as they stood waiting, watching the
two figures that stood just a little from their midst.
One of them was a large, robust man. His jaws and chin were square and strong, and
the crease of his olive-toned cheeks made him more than a little attractive. His auburn eyes
flashed with the surrounding fires, reflecting the cunning behind them. From his head sprang a
shock of copper hair that hung down the back of his cuirass. His armor was like that of the
warriors gathered behind him, though far more extensive and ornate. Iron encased his limbs
down to every single finger and toe, and reliefs of stylized beasts patterned his armor. He
clutched his helmet with one arm. Purple-dyed raven’s feathers cascaded from the crown as a
single layered plume. With the other hand he gripped his sword, still wet with blood – the
Songblade, Lá frét . The irony of its name had been demonstrated all morning as it cut
through swathes of farmers, distorting and magnifying their screams through some lost trick of
its forging. Those piteous and wallowed wails had further unnerved the enemy to flight. The
g el mb ch of Mìdȧ only took comfort in its familiar shrill.
The other man that stood beside him donned a much different ensemble. He wore a shirt
of extensive fabric. The sleeves, superfluous for his narrow frame, were bundled around
crossed arms. His baggy britches ended above bare feet, only midway down his calves. His skin
was a darker hue of brown-green, and his face seemed flat in comparison to his companion’s
rugged features, textured slightly by a trim beard. The man’s head was uncovered save for a
thick comb of black hair.
Still looking out over the battlefield he spoke to the armored man beside him, “I fear you
have upset The Tides, Tánȧ.” He gestured toward the sun.
Tánȧ cocked his thick neck skyward to peer at the sphere, so Dulled he could nearly
look at it without squinting.
The bearded man continued, “Killing your queen is foul enough, but killing your son on
the same day is far worse. It displeases the Old Powers. They do not approve the murder of
flesh and blood.” He closed his eyes and listened, “The earth is tainted, dressed in death. It
remembers the acrid tastes of the slain from former days, and it does not relish them.”
Tánȧ only scoffed, “I care little what the damned Powers think of me. No one who claims
me an enemy in my own halls or stirs rebellion behind my eyes deserves my mercy. Especially
my own son. Fáemȧr deserved the same fate as his mother.” Tánȧ paused to spit, “Besides, it
doesn’t matter. It was not me who killed them,” he added regretfully.
For a moment, his eyes were lost in the fires’ glare before he spoke again.

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“If only I’d reached them before they ended themselves,” Tánȧ squeezed Lámfréth ’s hilt
tighter in his mailed fist, “then, Ūvthȧch, your cherished Powers would have something to
trouble them.”
A scream pealed out from the base of the hill accompanied by the heavy thud of wood
on wood. Those rebel survivors unfortunate enough to be caught fleeing were being nailed to
trunk and bough. There were few trees upon the landscape of rounded hills surrounding the
battle-plain, so those handful around were festooned with dangling bodies. The screams had
only stopped long enough for more staves to be cut.
“Is that not enough retribution?” Ūvthȧch asked level-toned. “It seems sheer wrath, mere
vanity for this to continue. We cannot afford to lose more workers than necessary. Have you
forgotten we need their labor to feed our city and to forge our warriors’ arms?”
“No, Ūvthȧch, I have not. But believe me,” Tánȧ pointed his sword out before them to the
grisly scene of torture and destruction, “this is not just simple vengeance. We’ve a necessity for
brutality. I mustn’t look weak, like I’ve lost control of these peons. That’s all the opportunity
Cáegid would need to muster his warriors, and to convince the rest of our enemies to attack.
We would have rebellion on our hands again as quick as you could spit, and Cáegid would
come down from the walls of Mūnmȯǐr to finish us himself.”
Tánȧ stopped and mused, “It’s a good thing they’re still recovering from our last
encounter, or else Cáegid and the g el mb ch of Mūnmȯǐr would be here by now. He must still
be mourning his son.” Tánȧ thought for a second before snorting, “I suppose, after all these
years we finally have something in common, Cáegid and I. Both our heirs perished against me,”
all the corrosive wit whithered from his words as he realized the truth of his statement. Tánȧ
recovered, but he no longer spoke with severity, “Though I suppose you’re right, Ūvthȧch.
We’ve been distracted with these helots while our attention is required elsewhere. We need to
react while these rebel towns are still cringing from our sting. But that should be no hard task.
The brave are dead at our feet. Only the cowards remain.”
Tánȧ turned to the g el mb ch behind him. Those at the forefront were the nobles of the
four clans of Mìdȧ, each one of them a clan captain of a troop of their own g el mb ch, all of
them proud warriors trained under the harsh martial traditions of Mìdȧ.
“Dūv ch, Fǎrȧr, take your warriors to G llȧch. After the uprising there, we’ll need a new
garrison,” each captain nodded his understanding and turned around to muster his men. “Oh,
and nail the village elders to the gate if they haven’t fled,” Tánȧ added casually. “Make it known

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what happens to those that murder Mìdȧ’s clansmen. Be quick.” The clash of their armor rang
as they hustled away, their g el mb ch soldiers pursuing the call to advance.
In turn, Tánȧ named each of the towns in the area that had participated in the revolt and
the names of the g el mb ch commanders he wanted there.
“Mèil and Tócȧc, go to Frécmȯr,” he finished.
“But they have never been a protectorate of Mìda,” Ūvthȧch expressed his surprise while
he watched the g el mb ch march away.
“No, but the men of Frécmȯr were here today,” Tánȧ said, eyeing the drying blood upon
his sword. “They knew well the inevitability of their subjugation. Besides, we will need all the
northern towns beneath us if we mean to compete with Mūnmȯǐr.”
“Would the Hound not be better suited for such a task?” Ūvthȧch inquired.
“Perhaps, but I’ve already given him one. He’s hunting for Féinu.”
Ūvthȧch turned and looked at Tánȧ for the first time in their conversation, “You do not
intend to harm the boy? After all, it’s natural that a child go with his mother. He could not have
seriously comprehended what your wife’s…” Tánȧ grit his teeth and Ūvthȧch shrewdly corrected
himself, “…what Queen Théi’s intentions were.” He paused before turning back away from his
irritated companion, letting his eyes bask in the light of the roaring pyres. “Two sons dead in one
day. That would not bode well for you.”
Tánȧ’s snarl faded into a clever grin.
“Your concern is touching, Ūvthȧch,” the bite of sarcasm evident in his tone, “but do not
worry yourself. I don’t mean to kill my remaining child. Only to reclaim him. Though, it’s not from
fear of your divinations. But, who is a king without an heir?”
From among the bustling flames below, a small cluster of people moved towards the hill.
“Ah, here’s the Hound with him now.”
A boy dressed in rich white fabric trotted beside an elderly woman in a brown dress. The
boy looked haggard, his sumptuous clothes stained by mud, ash, and blood. The soot on his
wearied face cascaded with dried tears. He clutched tight to a pleat in the old woman’s skirt
while she loped forward, clutching a bundle of red cloth.
A pale-skinned, exotic-looking man strode behind them. His body was well-built and his
gait easy. The man’s bright gray eyes were wide and alert. Every single one of his movements
seemed to be calculated and purposeful, each breath, every step. He wore nothing save for
loose-fitting trousers, a short black wool cloak, and a large iron collar. His head was bare like all

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shaved slaves, but the stylized scars that lined his cheeks in slender crescents and swirled
patterns distinguished him from the other slave-soldiers who cleared the field of bodies.
If the Hound’s notoriety as Tánȧ’s most loyal and lethal henchmen had not sufficiently
publicized his heritage, all those present would have easily been able to see that he was an
Ocsrae – an ancient people whose past in Árn preceded any of their own ancestors. Almost a
millennia ago, they had been driven out of the lowlands to dwell in the mountains that separated
the eastern and western halves of the island where they could not be dislodged, and proceeded
to maintain an unbreachable barrier between either side of the island continent of Árn . They
were an enigmatic and aloof people. Many Árnich went for a lifetime without seeing one, making
the Hound’s presence all the more ominous.
While the peculiar party ascended the slope, Tánȧ called out to the man, “Hound, you
clever bastard! I send you for the calf and you fetch the cow.”
The hearty laughter of the armored g el mb ch jangled behind him.
In surprising contrast to his alien appearance, the Hound spoke with a deep, unaccented
voice; however, his speech was formed with peculiar preciseness and brevity, “Forgive me
master. I found them fleeing together. The boy would not be parted from her.”
Once more Ūvthȧch leaned over to Tánȧ, “This woman is one of the inane priestesses
whom Queen Théi liked to surround herself with.”
Tánȧ did not need Ūvthȧch to tell him. He recognized her as one of those belonging to
the entourage his wife kept at court. He never could understand why Théi kept such repulsive
company as this hag, impressive only for her ability to represent lunacy as a cryptic breed of
wisdom.
Tánȧ’s lips curled as he looked the woman over. Her face was furrowed with age, and
her dark brown-green skin so tough it looked like worn leather. A large crooked nose protruded
from her brown cowl and hooked lowly, almost reaching her cracked lips. Greasy, gray hair
streaked with strands of black hung out of her hood and sat like burnt wax upon her shoulders.
Her austere brown robe and the bronze sigils hanging from her neck identified her as a
V uch priestess – a woman belonging to that stepped tradition of piety and cosmic divinity.
Much of the day’s massacre had been born out of the V uch’s resentment toward the Òmȯr.
The V uch were the elder order, one which Tánȧ’s wife had staunchly supported, even after he
had fostered Ūvthȧch’s sect. The Òmȯr sanctified power and the right to manipulate the
universal balance in order to achieve it, something in direct opposition to the tenets proposed by
the V uch. Above the glare and reek of it all, Tánȧ considered that bloodshed had been

10 |
imminent and unavoidable over their vastly disparate principles. One of the incontrovertible
things he had learned in a lifetime disciplined by violence is that all matters of power were
settled viciously in the end.
Tánȧ’s adoption of the Òmȯr caste had likely been the greatest source of animosity
between him and his wife. Her religious preservations were intolerant toward the Òmȯr faith.
Though he never found the comfort of unaDūlterated truth in either order, he recognized the
merit of the Òmȯr pursuit for power and the disadvantages of the restrictive V uch traditions in
his bid for control over West Árn . High Priest Ūvthȧch and his Òmȯr acolytes had proved
valuable allies, despite that they clung too rigidly to their beliefs in intangible forces for Tánȧ’s
tastes, or even that they seemed as trustworthy as his dead wife and son.
Tánȧ considered Féinu for a moment. He looked down at the boy. A child of three years,
Féinu stood only a little higher than his knee. Even though Féinu was still very young Tánȧ
could tell the boy had the build of his mother’s father. He was tall for his age, and the apparent
lack of baby-fat suggested Féinu would be lofty like his grandfather – a proud warrior firm in the
traditions of Mìdȧ. The old warrior’s prowess and breeding were the reasons Tánȧ had chosen
his daughter as a queen. Her looks had only hastened the decision. Théi had been beautiful to
him then. That was before she learned to resent him and his conquests, before he knew how
bitter his passions could make him, before their attraction had devolved into the frustrated union
of separate desires. It was a good thing her father was dead. The old man died proud, not
knowing what sort of malice his daughter would become or the failure of a grandson she would
raise. Tánȧ decided he would not let Féinu become like his elder brother – a traitor to Mìdȧ,
killed by his own hand. He would have to undo all of Théi’s coddling.
“Take Féinu to my tent,” Tánȧ’s voice was grating and harsh, his stern eyes fixed on the
cowering child.
Without the slightest hesitation, the Hound brusquely whisked the boy away. Féinu’s
sobs grew fainter as the man hastened down the backside of the hill.
Tánȧ turned his wrath upon the woman. He eyed the bundle in her arms and saw that
they were scraps of fabric, torn and bloodied. Her foul presence roused more of Tánȧ’s
revulsion.
“What filth do you clutch, crone?”
Without speaking, the woman held the bundle away from her chest and up to the brawny
man. Her arms shook with raspy breaths, so that a corner of the bloody scraps fell away to
reveal a soft olive substance beneath. Tánȧ peered quizzically at the bundle, his disgust

11 |
replaced by curiosity. He took the rags from the old woman, and as delicately as he could
manage with his mailed fingers he uncovered the priestess’ burden.
Before he could remove it completely, a small, chubby leg kicked the rest of the cloth
away. Tánȧ stood staring at a newborn, stretching while she slept, her tiny mouth arched in a
yawn.
“Found her,” the old woman croaked. “I Felt her. Heard her call out from the womb. She
asked for help. Demanded it. So, I turned with the boy, turned back from where we had come.
Followed her calls. Found her mother nailed to a tree – one of the Dáedȧl ich caught and
strung. Dead, gone, dead. But she,” the V uch priestess crooked a gnarled finger at the babe,
“she was alive. Kicking, breathing, fighting to survive. She knew, she knew, she knew she was
alive. So I helped her. Just a little. Only a bit. There’s much to that one there.”
Ūvthȧch’s expression lasted, stern and sober, as he took the naked babe in his arms,
“Give her to me, while she is still fresh-born.”
Holding her in one arm he retrieved a dagger from the folds of his draped sleeves. A wail
pealed out from the babe’s mouth when she awoke to the deft prick of Ūvthȧch’s knife. He
tucked the dagger back into the bountiful fabric wrapped around his arms, before he closed his
eyes and leaned forward. Ūvthȧch inhaled the warm scent of the droplet that swelled like a red
tear on the baby’s arm. Then, with two fingers he rubbed the blood from her arm and spread it
across his eyelids.
A moment passed. The g el mb ch waited. Ūvthȧch opened his blood-stained eyes and
stared at nothing. He looked beyond those who gaped at him, anticipating his insights. He saw
through the veil of blood that mantled his graven visage.
“Here is a woman of unparalleled beauty. More beautiful than fair Péthi or Sǎer or any
queen of Árn . Lovlier even than what men praise of Ménth -v , what she must have seemed
as she played sweetly in flowered meadows the first time Tǎengȯch-vō beheld her from his
solar throne before the gods slew one another and forsook this world. Of form, no woman is
more perfect or finer figured.”
The eyes of the men listening glittered with the thought.
“But there is a cruel aspect to her beauty. At best, it is devastation. No man who sees
her does not ache with love for her, or queen with envy. Many a falsehood is spoken, many a
man wrecked. Sorrow dogs her heels like a tamed pup. Misery, strife, and death arise for the
men of Mìdȧ on her behalf. Her name is spelt in ruin.”

12 |
Ūvthȧch finished speaking. The vaunted portals of his eyes narrowed back into pupils
and once more he saw Tánȧ and the men around him. All of them stared back with horrified
fascination, hoping he had something else to add. The babe continued to cry.
Suddenly a shout erupted from the host of g el mb ch
“Kill her!”
“Nothing can come between the warriors of Mìdȧ!” another soldier proclaimed.
“Cast her on the pyres!”
Soon, the voices of the huddled g el mb ch grew thunderous, ringing out from their iron-
rimmed mouths. Vehemence and urgency gained momentum until they were a discordant
chorus of condemnations.
“Silence!” Tánȧ commanded.
Everyone grew quiet. All that could be heard was the distant roar of the pyres, and the
settling whimpers of the child.
“Have the proudest of Mìdȧ ceded their courage to a woman?” he grumbled.
Tánȧ took the girl from the Òmȯr priest and inspected her.
“I urge you do as they suggest,” Ūvthȧch spoke in earnest.
There was an unexpected sense of disquiet in the voice of the priest whom Tánȧ had
come to regard as positively impenetrable. Lacking the assurance of Ūvthȧch’s predictable
impassiveness, Tánȧ was forced to share in the moment of the priest’s unease.
Gurgled laughter turned their heads.
“Not her,” the priestess chortled again, “Not the girl to be feared. No, no, no. Just the
man beside.”
The semblance of anger tinged Ūvthȧch’s solemn features. “Deceitful woman. You
would deliver this woe unto Mìdȧ?”
“Ca, ca, ca,” scoffed Tánȧ. “You prattle like two old crows over the same worm. We
won’t murder a babe for fear of her. Let her beauty come, and I will savor it.” He faced the
congregation of warriors behind him, “I intend to foster her, and keep her for myself. We shall
see if such splendor ever blooms.”
Tánȧ parted the host of warriors and began walking away with the girl. He took a half-
step, then paused and without turning around said, “Nail this old gossiping cow’s tongue to the
bark.”

13 |
Act I
Episode I: The Silent Stone
“Sóethȧ!” Gānbȧ paused before calling the name again “Sóethȧ!” The lithe woman stopped to
peer into the walled garden‟s entrance. “Where‟s that girl gone now?” Gānbȧ asked herself aloud.
“Sóethȧ!” Gānbȧ called once more before grumbling to herself, “Up to her tricks...”
Gānbȧ picked up her dress and scuttled further into the walled garden. She could see no sign of
the girl, the turns and twists of the vine-tangled walls obstructed her vision.
“Sóethȧ!” The frantic nursemaid rounded the lily-filled pond at the center of the maze.
Gānbȧ was quickly tiring of a game to which she had never consented. She leaned over and
looked through some of the tall stalks of bloomshades – one of Sóethȧ‟s favorite hiding places. Autumn
was fast approaching. Their violet petals were wilted black and scattered by the breeze, already a poorer
place for concealment than it was a few days ago.
She‟d never hide here now, she chided herself.
“Sóethȧ!” Gānbȧ called once more fruitlessly.
She’s getting better at this.
Over the many years she had cared for Sóethȧ, Gānbȧ had been forced into countless games of
hiding. Though emerging into womanhood, Sóethȧ‟s love of play showed no signs of ceasing. Gānbȧ
supposed it was because the girl had been made to live in seclusion her whole life that she continued to
entertain herself with childish frivolity, despite the precociousness which Gānbȧ attributed to her young
charge. All Sóethȧ had were games and her imagination to keep her entertained. Other than Gānbȧ, only
her foster-father and brother ever visited.
Tánȧ never bothered hiring Sóethȧ a tutor, seeing no need for it, so Gānbȧ had taken matters upon
herself. She taught Sóethȧ simple things of the outside world, beyond the barriers of her existence.
Geography, history, music, gossip. Gānbȧ always told her ward what she heard walking the streets of
M dȧ on errands. The latest fights and love affairs were of particular interest to Sóethȧ. The girl always
listened to her accounts in earnest. Gānbȧ marveled at the way Sóethȧ spoke of people she had never met,
as though she was the one delivering news. Sóethȧ often corrected her on certain affairs, citing details of
earlier stories that Gānbȧ had told her. Even more surprising was the girl‟s insights over such matters. It
was never that the lives of others outside her own served as mere diversions from Sóethȧ‟s own cloistered
existence. The girl always seemed to take a genuine concern in the interests of those people. It was not
her way to dole out advice, but she was keen to detect the follies and geniuses of other people.

14 |
Perhaps from her isolation from the rest of M dȧ‟s high society, she developed strange sentiments
of things. For one thing, she detested the wars that all the families of M dȧ saw great purpose in, and she
had little taste for the city‟s increasingly intensifying political atmosphere. Instead, her concern was
reserved for the daily successes and failures of M dȧ‟s denizens. She also retained a fondness over the
lives of helots and slaves, something most pure-blooded M dȧich would have regarded as childish
sensitivity. Normally such sentiments would have been squelched at a younger age, but Gānbȧ, a house-
slave herself, had raised Sóethȧ exclusively and never had need to demean herself or her servile kind to
the girl.
If it was childishness that made Sóethȧ so affectionate she did not mind it. Gānbȧ was in no hurry
for the girl to grow any older and realize that she no longer wanted to play games with her aging
nursemaid. Gānbȧ had not been much older than Sóethȧ when she became her caretaker. Only after
Sóethȧ‟s first elderly nurse had died while Sóethȧ was still a toddler, had she been charged with the task.
Despite Sóethȧ‟s initial apprehension, which often manifested itself in violent tantrums, the toddler had
quickly been won over by Gānbȧ‟s amiability and persistence. Since then the two had been closer to one
another, and though arguments occurred, they were infrequent and rarely ended in fits.
Though she was limited to life in the White Garden, a stone enclosure at the top of M dȧ‟s one
great hill with only a modest garden, yard, and small house, Sóethȧ was quite creative, and managed to
find new ways to avoid her nursemaid.
“Sóethȧ!” She called again in frustration as she poked her head through a bush.
“We have no time for this! Sóethȧ?” She said, more pleading than demanding.
The name sounded odd coming from her. Though Sóethȧ was the girl‟s name, Gānbȧ rarely called
her by it. When Sóethȧ was still the boisterous age of two, the contrariness of her name, „Sóethȧ,‟
meaning „Breeze,‟ was compensated by a more fitting pet name. Thus Sóethȧ became „Sūndȧ,‟ meaning
„Windstorm,‟ a common name of G llȧch and Gānbȧ‟s native city, where seablown gales kept a familiar
presence over the low hills. Sūndȧ was the name that Sóethȧ was called by most of the time, unless Gānbȧ
was angry or they were in the presence of her foster-father. „Sūndȧ‟ felt more comfortable to call than the
name he had given her, a name Tánȧ claimed to have chosen because it was only the breeze that answered
him when he declared his intent to keep her. Sóethȧ only ever saw three people, and Tánȧ, the only one
who insisted calling her Sóethȧ, visited only sporadically.
Tánȧ was supposed to be returning anytime today, and Gānbȧ could not find Sóethȧ anywhere to
get ready. Surely she was procrastinating. Tánȧ had been away on campaign all summer, raiding
Mūnmȯ r‟s subject towns and trying to pick a fight with its armies. Sóethȧ had become too comfortable
with not dressing up, or having to anticipate his visits, but Gānbȧ was at fault, having only catered to her

15 |
whims of sleeping late and dressing down. It was only during this limited period of each year that Gānbȧ
could witness Sóethȧ enjoy herself so much, without the pressure of Tánȧ‟s unannounced visits. Now she
only wanted to delay the inevitable.
“Sóethȧ!” Gānbȧ bent over to look underneath another bush. The white hem of a dress was barely
discernable among its dark roots.
Gānbȧ eased forward, then quickly leaned in and grabbed it, “Got you!”
“What are you looking for?” Another voice asked from behind.
Gānbȧ spun around startled, clutching her chest in shock.
A girl with sandy blonde hair and big brown eyes stood smiling, wearing nothing but her
undergarments.
Gānbȧ let out a big sigh of relief as she regained her breath, and her heart beat slowed to normal.
Then, she let out an even bigger laugh.
“Come here you!” Sóethȧ screamed and giggled, trying to get away before Gānbȧ could catch
her.
The two of them ran through the paved garden, past the flowers, bushes, and growths that twined
the walls, out onto the grassy yard of the enclosure. Despite Sóethȧ‟s youthful agility, the older woman
was much taller and her stride easily outstripped the girl‟s. Gānbȧ grabbed her from the back and tackled
Sóethȧ into the grass. Both of them rolled over, their backs to the yard, looking up at the bright blue sky,
laughing hysterically.
Their laughter subsided, and they were left to lie in the grass and watch the feathered clouds pass
overhead.
“You might be getting quicker, Sūndȧ,” the nursemaid panted, “but you‟ll never outrun me.”
“You might be able to outrun me,” Sóethȧ smiled and scooted away slightly as if she meant to
make another dash, “but you can‟t outlast me.”
“No. We don‟t have time for this,” Gānbȧ protested breathlessly. “Your father will be here any
moment.”
“Let him come,” Sóethȧ shrugged. She stood up and began prancing about on the grass.
Gānbȧ propped herself up on her elbows and looked at the flippant girl.
“Oh, that‟d be good! Would you let him come while you‟re in nothing but your underwear?”
Gānbȧ smirked.
“Of course,” Sóethȧ stated matter-of-factly before doing a cartwheel.
Gānbȧ stifled a burst of laughter. “And tell me brave Sūndȧ, what would you tell the king of M dȧ
when he asked what you‟d done with your clothes and make-up?”

16 |
“I‟d tell him I was done with them.” Her tongue stuck out in concentration, she planted her palms
on the ground and swung her feet in the air so that she was balanced in a hand-stand, then walked hand
over hand to Gānbȧ, who was flushing red trying to hold back a laugh. “And if he liked them so much,”
still upside down, Sóethȧ pressed her face close to her nursemaid‟s, “he could wear them.”
A horn drowned their laughter with its stark shout. The eyes of the nursemaid and the girl
widened with alarm. Sóethȧ sprang to her feet, sprinting toward the small house and its wardrobe, Gānbȧ
in close pursuit.
The army of M dȧ sprawled out in a trail of pike-points and plumes, kicking up dust from the dirt
road that issued from the standalone gate of M dȧ and dwindled beyond sight among the surrounding
hills. The city was constructed upon a gigantic hill, the largest among the rolling countryside. The
monumental mound was tiered by a single swirling street that wound the way up leveled, rounded slopes.
A palace complex crowned the plateaued top of the hill, its white stone walls shined with the sun in the
eager eyes of the returning soldiers.
A horn sounded from somewhere within M dȧ. The air grew tremulous with the proud hurrahs of
the oncoming army. The g elėmbīch were coming home once more as victors, and they had special
reason to be thankful this year. It had been several years since Mūnmȯ r and M dȧ mustered their full
forces to field in pitched battle against one another, and it had never been that the g elėmbīch of M dȧ
earned such an impressive triumph over the g elėmbīch of Mūnmȯ r. There would be much celebration
when they entered the city.
Darlings, wives, and children were beginning to gather outside the gate to cheer them in, while
others ran alongside the column, searching eagerly for the faces of their fathers, sons, and lovers.
Merchants from other settlements who trafficked the road stood to the side to give the army berth. Once
the army entered the city they could begin bartering. M dȧ had come out successfully on this summer‟s
raiding campaign, and its warriors would provide lucrative trading partners. As soon as they had learned
of M dȧ‟s latest victory the merchants had travelled from every town in the north to come turn a profit.
They gazed expectantly at the hefty trophies of grain, cattle, and wine that marched with the g elėmbīch
and their boy-attendants.
Five strode at the forefront of the army, leading the procession of stalwart soldiers in relaxed
formation. A small entourage of inėnīch, boys being sponsored for warriorhood, trudged behind them
lugging shield and spoil keen to eavesdrop on the conversation of their g elėmbīch patrons.
“Ah, it‟s good to hear that sound,” Tánȧ breathed hard. “The city welcomes us.”

17 |
“Three months away. I‟d hate to see how she fared without us,” a stout warrior said chuckling in
afterthought. “When we get through that gate,” he said pointing to the large square entranceway that
opened in the distance, “no maid of M dȧ will be safe.”
“Spare some. I can‟t have too many of your little bastards clogging my streets. If they all have
their father‟s appetite they would undoubtedly devour our entire summer‟s winnings,” Tánȧ smirked in
rare affable mood. “But enjoy yourself. You deserve a little amusement, Bórdȧ. All of Fărȧr‟s sons do.”
Bórdȧ banged the tusked helmet he carried against his chest in thanks, and the two g elėmbīch
that marched beside him nodded their gratitude.
“If it hadn‟t been for the actions of you and your g elėmbīch it might be Cáegid and the troops of
Mūnmȯ r entering through this gate today. Truly, the situation was starting to look dire on our left flank
where Ùthėnmōr was hammering away at us. Not until you pushed through on the right, and hedged in
their left did I see any hope of salvaging the battle, or the entire summer campaign for that matter. But
now M dȧ will grow fit on food farmed for the granaries of Mūnmȯ r, and Cáegid‟s city is one step closer
to crumbling.”
Bórdȧ and the two other men marching to Tánȧ‟s left nodded their appreciation once more. One
walked with his helmet off, his dark features and curly black hair left to feel the breeze and summer sun.
His dark gray eyes shined pleasantly in the sunlight. He was several years younger than the two warriors
beside of him. Though not as burly as the warrior to his right, his slender frame was neatly dressed with
pliant muscle. Unlike doughty Bórdȧ who stomped beside him, he marched with a spry vigorousness.
The other man was even taller and thinner. His hair long, smooth and black. His head was as high
as any of the soaring plumage of g elėmbēch helmets behind them. Though he still wore his own helmet,
enough of his mouth and chin was visible to show that he was older than all of his companions after Tánȧ.
A skull shaped helmet and two enormous vulture feathers, which dangled from the trim of its jaw line,
only accentuated his skeletal aspect and grim demeanor. The mask of mourning had become a staple of
the slender man‟s war ensemble. No other g elėmbēch wore one. Only him. Its donning was an archaic
custom, an outdated demonstration of bereavement not even the eldest traditionalists of M dȧ practiced.
During that lull in their conversation, the young, curly-haired warrior spoke up, “Our gratitude,
King Tánȧ, for allowing us the honor of marching first through hallowed B erèrėbēch.”
“Think nothing of it, Dūl.” Tánȧ replied. “Take joy and celebrate in this moment of our city‟s
triumph. You three have aided in its achievement.”
Dūl peered over to the man marching on Tánȧ‟s other side. Of the five man vanguard, the warrior
was only shorter than the ominous skull-faced g elėmbēch beside him, but resembled the far more
powerfully built king.

18 |
“Not without Prince F inu‟s contribution, of course,” Dūl added.

“Hmph, F inu?” Tánȧ condescended, “he‟s only at the forefront by honor of your request.”
Dūl winced, expecting the typical loud squabble to erupt between father and son, but F inu
seemed not to notice his father‟s rebukes. He was distracted by something small in his hand. When he was
engaged F inu could be as fiery and temperamental a companion as Tánȧ, but he was more often a distant
presence at the edge of conversation. Dūl wondered if F inu harbored any resentment toward him and his
brothers for their intervention during the last battle or if he had already forgotten. It seemed you only ever
got one of the two when dealing with the prince – either reckless hostility or total inattention.
In an effort to ease that possible tension, Dūl attempted to smooth F inu into the discussion.
“Surely F inu deserves to be at the head of the army. It was him who pushed through Mūnmȯ r‟s
left flank with us. Bórdȧ, Òrmȯlc, and I could not have done it ourselves.”
“I do not think so,” Tánȧ snapped. “And even if that were so, his petulance and temper are
becoming more hindrance than aid. He had no need to pursue the enemy so far, so far out that you three
had to rescue him. He was in way over his head with Ùthėnmōr. He has yet to learn that the wolf bites
back once its tail is tugged.”
“Perhaps, a game of brāgȧic dóun is in order once we‟re in the clanhouse,” Dūl suggested in an
attempt to change the subject.
“Excellent idea brother,” Bórdȧ commented. “Would you care to join us, King Tánȧ?”
“I have other business to attend to,” Tánȧ declined gruffly.
In his usual absent-minded cheer, Bórdȧ ignored Tánȧ‟s surly mood and pressed, “Come, what
could be time better spent than having a few drinks with the sons of Fărȧr?”
Before Tánȧ could bark back, in a voice both low and steady, Òrmȯlc reproached Bórdȧ,
“Remember to whom you speak brother.”
“I just mean that…” Bórdȧ was about to protest.
“I am sure that King Tánȧ has better things to do than watch you drink yourself into a stupor,”
Dūl interjected, in an attempt to ease the tension.
Bórdȧ chuckled heartily at his brother‟s statement before turning to Tánȧ‟s son, “Do you care to
join us F inu? You would be a welcome guest in our clanhouse.”
No answer.
“Friend F inu?”
F inu heard Bórdȧ the second time. His hand snapped shut, and he looked up.
“Huh?”
Tánȧ grumbled.

19 |
“Come have my first drink and join us for a few games of brāgȧic dóun,” Bórdȧ insisted.
“No,” F inu answered abruptly, his gaze fixated on the summit of M dȧ‟s vast hill. “I‟ve other
matters at hand.”
For the remainder of the march to the city, none of the five talked to one another, though the
atmosphere was hardly silent. Growing droves of citizens and slaves were gathering around the army,
their celebratory noise increasing steadily with their numbers until they erupted into full-blown festive
uproar. Out of the leading g elėmbīch, only Bórdȧ spoke, joking and playfully teasing the crowd with as
much enthusiasm as they cheered him. Women waved and the braver boys and girls danced upon the road
ahead of the army, pluckily guiding their warriors home. The army entered into the rows of earthen,
grassy huts spread out along the extremeties of the city‟s base, greeted by the robust, peaty scents of
hearth-cooked meals. Here dwelled those hanger-ons and vagabonds that success had created for M dȧ,
most numerous among them the families of bonded servants and petty traders. Though they were not
counted among the city‟s citizenship, a right reserved only for the warrior class, a successful campaign
meant profit to these lowly people as rewards and cheap sales trickled down the levels of M dȧ‟s
graduated economy to them. More of them gathered outside their hovels to give their vocal appreciation
of the goods borne by laboring boy-soldiers, and the fortune arriving as sacks of grain, and sleds of iron
and gold.
Some of the more aggressive merchants began soliciting the warriors for trade even as they
marched. Flattery and sale promises chittered through the air like hordes of scavenging locusts. Though
they would never break code to barter loot before it was registered with the clans, a few of the g elėmbīch
asked for the choicest deals among the competing merchants who bargained from the side of the road.
Dūl observed the pantomime of exchanges between the traders and g elėmbīch with
dissatisfaction. He had little regard for the foreign merchants and their obsequious babble. To Dūl, they
were only opportunists come to take willing advantage of spoils seized from the people of their own
lands.
Above the mingling fanfare that awaited the returning soldiers, the high white stone arch of
B erèrėbēch gleamed to welcome them. Carved from a gigantic upthrust pillar of brāgȧiccōun or
bonestone, the solid mineral said to be yielded in death by the wargod‟s slain body which formed the
island of Árnė, the Gate of Champions was a prop in the ritual return of the g elėmbīch from the city‟s
annual summer campaign of raiding its neighbors. Once standing upon the outer edge of the city as an
entryway into home, it now existed as a strange and steadfast symbol in a clearing of its own among the
upshoots of a shanty town. Over the course of the past few years‟ triumphs such hovels began collecting
around the city‟s periphery. Their squallored presence was perceived by the old men as an affront to the

20 |
B erèrėbēch and the purity of tradition that they took it to symbolize – a view Dūl knew his brother
Òrmȯlc shared.
One of the many gripes against Tánȧ was the fact that he provided little attention to this
complaint, justifying the presence of these dealers and drudges as the consequences of M dȧ‟s evolving
prosperity. Toward some passing satisfaction Tánȧ declared it a law punishable by death for any other
than M dȧ‟s pure-blooded sons and daughters to touch the B erèrėbēch, and more severely, anything done
toward its slightest desecration or vandalism ended with the extermination of the offender‟s entire
household.
To appease those g elėmbīch who had supported the ordinance, Tánȧ followed his legislation
with a series of quick public executions. Dūl recalled how suitable he had thought the law until he had
passed by the B erèrėbēch and seen in the clearing of the white gate the display of twisted bodies
crammed and slowly broken backwards through staked iron hoops, ropes still bound to their folded waists
showing how the oxen had hauled them halfway through in a process derisively referred to as „entering
the Gate of Inferiors.‟ To him, in that moment, the B erèrėbēch became a monument to something other
than the tradition law had attempted to preserve – a colossal, polished contradiction. Still, its inviolability
was intact and obvious.
The skipping vanguard of children parted and gave berth to the army, none of them impudent
enough to precede the king‟s party through the B erèrėbēch. A hush subdued the crowd as they watched,
anticipating that near-sacred return of their lord and his champions that would only be attested when they
passed beneath the ancient white archway.
In that calm, King Tánȧ and his companions came close to the threshold of the Gate of
Champions. Upon the trampled earth leading through its mouth, an emblematic offering of wheat was
sprinkled. The scattered grains represented that which M dȧ‟s army had collected from its vassals and
enemies and the expectation for a hale and hearty year.
Dūl felt every eye upon him. There was a confidence he took for granted upon the battlefield that
these bystanders unsettled by their intent gazes. He tried to ease his nerves, reminding himself that it was
not the first time he had returned with the army beneath B erèrėbēch; though it had never been at the
forefront of the army, he recalled just as quickly.
The Mark of Champions was not an honor lightly distributed by the king. It was the highest
distinction a warrior could receive and one he was unsure he was willing to own. Nonetheless he was
unable to refuse, knowing that doing so would only insult king and kingdom, as well as shame both clan
and family. A silent, gracious acceptance was the prudent response, though Dūl felt much more like

21 |
vanishing. As soon as he passed through the gate, his name would pass like eager flame among the
people, until he would not be able to escape it in the streets.
The army came to a shuddering halt with Tánȧ who was leading it. All of the casualness the king
had displayed toward the sons of F rȧr in their march together was quickly replaced by the stately,
commanding persona the rest of the kingdom was more familiar with. When he spoke it was not to those
who listened, at least not directly. Tánȧ did not even spare them a glance. Instead, his gaze was fixed
upon the B erèrėbēch, and his recitation addressed to the gate itself.
“We are the men of M dȧ! We return by the path of harvests gleaned by our spears! We
remembered the way home, and have come thus mightily! We come with wheat in our arms and victory
in our veins! Yours is the last gate that leads home. Let us enter it and set our shields upon the hearth.
“First of us who shall enter is I who am king. I lead my champions who are mightiest among the
mighty. I name them: Òrmȯlc in F rȧir of the T en, Bórdȧ in F rȧir of the T en, Dūl in F rȧir of the
T en, F inu in Tánėa of the Dáedȧlāch. These worthy men lead the host.”
His performance delivered, Tánȧ started forward again. Dūl took a deep breath, and lurched
toward the B erèrėbēch. He would have halted were it not for his companions continuing through the
doorless gateway. Tánȧ entered first, the sons of F rȧr and his own son followed without pause. Kernels
of wheat cracked softly beneath their tread. As he marched shoulder to shoulder with his brothers and
F inu, Dūl felt the cool, heavy shadow of stone above him. He resisted the urge to glance up at the
archway under which he passed, lest he reveal some gesture of his reluctance.
The archway corridor was massively wide. Even at four abreast, there was room enough for three
more champions to enter. But the stone‟s passage was not deep. Abrupt sunlight broke upon Dūl‟s face,
and with it, the pridened shout of a kingdom. His name was among the uproar, already being tossled
about by a sea of insistent boys and admiring maidens. They called to him, hoping to share in, if only for
the brief moment of his glimpse, that which made him great. But his name upon their countless tongues
was something strange and unfamiliar, only belonging to him by a rational force of sound. It was not the
same word his father spoke so proudly, nor with which, when paired with other less encouraging titles,
his brothers teased him in his gangly youth. It was not that same soft utterance offered by his mother in a
moment of reassurance that still comforted him despite its twined, brief measure of sorrow. In the instant
of their cheering he was given a different vision of Dūl, one he had never pursued but manufactured.
Perhaps he was being unreasonably reluctant. Afterall, „coward‟ was a word he knew to fear. He tried on
that name being shouted at him, attempted to bask in its triumphant chorus, and immediately felt lost
within himself. He saw Dūl swarmed by a name like a hapless boat in squall-swung waves. Swiftly, he
cast off that desperate, marred self-image. Instead, he attempted to take refuge in the familiar glances of

22 |
his brothers, but they were both distracted. Rather than sharing in Dūl‟s own apprehensions, Bórdȧ took
more than a fair amount of pleasure in the recognition he was receiving from the multitudes of women
and young girls. Òrmȯlc‟s attention was diverted by something deeper.
More people gathered on the side of the road as the parade proceeded into the older portion of
town. Houses and shops lined the rough-trodden street, erected from and shingled with the same variety
of white stone from which the Gate of Champions was hewn. Many of the buildings were first
constructed half a millennia ago after M dȧ‟s initial settlers cleared the land of its monstrous Urmurl
inhabitants and took the one great hill for their own home. The city itself was the hill – a gigantic upthrust
of rock protruding from the undulating countryside. Rudimentary dirt roads sketched a rough grid of
residences, markets, and temples that spread out from the base of the vast hill. Spiraling up the face of the
hill itself, a narrowing street paved in chunks of bonestone ran in surmounting circles, lined with
buildings cut into the white rock of M dȧ. Most of the buildings cut into the stony prominence were quite
small but of great antiquity.
Though it used to be one could tell how old and well-to-do a family was by the altitude of its
home, that outdated notion of affluence was now only ever considered in jest; however, it was still
evident that only the warrior families that could be considered pure M dȧich and true citizens ever took
their home upon its winding road. Not even the richest merchants or the priesthood were privileged to
own a building along that honored stretch of bonestone pavement. In intervals along the length of the
coiled hillside road were the much larger clanhouses.
Each of M dȧ‟s kinships operated a clanhouse that acted as both a social venue and a
headquarters. Treasury, assembly, and monument, the clanhouse was a place dedicated to the affirmation
of clan loyalty, and the clans‟ functions within the larger monarchy of M dȧ. It was a site where past and
current warriors, all generations of living clansmen met to discuss the affairs of their days and recount
those passed. When the clan was called to war, its captains were mustered first to the clanhouse, and
when the soldiers returned from a stint away they immediately went there to donate a portion of their
plunder toward the clan‟s assets, and usually stayed for a few drinks.
It was to one of these four clanhouses that the g elėmbīch carried themselves, peeling off from
the course of the main army as they made their climbing ascent. In succession the g elėmbīch of Clan
Bēphȯm and Clan S thrė left the army to stand outside their clanhouses, respectively The Draught Horn
and The Bloody Blue Raven. Soon, the small clan of Dáedȧlāch had also reached its destination before the
door of the house they affectionately called Wind Hearth.

23 |
Dūl looked over to wish F inu well on behalf of the sons of F rȧr before they passed by the
prince‟s clan headquarters, but their aloof companion was already nowhere to be seen. His mouth slightly
open to speak farewell, Dūl shut it and thought that F inu really had been in some haste.
Soon, all that remained of the army on the mounting, tapering course were the warriors of Clan
Tàen, lead by their champions and king. The Summit House was Clan T en‟s hostel, so named for its
location near the top of M dȧ‟s great hill. For all of Dūl‟s apprehension since he had returned to M dȧ, his
spirit was eased as soon as he caught sight of the rocky edifice of his clan. Even if he had to keep up this
false sense of himself as champion once he was inside, it was the thought of that person who would be
waiting for him within that comforted Dūl.
Being at the forefront of the army, the three brothers and Tánȧ arrived at the clanhouse first.
“So, I take it you still won‟t be joining us?” Bórdȧ asked Tánȧ incorrigibly.
Eager to be rid of the king‟s encompassing presence, Dūl suppressed a wry glance at his brother‟s
unrelenting charm. Òrmȯlc too stiffened visibly. But Tánȧ was not offended by Bórdȧ‟s persistence, his
previous annoyance having departed with his son F inu. Indeed, he did not even stop or give a parting
glance as he left them.
“Farewell champions. Until I call on you next,” Tánȧ said without turning around, in a half-
hearted distracted way, much as F inu had spoken when his eyes were in his hand.
Some undertone in the king‟s voice uncomforted Dūl once more. The young warrior was further
unnerved when the Hound emerged from the host behind him and whisked to the king‟s side as Tánȧ
made his way to the palace mounted upon the flattened pinnacle of M dȧ. Something of Tánȧ made Dūl
slightly untrusting, and the Hound was the most glaring symbol of that mistrust – the unspoken agent of
Tánȧ‟s darkest deeds. Still, Dūl was glad to watch them leave.
Turning away from sight of the king as he rounded the next corner of hill, the brothers took their
place in line at the door of the clanhouse. The clan steward was waiting for them at the door.
“Form up in four lines,” the old man barked officiously and without greeting over the laughter
rising from the g elėmbīch for joy of being home. The steward was one of those elder g elėmbīch of Clan
Tàen who, exempt from bearing spear and shield by age and progeny, took elected service running and
maintaining the properties of the clanhouse. Among his duties were the collection and cataloging of assets
acquired by T en‟s clansmen after the annual summer campaign. Despite the man‟s name eluding him,
Dūl was pacificed and comforted by the unchanging surly presence of the steward – one man who
undoubtedly would treat him no differently no matter what distinction he held. Even recently claimed
champion, Dūl would have to wait in line to be barked at by the unimpressed old man just like everyone
else. Guiding their burdened attendants, the brothers took their places side by side in three adjacent lines.

24 |
Laughter and good cheer broke out in full among those returning boys and men filing before the
steward now that they had reached their last task before dismissal, but the steward‟s chores were only
beginning. A team of slave-servants was there to assist the steward in the compilation of plunder. By his
vigorous commands for order, one would think he was trying to work definition upon raw chaos, but his
immediate clients were soldiers. It was their nature to conduct themselves tidily, and they were well
familiar with the protocol for the homecoming dispensation of campaign spoils. Even in a relaxed fashion
of casual conversation, four lines formed fluidly from the composition of warriors and their boy-
attendants filtering up the road. Dūl watched the steward‟s face fluster as each new arrival announced
himself by name and the heavy thud of dropped loot.
“Òrmȯlc in F rȧir,” Dūl heard the low rumble of his eldest brother‟s name.
Turning to the left, Dūl saw that Òrmȯlc was the first of his brothers to reach the front of his line.
Having reached this juncture of resolution for the year‟s campaign, Òrmȯlc removed his skeletal helmet.
There was a grave, graceful ceremony to his lengthy movements. In solemn display, the towering warrior
unsheathed a face of slender, chiseled bone, more doleful than the mask of mourning that had previously
covered it.
Though tall like his father, Òrmȯlc‟s aid and son, Cáenul, was still quite young, only having
completed his initial year of training with the close of the summer campaign. Òrmȯlc carried most of their
loot. He untied the sacks he had bound around his lengthy frame, and set them down before the recording
slave. In imitation of his father, but with much less care, Cáenul let his bags fall to the ground. With a
satisfied sigh the boy rubbed his shoulders, tender after carrying a wearisome weight for the march of
several days. Òrmȯlc‟s unchanging glance jerked in Cáenul‟s direction, and the boy straightened into rigid
pose.
The slave peered into the sacks offered to him and saw they all carried grain. “Anything else?” he
asked with a note of subtle condescension unbecoming of servants. He seemed to regret his tone as soon
as his looked back up into the soaring eyes of the grim warrior.
Without his knowing, the servant had struck a sore spot for the tall warrior. Tradition was
Òrmȯlc‟s obsession. Those customs of old M dȧ, no matter how remote or devoid of their original
significance, found practice through the austere champion; but rarely did he celebrate the functions that
connected him to the past, for memory was like a vessel to Òrmȯlc, perpetually preserved to take him to
the same lonely island.
In more recent years, as Tánȧ‟s aims became more about conquest than sustenance and M dȧ‟s
older conventions fell increasingly into dissolution, Òrmȯlc became harder, his sorrow poorly hidden. He
found much to articulate against. Among the privacy of family, Òrmȯlc‟s grumbled disapproval had

25 |
grown more derisive than even the eldest clansmen‟s. Dispensation of loot was no exception to his
griping. Until recent generations, the main objective of M dȧ‟s forays was to gather food tribute from the
crops and livestock of its neighbors. Inedible wealth had increasingly become a viable contribution to
supplement M dȧ‟s economy, but as Mūnmȯ r‟s and M dȧ‟s annual skirmishes escalated into seasonal
war, Tánȧ had come to fuel his war-making efforts by greatly encouraging and emphasizing such material
forms of profit. Eager to increase their prestige, many of the younger g elėmbīch took great pride to
lavish compliments of precious metals and artisans‟ captured works as if the value of such loot reflected
their own worth. And on some level it did, for these men were awarded with finer things when Tánȧ
redistributed spoils and they were lent the invaluable favor of a king who empowered himself through
their prosperity. In fact, it became expectation that warriors should supplement the donations of edible
provisions with luxury articles. But Òrmȯlc refused to stoop to their pandering, saying that it was custom,
not greed that bid him. He always brought back simple bags of grain as dictated by his ancestors, all that
he and his boy could carry by their own strong backs, never the trinkets being so abundantly offered
around him.
In watching him, Dūl thought for a moment that his oldest brother was about to unleash that pent
frustration upon the slave cringing before him, but Òrmȯlc‟s unshakeable sense of duty prohibited him
and made him a cautious spectacle in public. “I give more than my due,” was all he said.
Before he could see how the cornered servant would react, a terrific clanging uprooted Dūl‟s
attention to the line on his other side. Bórdȧ stood at the head, grinning over a sprawling mixture of gold
and fine furs dumped unceremoniously at a servant‟s feet. So much finery spread out before them it was
almost perplexing how Bórdȧ had found it all, let alone carried it. It was well known that he was one of
the stoutest g elėmbīch Clan T en could boast, and that with his inėnēch B cȯg, a polite and
uncomplicated young mute of similar sturdy dimensions, they could carry a great deal of treasure. A more
endearing quality, though less renowned outside of family, was that despite Bórdȧ‟s obvious
distractedness he was remarkably resourceful. Things just seemed to fall into his lap. It was difficult to
determine if it was an inborn perception that Bórdȧ possessed which eluded others, or if Bórdȧ was
simply and consistently compelled by absent-minded, dumb luck. When asked, Bórdȧ always replied with
a wink and a quick answer. “Must‟ve charmed Fortune herself,” he was fond to repeat, something their
father always said when referring to his middle son.
With widened downcast eyes, the servant tallying Bórdȧ‟s plunder called the steward over to help
him value such an extensive contribution. Both men rifled through the trove offered them. Eyes shifted in
the lines, and impressed comments passed around. Bórdȧ seemed unaffected by the fuss being made
around him. Instead, his attention was completely engrossed upon the portion of loot he decided to keep

26 |
for himself. He pulled an apple from the last small sack he kept on his belt. Bórdȧ‟s eyes passed eagerly
over the smooth, golden-green skin of the fruit he had procured sometime during the march home. With
an adamant crunch, Bórdȧ bit through the fresh-plucked, crispened flesh of the apple. Autumnal juices
dressed his face in sweet rivulets while it balanced an expression of sheer pleasure and the engrossing
challenge of chewing. Shamelessly, Bórdȧ savored the apple while steward and servant reckoned his
spoils.
Before all of Bórdȧ‟s plunder had been carted off the brawny champion reduced his apple to a
thin core. Bórdȧ handed the apple‟s gnawed remains to a passing servant, who, despite his confusion, took
it away all the same in his bustle.
After wiping his hands, Bórdȧ reached back into the bag on his belt and grabbed another apple
which he promptly tossed to B cȯg.
“Here you are, my young friend. An apple rendered for your services.”
B cȯg relished his prize with little less enthusiasm than his sponsor. His lips smacked together
with deeply satisfied bites.
“I say, lad!” Bórdȧ exclaimed after B cȯg delivered a vigorous chomp and sprayed him with its
residual succulence. “Who says you‟ve got to keep food in your mouth to enjoy it?” Bórdȧ commented
dryly while wiping the spray off his arm. The brawny champion untied the apple sack and tossed it to the
boy, “It looks like you could use some more practice. Make sure to give the younger boys some. There
should be two for each of you,” Bórdȧ said with a wink. “Go chew your tongues off.”
The younger boys Bórdȧ spoke of were undoubtedly Òrmȯlc‟s and Dūl‟s inėnīch. The comment
caused Dūl to look down at the pudgy child beside him, strapped with Dūl‟s huge shield and straining to
hold a sack of grain. Like Cáenul, Fěrm was in his first year of training as an inėnēch, so Dūl had to do
most of the hauling. Despite a general lack of athleticism, the boy had proved to be a dutiful and willing
hand. His eagerness to perform made him an admirable and sometimes pitiable little fellow.
“You can set that down,” Dūl told the boy.
Fěrm wagged his coppery shock-top in a nod. For a second he hesitated awkwardly in lowering
the bag to the pavement, before accidentally letting it slip from his hands and crash into the street.
Stretched brimming with grain, some of the tensed strands snapped upon impact sending some kernels
hopping along the cobbled stone. Fěrm flashed Dūl a cringing, guilty look, but Dūl assured him with a
gentle expression.
Managed by the steward, the house servants operated succinctly together. One who stood with
vellum and ink at each of the eight lines quickly registered the names of a g elėmbēch, took account of
what he brought, and registered a value of goods beside the man‟s entry while other servants whisked his

27 |
loot through a small, open side-door. These servants too knew well the process of collection. Most had
gone through the motions many times, and like that loot which they so diligently collected, they or their
forebears had been seized by the M dȧich from other cities, for the great city of M dȧ succeeded by force
of its warrior-citizens and operated on an unrecognized population of slave laborers.
Dūl watched the servants with a fascination unshared by the rest of his jesting comrades around
him. Then an inexplicable curiosity made him notice that the servants did not seem unhappy. House
service was considered fortunate work for slaves. Often the poorer helots that farmed the surrounding
countryside would petition to have their children sent to work a job in service to the warriors of M dȧ. It
was a fact Dūl had understood of their existence long since boyhood that the servants‟ best interests were
in the fulfillment of service to those who were stronger than them, those who would protect them. When
he considered the word „protection‟ he heard a challenging snort, so short and bitter it surprised him that
it had come from him. It struck the newly-claimed champion as odd that he should question the
dichotomy of the relationship between M dȧch and servant just at that moment. But he saw one of the
younger slaves running plunder in through the sidedoor, a boy no older than the M dȧ-born one who stood
beside him attending to his equipment. Then, he became unavoidably aware of that which lay tucked in a
small bag at his belt.
First casually shifting his eyes to make sure no one was taking notice of him, Dūl slid the
drawstrings of the bag open slightly and peered down into its shadowed mouth. All he could see were
pressed yellowtail petals and bits of the dried roots of some shrub that when crushed up, Òrmȯlc had
informed him, relieved indigestion. Dūl risked loosening the sack end a little more and poked a finger
inside. While he prodded the debris of his pocket around, the thought that he might have somehow lost it
brought a dumb relief. But his nails scraped over a hard edge, and the touch brought with it a sudden
gravity and a smacking realization of his naivety. Still without seeing it, Dūl rubbed the stone with the tip
of his finger until he could discern the rough shape of carved legs. Tracing his way up the length of the
etched figure he found its torso, its two arms holding spear and shield tight against small body. He
stopped at the head. There his finger pressed down, trying to feel the details of its face – its rigid, lipless
chip-mouth; the shallow insets of its eyes. He felt this toy warrior and saw the face of the boy to whom it
belonged. The boy he had found lying pierced through the lung outside his ransacked home. He could still
see the boy crumpled beside his father‟s spear, the stone soldier clutched tight to his breast, while his farm
burned behind him.
Was that what he wanted? Dūl wondered. To be a soldier?
Worse than anything, it seemed. So badly that Dull image was what he thumbed as his last
breaths failed him.

28 |
Is that how he imagined himself? Why he grabbed the outlawed bow his helot father kept hidden
instead of watching like most as a few fond goats were taken and grain stripped in measure from the field
he had tended? Did he not deserve more leniency for his impetuous age than a single stroke and fire?
The boy‟s house was nearly ash when Dūl had found him, a sure sign there had been a struggle. It
was protocol for the homes of those who resisted M dȧ to be razed to the ground, and all of their assets
seized rather than a portion of them – a callous warning to those likeminded.
Dūl recalled looking with wonder, gaping at a boy whose innocence he had never known except
that last, stark gesture that had made him for an instant revile his king. Tánȧ‟s greed was growing as
legendary as his success – crushing those that showed him the faintest hesitation in submitting,
encouraging wanton rapine from his youngest warriors to the extent that the poorest of those who
submitted to him were forced into destitution, so it became that the only option helots had to pay their
debts was servility falsely modeled on salvation. Never before had M dȧ‟s king condoned or forgiven
such aberrant violence as was allowed in Tánȧ‟s current reign. Despite urgent shame, honor would not let
Dūl confess the ingratitude he felt toward his sworn lord. A guilt he did not think belonged to him sank
into him all the same.
And Dūl remembered how fiercely the boy seemed to grasp the stone soldier, but how feebly his
corpse had given it up. He had taken it without knowing why. Even as he stood among his kinsmen and
comrades, wallowing self-satisfied in the triumph of their amassing display of meal and metal, Dūl could
not admit that he had taken it to remember that boy and what confusion he had felt standing over his
huddled, little carcass. For the moment, he could not completely understand that he had collected the boy
into pocket – a ponderous token of his shame.

29 |
Episode II: Shadow Within the White Garden

“Come here Sūndȧ,” Gānbȧ said urgently as she tried to clasp some earrings on the
passing girl.
“Have you seen my ivory comb?” Sóethȧ asked, swinging jewelry around the room in her
desperation. They had only a short duration before Tánȧ would arrive. Some time had already passed
since the sentries had spotted the returning army and sounded the homecoming horn, and Tánȧ almost
always came to see Sóethȧ immediately after a long stint away.
“We don‟t have time for this,” Gānbȧ massaged her forehead, preemptively easing the pressure of
a headache that threatened to rise to the front of her skull. While she rubbed, she felt something cool and
hard touch her skin. Gānbȧ lowered the hand into her range of vision, and saw that she was holding the
comb.
“Here,” she grabbed Sóethȧ by the shoulder as she passed again, still frantic in her search. Gānbȧ
swung the girl in front of the mirror. With blinding haste, Gānbȧ rolled the sandy strands of Sóethȧ‟s hair
into an elaborate swirl. Holding her creation with one hand, Gānbȧ plucked the square comb from her
mouth with the other. When Sóethȧ‟s hair was fixed by the comb teeth, she tidied the last few locks in
place using the mirror as a guide. Sóethȧ sat before her, looking into the mirror with wide, worried eyes.
At the end of summer Tánȧ would return to court. It was a process Sóethȧ had come to know as
intimately as the feelings of dread she owned for her foster-father. For the young girl, time was measured
by the man – the year cycled by his comings and goings, days were reckoned in the pleasure of his
absence or the infamy of his company. Come the close of campaign, Tánȧ ushered in another year of
stolid rules and reminded Sóethȧ that she had never really known freedom, that she was truly caged. He
had strict policies on how his foster-daughter should appear, even if no one else was ever allowed to see
her. It was evident that her growing beauty and her innocence were things of entertainment for him,
something he could momentarily abandon the rigors of hard rule to appreciate.
To say that Sóethȧ favored comfort over his imposed elegance was to make a glaring
understatement. Sóethȧ would suffer that first preening of many with grumbled indignation. Her ill-
contained irritation was merely a response to the imminent stress of Tánȧ‟s arrival, but her annoyance was
always leveled at Gānbȧ. The nursemaid endured her mild abuse patiently while she urged and coaxed the
girl into the clothes that had come to represent her oppression with stiff collars, and an overabundance of
unbreathing fabric that felt so much like suffocating in the clinging warmth of summer‟s end. No matter
how carefully Gānbȧ readied Sóethȧ, all of her touches were pure nuisance to the pensive girl, all tug and
prod. But now, stuffed into the clothes she so thoroughly hated, Sóethȧ did not make a single complaint or
resist her nursemaid. Instead, she accepted the process of her adornment with docile submission, and

30 |
gazed wistfully, strangely at her reflection, striving with solemn eyes to accept that vision of herself. In
her own sweet way, without saying she was sorry, Sóethȧ would eventually apologize to Gānbȧ for her
brattishness. In a number of days things would be patched up between them, but it would be a long time
before summer came again and bought joyful respite from a clenched existence.
“Don‟t frown. You‟ll make a mess of your make-up,” Gānbȧ warned, looking at the same
mournful mirrored image while sorting the girl‟s hair.
Sóethȧ reached up to feel the lines cracking across her face.
“And don‟t touch it or it‟ll be all over your dress.”
Sóethȧ‟s sleeves were very long. She had to be careful not to drape the copious purple fabric on
anything that might dirty her dress. She tucked her arms back into her lap.
Gānbȧ finished with Sóethȧ‟s hair and touched up the smooth, pale brown make-up pasting the
girl‟s face.
“Sóethȧ!” A man‟s voice called from outside.
Sóethȧ looked up at her nursemaid. Gānbȧ stared down at her. Both of them were startled to
silence.
“Sóethȧ!” the man called again, though more curt the second time.
Gānbȧ pushed Sóethȧ from her seat and toward the door. The girl had grown so accustomed to
running about barefoot over the last three months that she had almost forgotten her slippers. Just as
Sóethȧ was about to open the door, Gānbȧ grabbed her and handed them to her. She quickly put the
slippers on, took a deep breath and opened the door.
Tánȧ stood outside, impatience evident in his scowl.
He was decked in full armor, helmet in hand, purple cape waving in the breeze. His heavy steps
imprinted the grass from the enclosure door to where he stood with a brusque expression. As expected, he
had come straightaway upon entering the city.
“You shouldn‟t keep me waiting,” Tánȧ barked.
Sóethȧ knew to keep her charm about her and to maintain innocence.
“I am sorry, father. I was distracted by a new song that Gānbȧ was teaching me. I did not hear
you over my singing.”
“A new song?” Tánȧ‟s glare melted. He loved to hear her sing, and told her so quite often. “Let
me hear it.”
“I could not yet do it justice, my lord. I am still learning it,” Sóethȧ maintained coyness while she
wracked her mind for a song he might not have heard, expecting him to insist.

31 |
“No matter,” Tánȧ said to her relief, waving off the momentary distraction. “I have more pressing
things to discuss.”
Tánȧ looked toward Gānbȧ who stood behind Sóethȧ, reserved in her compliant stance, “Leave us
in private.”
Sóethȧ suppressed a shock of horror that threatened to spread across her face. It was hard enough
to remain composed in Tánȧ‟s volatile presence, but having her only source of comfort absent during an
already stressful engagement was nearly unbearable.
Gānbȧ nodded her consent, and set out in a brisk stride for the exit. A subtle glance in passing
reassured Sóethȧ, and went unperceived by the king. Gānbȧ swung the door behind herself. The two of
them were left standing, staring at each other in uncomfortable silence – the armored warlord and the
neatly preened girl. Sóethȧ did her best not to look worried.
“I‟m sorry I was not back for your birthday.”
Sóethȧ was familiar enough with Tánȧ‟s cues to know that she was not meant to respond. If he
had wanted her to, however, she was not sure she would have known how. It was rare that he took her
feelings into consideration, and even rarer when he apologized. He was trying to be nice, but his tact was
as awkward as the circumstances of their privacy.
Tánȧ continued, “Look at you. I can tell that you are older. You are even more beautiful than
when I left. No longer a child, a full-fledged woman before me.”
Sóethȧ bowed graciously.
“More beautiful than any woman in M dȧ, or all of West Árnė for that matter.”
“I think too much blood and too much horror has Dulled your sense of beauty,” Sóethȧ responded
with reflexive modesty.
“I have a surprise for you. Something for you now that you‟re old enough. Now that you are a
woman.”
Tánȧ walked closer, bridging the gap between them with his unsettling presence.
“It occurred to me while I was away that you have reached a marriageable age.”
Sóethȧ could no longer contain her fright. She gently bit her bottom lip and swallowed hard, but
Tánȧ was concentrated on the speech he had prepared and failed to notice the small gesture of her
growing apprehension.
“I also recognize that I am not as young as I once was. As it is for all men, my death is imminent.
An heir is required for M dȧ after me.”
The horror of what her foster-father was suggesting was incomprehensible. Sóethȧ pretended he
meant something else.

32 |
“You are not so old, my lord,” she feebly offered.

“Do not deign and flatter me,” he snapped.
She shirked back slightly.
His tone was grating, “I know I am getting on in my years.”
It was true. Though still a robust man, Tánȧ was beginning to portray his age. Sóethȧ could see
the deepening lines about his eyes and mouth, and the salt-colored hair mingled in his copper beard.
Indeed, his temples had faded completely white in just the past year.
“What of my brother? Is F inu not heir enough?”
“F inu?” the man snorted. “He‟s not fit to rule, to pursue my legacy. He is only as good as a
whipped bull and less manageable, swinging madly across the battlefield, refuting every order I give him.
He has too much of his mother in him. Obstinate sow,” he snorted. “But not you, Sóethȧ. You‟re
obedient, fair, and far lovelier than that woman could ever pretend to be. A son would only complete my
ambitions, and none of Th i‟s ilk will do. I have buried one child and I will tolerate the other, but I am
still without a son, a son of the same mind, to share my aspirations and to rule once I am dead.
“I will take Mūnmȯ r, and have Cáegid eat dog shit before me in the shadow of his own walls.
Then, no power in West Árnė will rival me. I shall rule all there is from the ocean to the feet of the
Giant‟s Spine Mountains. Half the island of Árnė will be under my sway. But my name will not last
without a man to preserve what I have won. When the current kingdoms of man are mere rubble and time
is nearly spent, my name shall endure!” The fury of his voice ceased abruptly, and he realized he stood,
heaving with clenched fists, towering over the petrified girl.
“Father?” she meekly pleaded.
“Do not call me that!” Tánȧ growled.
She shyed away further.
Tánȧ huffed, then answered more calmly, though his frustration was still evident, “I have made
arrangements to relinquish my guardianship over you. Écmȯen in Fōthȧd nóen Dáedȧlāich, one of my
captains, shall adopt you in my stead and present you as my bride. By privileging him to foster the
forthcoming queen of M dȧ, some of the old resentments between the Dáedȧlāch clan and I might be
resolved. You are important in that.”
When Tánȧ stated his plans in plain, unavoidable detail, Sóethȧ went pale and she began to faint.
A thick mailed arm caught her just before she could fall. Her consciousness reeled, then snapped back.
She looked up at the large man, his face only inches from hers. He looked the girl over with flashing eyes.

33 |
“My, you are beautiful, Sóethȧ.” Her supple body warm in his iron arms, her pouted lips, big
brown eyes, the delicate features of her face, all stunned him with their beauty. “Gorgeous,” he mumbled
to himself.
The clanhouse of Clan Tàen was abuzz with excitement when the three brothers walked in, a host
of g elėmbīch in tow. As they entered they were hailed joyously by the old men awaiting them, already
celebrating and toasting the triumphant return of their sons and grandsons.
The three brothers walked through a gauntlet of congratulatory backslaps and vocal
commendations. Òrmȯlc and Dūl gave only polite nods and humble responses, unprepared for the
appreciation they received. Bórdȧ, on the other hand, enjoyed the praises with a hearty chuckle and
matched them with his own teasing sort of compliments.
In a matter of seconds, the nearly vacant clanhouse was crammed by hundreds of thirsty armored
men who poured through its doors, filling the drinking hall with their vivacious merriment. Servants and
slave-girls expectant of the sudden rush, were already dashing between tables and doling hospitality.
Conversation fragmented into small groups among the mass. Some reflected on their good fortune or
recounted their recent deeds, others happily received the company of an old friend or a favorite serving
maid.
The clan badge – a white, sharp-peaked mountain set upon a backdrop of solid black – was
displayed on various sigils and banners around its stone walls. From the outside, the house itself appeared
quite large compared to the other small houses and shops that lined the carven slopes of the city‟s streets
but within, the house was even greater. Hewn much further into M dȧ‟s great hill than the exterior
impression suggested, the clanhouse gave way to a large, low-ceilinged hall filled with tables and stools.
The chamber held itself beneath the colossal weight of the mountain through a series of evenly spaced
pillars left standing when the clanhouse interior was first carved. Leading off the massive main room
were various chambers of storage which held an accumulated wealth of grain, meats, and drink. There
were also quarters for the clan-owned servants, as well as hostelry bedding for any g elėmbīch who might
drink themselves into incognizance. Among the more secreted chambers were the vaults where Clan Tàen
kept the relics they had captured over the course of their long continuance.
The brothers struggled through the carousing g elėmbīch to find their usual table, tucked away in
the back-left corner, far from the door. Identifying their table by Bórdȧ‟s grided etchings of a makeshift
brāgȧic dóun board into its surface, they reached for their chairs and seated themselves heavily. Able to
rest his limbs for the first time after the long, toiling march, Bórdȧ sighed. Then, he grinned.

34 |
He hailed one of the passing girls, “M rni, looking ever as lovely as I last left you. How about a
few drinks for me and my fellow champions?”
The girl showed a smirk she reserved especially for Bórdȧ before she nodded. She headed off to
fetch them.
“You scoundrels! Going to leave me to sit by myself, are you?” asked an elderly man, smiling as
he approached them. He had the long hair of a g elėmbēch, pinned halfway up. The strands had grayed
with age, but maintained a rich luster like silver-tinged stone. Though his gait was short and somewhat
strained, his shoulders were firm, held high in the proud stance of a professional warrior. Still, Dūl
thought he never looked so old.
“Father!” Bórdȧ sprang up to greet him.
It had only been a few years since he had retired, but he had aged rapidly in that time. The last
three months they had been away, Dūl marveled, seemed to be his father‟s worst. Though wrinkled and a
little more hobbled, F rȧr wore his age with a merry dignity. Indeed, even with his old scars, he had a
comely face. Bórdȧ was most like him in build and temperament. High stature, dark complexion, and a
characteristic reticence attributed to Òrmȯlc and Dūl were always said to have been inherited from their
mother.
Bórdȧ clapped his father in a bear-like embrace. Òrmȯlc and Dūl followed in turn. All were glad
to see him.
“How went the city‟s defense?” Bórdȧ asked his father with mock seriousness as they all sat
down.
“It‟s good of you lads to return. The Summit House was getting much too rambunctious with only
these old men to drink with,” F rȧr said with Bórdȧ‟s same dry delivery.
“Well no worries, young man,” Bórdȧ said clapping F rȧr on the back. “We are here to rescue
you from the rowdy sort you‟ve been forced to associate with.”
Bórdȧ pointed to Fèthȯg, a spindly, stooped ancient and T en‟s recognized eldest living
clansman. Fèthȯg spluttered to sip ale with the trembling lips of his toothless mouth while sitting at a
table of other old men who only seemed to have any age left because of his company.
F rȧr laughed hard at Bórdȧ‟s jest, a laugh still hale Dūl was glad to hear. Dūl found himself
chuckling too, caught up in the moment of his father‟s mirth, for the first time in several days, truly
relaxed.
“Besides, anymore time away from Ūthi and I might have gone crazy,” Bórdȧ said pretending he
had not seen the servant passing.

35 |
The dark-haired girl stopped and flashed Bórdȧ a defiant eye. She was one who had not
succumbed to Bórdȧ‟s charm so easily, which only made her more a target for the warrior‟s shameless
advances.
“Oh, Ūthi! I was just talking about you,” Bórdȧ turned around to face with exaggerated surprise.
“Didn‟t know you were standing there till I felt your chill on the back of my neck.”
“What do you want, Bórdȧ?” she asked impatiently.
“Well, it‟s not for me, you see, but some food provided for my little brother here would be most
salubrious of you,” Bórdȧ said jabbing a thumb in Dūl‟s direction. “See, he‟s not the scrawniest runt
you‟ve ever seen, but he‟s not yet as fat and handsome as some,” Bórdȧ‟s eyebrows arched with an extra
flare as he patted his stomach. “And since he came in and smelled some of those leeks and boar you‟ve
got boiling in that great big cauldron over there, the little lad hasn‟t been able to stop yammering about
the delicious scent. If you could fetch him some and spare us his whining than we should be most grateful
to you.”
Ūthi sighed and barely began to move away when Bórdȧ stopped here again. “But now it
wouldn‟t be proper if you gave him some and he didn‟t have enough to share with his old dad and his two
champion brothers, now would it? It‟d make him look a right niggardly little bastard. So you had best
bring some for the lot of us,” Bórdȧ finished with an oversized, toothy grin.
“Whatever you say, champion,” Ūthi spoke with sardonic homage, but she could not resist the
smirk tinging the corner of her mouth or subdue its subtlety enough to escape Bórdȧ‟s searching, gloating
notice.
“Look at that! That counts. A smile from Ūthi and I‟ve only been back for the breadth of a hair.”
Immediately regretting encouraging Bórdȧ, Ūthi snorted dismissively and sauntered away to the
task.
“Oh, and some bread if there‟s some to be had,” Bórdȧ called after. He watched her hips sway
into the crowd. “I could get used to this champion treatment,” he said beaming as he turned back around
on his stool.
A great, contented sigh issued from F rȧr. “To think that I would live long enough to see each of
my three sons made champions. I‟m very proud. Your mother would be too.”
A brief solemn mood settled over the company as M rni returned with their drinks. Bórdȧ seized
the mug she set down before him and hoisted it in the air. The rest of the table followed suit.
“To our mother. May Bòus-vō treat her kind soul kindly and keep her in the realm of his kingdom
that is the most comfortable and the easiest found.”

36 |
Each in his turn took a long draught of his drink before setting his mug back on the table. Bórdȧ
drained his. Wiping away the foam from his mouth he commented, “Good stuff, this.” He called for
another round from Mérni, who had only just gotten to the next table.
F rȧr leaned in closer to his sons, “Though word of your deeds has made it back before you and
I‟ve heard them recounted more than a few times in this hall, I would greatly relish hearing from the men
who lived the performance.”
“It was a sun-ripe noon. All the armies of Mūnmȯ r lined against us…” Bórdȧ began without
hesitation, drawing that glorious day with a wide arc of his hand. His story lasted through a few rounds
and several portions of leeks and boar, while he recounted the brother‟s deeds in embellished detail, Dūl
filling in when his brother‟s mouth was too full. Òrmȯlc leaned back in his chair, and waited with
diminishing patience for his brothers‟ story to end, but F rȧr listened with rapt, delighted attention. In
timed partnership, Bórdȧ and Dūl told of how they were foremost of the warriors to smash through
Mūnmȯ r‟s left flank, and how they were among those charging down the armies of Mūnmȯ r as they
made their withdrawal, and how they caught up to F inu and fended Mūnmȯ r‟s Wolf Prince off of him.
“He‟s not one to have a chuckle over,” Bórdȧ said. “That Ùthėnmōr is vicious, and his spear
Mávbāgėa is nothing to shake your shield at either. It stretches unbelievably long every time he gives a
shout.”
Bórdȧ held one hand up as though it were measuring something. He gave a nod to the wall, more
than three men‟s length away as the other end of Mávbāgėa’s estimated length.
“But he‟s accurate with it too,” the brawny warrior continued. “He could stab a bird out of the
clouds and strike it a hundred more times before it hit the ground. Until there was nothing left that
reached the ground but bloody fluff,” Bórdȧ added, his words already beginning to mix themselves
together.
“My. Sounds a fierce sort,” F rȧr reflected.
“And F inu, without so much as a thanks, just walks and leaves when we chase Ùthėnmōr off of
him.”
“Hmm. Takes after his father in manners it seems,” said F rȧr. “How was the rest of the
campaign?”
Before Bórdȧ could expound, Òrmȯlc answered for him, following his father‟s disparaging
remark of Tánȧ with more reproachful news of the king, “Tánȧ has made the g elėmbīch his private
warmachine. The entire summer campaign was motivated by his conquest, and somehow he has managed
to blind many to the traditions and bind them to his bidding.”

37 |
The last remark seemed pointed toward Bórdȧ, but if the burly warrior heard, he neglected it to
savor another swig.
Òrmȯlc went on, “Too many fools running errands for that man‟s personal plans, rather than the
glory of clan and city. It looked like the treasury vaults piled out there during dispensation. Nobody
appreciates honest grain in this city anymore it seems, but believe you me, everyone would be missing it
sorely if all they had was silver to gnaw and gold to drink.”
Dūl was used to Òrmȯlc‟s private rants, something he had heard more than his fair share of when
he had served his years training as a boy under the grim warrior‟s tutelage. But it seemed the last remark
had been of a fresh ire roused from Òrmȯlc‟s frustrations over the servant‟s ingratitude at the doors of the
clanhouse. To have been questioned by a servant so openly was a graven insult, and Òrmȯlc had
demonstrated his prudence well when he refrained from beating the slave publically as most warriors
would have done. But now that Òrmȯlc was only among family, he let his rancor fly.
F rȧr scratched his chin thoughtfully, devoid of the jesting mood with which he dealt with Bórdȧ,
composed in a sober mood to match his eldest son‟s. “T engȯch-vō help us. That is dour news. After our
last assembly I would have hoped Tánȧ listened to the wishes of the clan officers. But I see he continues
to agree to one thing – only to do whatever he thinks his heart tells him. Nevertheless, the campaign
seems to have gone well. M dȧ continues to prosper, to a good end I pray. And I have my sons back and
they are champions.”
But Òrmȯlc‟s words were still capable of rousing that boyish fear in Dūl, as they had when he
had carried his brother‟s shield and been his inėnēch. Though he had learned not to latch on to his
brother‟s pessimisms so quickly, Dūl found that Òrmȯlc‟s observations always held some force of truth,
even if they were exaggerated in their cynicism. The reemergence of that fear made Dūl recall his caution
from earlier that day when he had been nearly overwhelmed with the gravity of it all.
“That honor too, Tánȧ has sullied in part for us. Though I bear the distinction with great pride, I
do not adore the intention with which it was granted to us.”
“What do you mean, my son?”
“If tales of our deeds have preceded us to M dȧ before this day, then I imagine you heard of some
of the dissension among our warriors. It was not much, but there was some open discontentment voiced of
Tánȧ during campaign.”
Òrmȯlc‟s voice was low and stern, his father gazed at him with the same seriousness, a mutual
gravity held between them. Rebellion was not some bygone conception but something fresher that lived
and dwelt in close memory. It painted the hazard in their eyes.

38 |
“I know. Most of that discontent began here with the old men, in their retirement unable to visit
the shrines of their ancestors for his misconduct toward the Vēuch. And I am one of them.”
“Yes that is it precisely. You are not one to hide his opinion in assembly, nor to discourage your
friends from bearing their hearts, whether in praise or disapproval. Surely he seeks to win you and us over
through our reward.”
F rȧr regarded the idea with a skeptical scowl.
Òrmȯlc pressed, “Do you not think it odd that all three of your sons were made champions on the
same day when it is so close to time to join assembly?”
“I consider it a blessing. Such gifts should not be received so suspiciously. I do not think that
even Tánȧ is likely to stoop to such cheap tricks in the assembly as to award in guile the most sacred
distinction a warrior can hold other than the title of king.”
“And you can see how he has disgraced that office, making soldiers out of slaves, banishing the
Vēuch…”
F rȧr held a hand up to stay his son‟s tirade, “Please, must we always talk of our king as though
he were some delinquent. He is still my king and yours. We swore it so. Perhaps he deserves our criticism
– you know I am not among his favorites – but we should not expect so much terribleness from him. He
has done many great things for M dȧ too. We should be so lucky to have such a king as victory has
wrought in him. As for his flaws, we shall address them when the setting is proper. When we are given
the chance to do so in the Assembly of Heirs. The clans are still the power of M dȧ. He can do little
without them.”
Òrmȯlc leaned back in his chair, his low voice relinquished of its magnitude, “Yes. Forgive me
father. I only mean…”
“Do not think of it, my son.” F rȧr reached across the table and patted Òrmȯlc‟s long hand. “We
shall deal with it when we are given the time, then you will hear my voice loudest in our demands, but not
until. For now, we should enjoy one another‟s company.”
F rȧr turned and put a hand on Dūl‟s shoulder, “Surely, my youngest son is not so grim in his
reward? To be called champion?”
Dūl smiled but it was clumsy to conceal the worry beneath. F rȧr caught that small gesture of
reluctance.
“Is it so? You too doubt your reward? By Éc, I have such glum sons!”
“Not me father,” Bórdȧ sloshed from behind his upturned mug.
“It‟s not that,” Dūl began to admit hesitantly.
“Well, what is it then?” F rȧr asked expectant of an explanation.

39 |
“It‟s just that…” Dūl paused.

F rȧr‟s perceptive eyes grasped his youngest son‟s anxiousness.
“You feel unprepared to receive what‟s been given to you.” It was not a question. F rȧr was
simply finishing Dūl‟s thought, and by the patient cadence of his voice he told his son that he could
appreciate such apprehension.
“I understand that you‟ve been awarded a great honor,” F rȧr said, “and it is clear that you
comprehend what responsibility comes with that honor. But do not be afraid of it. Take confidence in the
role that you were mature enough to earn, and know that responsibility is only the opportunity to achieve
what you believe is right. If you never lose sight of that, then you will never shame yourself, and you
need not fear your own decisions.”
Still with his arm on Dūl‟s back, F rȧr lent his son his strong smile. Dūl smiled himself, slowly
but sincerely this time.
“Thank you, father.”
F rȧr reached with his other hand around Dūl‟s chin and patted his son‟s cheek, “There‟s a good
lad.”
Discussion turned away from the events of their marches, and for a time passed to quieter,
pleasanter things of the past.
When the whole clanhouse was settled into conversation, drinking, and games of brāgȧic dóun,
the clan chaplain approached the front of the house and hailed them, “Fight proud!”
“Fight free!” the second half of Clan Tàen‟s motto echoed in chorused response.
“We welcome back our victors, g elėmbīch of T en,” he said before a roar of ale-drenched
jubilance. “M dȧ‟s clans have once more attested their worth, but T en has proved itself most
commendable, for three of the four g elėmbīch who were awarded the Mark of Champions, who attained
the distinction to be called rėbīch, are among our number. In honor of their achievements, they shall
receive gifts from our treasury.”
Everyone was looking back at the three sons of F rȧr, their father glowing. Dūl shifted
uncomfortably in his chair.
“Òrmȯlc, Bórdȧ, and Dūl in F rȧir, come forth and collect your trophies,” the chaplain told
them.
More applause sounded, ushering the brothers from their seats and through the dense atmosphere
of ovation. By narrow, shuffling lanes of crowded men the sons of F rȧr made their way toward the front
of the building. Dūl tried to look appreciative as he moved through the packed clanhouse, but his smile
felt only like costume, as though at any moment it would come unhinged and fall crashing to the floor.

40 |
When they stood beside the chaplain and order resumed, he continued with the induction, “By
right of your first marks as rėbīch, you are each awarded a gift from the ancient treasury of the clan,
donated by our forebears for the success of T en‟s warriors. These gifts have been chosen by our most
senior members,” the chaplain announced with a nod in the direction of several old men whom Dūl
recognized as the clan‟s other elected officers.
Each of M dȧ‟s clans possessed vaults brimming with a vast array of treasure, armaments and
articles either re-dispensed in reward by M dȧ‟s kings or bestowed in death by their previous bearers.
Such relics that comprised these collections were thought to be great weapons, armor, and charms forged
in ancient days by the secret techniques that the Divine Firebringer Akatraisur had revealed to savage
man. But there were few items left like Tánȧ‟s wailing sword Lámfréthė to be found in the world, and
none of them among clan treasuries – their enchantment broken or faded with time, lost like the secret
craft used to fashion them. Still, there was the belief that they held some innate greatness because of their
legendary pasts, and for their former glory, warriors were gratefully humbled to receive them. Though
Dūl put little stock in the tales that accompanied these heirlooms bereft of their magic, he could
appreciate their fineness, a rare quality of beauty lost in arms since the eldest days and ended finally with
the destruction of Bállȧch. Scattered by the course of innumerable lives, such treasures, both authentically
archaic and convincingly archaic, were recollected into the clan treasury. Many of these hallowed items
no longer even came with a story.
“For Òrmȯlc, a warrior of dour skill, we give you the impenetrable shield L thȧic urm, the War
Wall.”
The clan treasurer brought forth a shield wrought in shining metal, a grim, socketless face fixed in
iron upon its broad surface.
“To Bórdȧ the Fierce, we grant the insurmountable erc aphȧi, the Gate of Battles.”
The chaplain fetched him a gilded shield, embossed with a ravening, flat-toothed maw.
“To Dūl, eager for the fray, we award Dán D l, the shield Black Face.” Clan T en‟s young
champion took hold of the shield handed to him, a silver-trimmed black-surfaced shield embossed by
black stone that had been sculpted into the fashion of a lightless sun.
The three brothers looked out over the crowd of clansmen that cheered them. They held their gifts
aloft for the inspection of the audience, but while Òrmȯlc and Dūl did so politely, Bórdȧ waved his shield
about proudly to the good-humored cheers of the clan.
Dūl tried to accept his shield in good grace while all those around cheered, but he could not share
their enthusiasm. Inspecting his prize, that broad, delicately wrought shield, Dūl experienced a new kind
of apprehension, a palpable tension as soon as his hand touched it. But ignoring his foreboding, as he was

41 |
apt to do before his comrades‟ thousand eyes, he disregarded his heart‟s sudden warning as purely
imagined. Instead, Dūl chose to believe his unease emerged because the shield was a physical reminder of
what celebrity accountability he was being forced to shoulder. There were a great many other
responsibilities the young champion would now have. He was to be counted among his clan officers at
functions, the most daunting of which was to attend regular meetings for the governance of M dȧ when
the Assembly of Heirs met. It was almost unheard of for one so young to be numbered among that
congress of privileged peers to represent the clan body before the king for grievances and legislation.
Staring at Dán D l, Dūl became uneasily aware that he might be expected to speak at the next
meeting in only a few short days. He glanced up. Dūl‟s eye caught Òrmȯlc‟s subtle grimace. The tall
warrior was used to being a public figure. He had already served his clan within the Assembly of Heirs
for several years, ever since F rȧr retired and Òrmȯlc accepted his captainship. To see his eldest brother,
an individual he considered highly astute, with the same grim expression of inspection made him
reconsider his own anxiety over the shields.
The clanhouse din slowly dwindled, and in the gap of noise, the chaplain spoke once more to the
brothers, but loudly enough that all could hear him, “Each of you now holds a shield, with which you will
protect M dȧ. Three shields to reflect the honor of Clan T en while you still bear them. Three shields that
stand alone as walls, but together, as the foundation of a fortress.”
The chaplain grabbed his mug set close by and lay his fist over it‟s mouth. Everyone else seeing
the gesture did so likewise in preparation of the impending toast.
“Let us drink to the mighty, drink to the bold,” the chaplain began. “May the sons of F rȧr always
defend us, and may we always give them something to defend. Fight proud!”
“Fight free!” the striking, unisoned shout of hundreds of clansmen seemed to shudder the very
mountain from within.
“I‟ll drink to that!” Bórdȧ said snatching a drink from a nearby table as he headed into the crowd
that cheered him.
It was fast becoming late. The sun pitched itself upon the clouds in various shades of pink and
orange, ending a glorious day for M dȧ with its splendored setting hues. Sounds of merriment issued from
the clanhouse a tier below the flat summit of M dȧ. The thud of mugs on tables and laughter bellowed out
into the streets and up the hill.

42 |
F inu listened as he waited in the early twilight. Though the din of the g elėmbīch below was not
what he so intently heeded. F inu leaned with his back to the stone wall that squared off a sizeable portion
of the hill‟s leveled surface. The wall stood adjacent to a cluster of buildings, all constructed of bleached
stone. Known as the House of T ephȯr, the palace was the centerpiece of the complex. Here was where
the royal family of M dȧ had dwelt throughout the centuries, and where the assembly of clansmen met to
discuss matters of governance and war. It was small to be called a palace, austere in design – a relic that
endured the elements since the ancient days of M dȧ, a staple of staunch tradition the city had come to
embody. Legend insisted that it was the house built by T ephȯr, the city‟s patriarch, who fought Ocsrae
through the Giant‟s Spine Mountains and settled the untamed west. At that time, M dȧ was home to the
Urmurl, grotesque giants, but their power had waned and they fell to T ephȯr and his men. Now it stood
tinted slightly yellow with age. Only the new gabled roof with its bloodstone shingles reflected any of
M dȧ‟s recent successes.
F inu peered around the corner to the only door offered by the high walls. His anticipation was
becoming too much to bear.
It appeared as though the garden within was abandoned, the walls worn and covered with weeds;
but everyone knew that was not so. Tánȧ had publically fostered Sóethȧ as is instructed by custom.
Everyone knew the king kept his daughter hidden in the White Garden, locked away for everyone‟s fear
of her prophecy.
F inu and Sóethȧ had grown up together, though he was a few years older. Often he would visit
the girl with his father. It was only when Tánȧ became concerned that his son was too old to be spending
his time playing with a girl, rather than learning the manlier arts, that he forbade F inu to visit Sóethȧ.
Still, for all of his father‟s stern prohibitions, F inu could not be kept out. He sneaked over the
wall at dusk, and Sóethȧ would steal away from Gānbȧ‟s watch for a night of catching fireflies or naming
stars. That had been before Tánȧ had moved Gānbȧ into his house-servants‟ quarters thinking Sóethȧ was
too old to sleep with her doting nursemaid. But some time after Gānbȧ was relodged, Sóethȧ had become
detached, herself an obstacle to him only after she had opened to him the most. He yearned for things to
be like that between them again.
Last year, F inu thought she would be impressed by his new status as a warrior of M dȧ, but the
first time he told her about his experiences in war, killing another man, she seemed appalled that he could
do such things, be capable of such violence. His deeds were never of any interest to her. Neither were the
scars he displayed, so she never understood what he strived to make them mean when he showed them to
her.

43 |
F inu looked down into his hand. He inspected the little seeds for the hundredth time that day,
their brown and tan striped shells rolled in his palm. Yellowtail. Her favorite. They were only a weed, and
seemed to grow everywhere except Sóethȧ‟s carefully kept garden. There used to be some in the
enclosure years ago. They crept in from nowhere and practically enveloped the entire lawn until it was a
swathe of bright yellow. F inu had told her that they grew free and wild, that there were whole fields of
them elsewhere in Árnė. She seemed to like that. She liked their bowled yellow petals and the little
yellow tails that wagged in the middle when they blossomed. She especially savored the tiny heathscuttles
that would come and sip from the concoction of rainwater and nectar that pooled in their cupped petals.
Sóethȧ would watch the birds‟ furtive movements, the blinding whir of their miniscule wings.
Eventually, Tánȧ had Gānbȧ pull the yellowtail up, despite Sóethȧ‟s teary-eyed protests. The
yellowtail never grew back, and the heathscuttles remained exiled. She never talked about either anymore.
But now he could give them back to her he thought to himself, shaking the round seeds in his hand. He
would give his gift and she would remember the way things were. The yellowtail would express the
emotions he had so much difficulty comprehending and conveying. They would say what scars could not.
The creaking door of the enclosure roused F inu from deep thought as it swung open and banged
shut. F inu glimpsed around the corner once more to see his father storming away, his mind weighing
something while he fidgeted with the joints of his armor.
Wasting no time, F inu tucked the seeds into a purse at his belt, then found the place in the stone
where time had made him footholds, and scaled the wall as he had done so many times before. He crested
it as stealthily as he could in partial battle-attire. F inu no longer wore his breastplate, helmet, or greaves,
but he was still heavy with chainmail and layers of thick cloth under-armor. As gently as he could manage
he leapt down, plodding into the grassy earth of the yard below.
He peered about the place. The enclosure had once served as a private lawn and garden,
constructed by his father for his mother after they were wed. He had played here as a toddler with her.
F inu remembered ambling in the garden vividly, but the memory of his mother was imprecise. She was
merely a glimpse of an idea, a specter in his dreams whose reality he was reminded of when he entered
the White Garden. It was the only thing he did not like about the place, the inevitability of that vague
feminine presence and the convoluted layers of meaning that came with it.
He looked across the yard to the house set against the far wall. It had once served as a shed for the
garden, but now, more than doubled in size and converted, operated as Sóethȧ‟s house. As F inu came
closer he crept, lest he warn Gānbȧ of his arrival, should she be present. Gānbȧ had been curt with him
ever since F inu‟s permission to visit was revoked. Though she sometimes recognized the merit of some
outside interaction for Sóethȧ, she was usually moody and disapproving of his involvement especially

44 |
after they had grown a little older. Gānbȧ was suspicious of his intentions, he knew as much. Once, when
he had left his gaze unguarded, his eyes lingering too intently on the girl, the nursemaid broke the depth
of his stare with a hard pinch to the ear and sent him home. Ever afterwards, F inu despised Gānbȧ, for
her scrutinizing eyes reminded him of that moment‟s humiliation and warned him against the obviousness
of his emotions.
He treaded softly outside, trying not to rustle the still blades of grass beneath his feet, until he
came to Sóethȧ‟s little house. He listened, his ear propped against the wall, hoping Gānbȧ was away on
errand. All he could discern was the faint sound of weeping. Concern mingled with his curiosity. He
pressed forward.
“Sūndȧ?” he called, no longer caring if Gānbȧ heard him.
The weeping only continued. F inu walked to the open door, and looked inside. In the scant,
setting light slanting through the doorway, he could distinguish Sóethȧ‟s shape from the shadows,
gripping the sheets tight over her trembling body.
“Are you alright?” F inu implored.
No answer. The tears continued to flow.
F inu‟s mind turned to Tánȧ, “What did he say to…”
“Leave me be,” Sóethȧ said between sobs.
He had not seen her so disturbed since they were small and he had pushed her into the garden
pond. F inu recouped his thoughts. He plucked the seeds from his belt and held them out to her, though
her face was still turned from his.
“Um, I, uh, brought you something. A present for...”
“Go away!” she screamed, still lying down.
“F inu!” Gānbȧ came running across the lawn, dropping the basket she was carrying. “What‟ve
you done?”
Suddenly, F inu felt embarrassed to be there, yelled at for what he did not know, holding his hand
out like some unrequited beggar. Stupid seeds. A silly notion. What had he expected? Shame welled up
within him until he flushed red, and just as quickly turned to anger.
“I have done nothing!” F inu threw the yellowtail seeds to the ground and stormed off, leaving
Gānbȧ to comfort the weeping girl.

45 |
Episode III: By the Gown of the Moon

Sóethȧ sat up in bed. Candlelight flitted across her shadowed face from the lamp that Gānbȧ lit
before leaving. The girl‟s eyes were puffy, her face still grief-strained though she had stopped crying. The
nursemaid had tried her best to comfort Sóethȧ after she chased F inu out, but Sóethȧ never divulged
what troubled her. She had not felt like talking. Guilt she could not explain was rife within her. Her shame
made her uncomfortable even in the presence of her trusted nursemaid. She knew Gānbȧ would search out
Tánȧ‟s intentions to wed her without Sóethȧ telling her so.
Sóethȧ thought about marrying Tánȧ, and her shame burned with spite. She hated him. For her
entire life she had tried to be a model daughter – his passive little amusement. It had never been for love
that she had tried so hard; but perhaps, out of a hope for love. That he could love her as a daughter. That
she could love him as a father. But he had done this to her. More than anything it was an abiding fear of
the man that compelled her. She realized how deeply he frightened her, and despised him all the more for
it.
Now there was no chance of another life outside her walls. Sóethȧ did not know what she
expected. She supposed that she always knew she would live secluded in her enclosure, nothing indicated
otherwise, but some part of her imagined a future beyond, living like the people Gānbȧ had told her about,
whose bustle and life she heard on the wind.
But there were the prophecies surrounding her birth. Gānbȧ had always taken an honest approach
with Sóethȧ in discussing the omens of her birth, and when conversation turned to the topic, Sóethȧ could
always count on a disparaging account of the divinations from the nursemaid, citing the character of the
man who had spoken them as sufficient discredit. Gānbȧ had nothing good to say of Ūvthȧch and his
Òmȯr cult. Gānbȧ‟s shepherd father had borne a staunch loyalty to the Vēuch, something of the man‟s
that stuck with Gānbȧ even after he bartered her into servitude.
Gānbȧ‟s declamations of the prophecies began as an assurance for the curious girl but always
ended in angry rants. And Sóethȧ in her own polite, unknowing way had agreed with her nursemaid‟s
views. Now, Sóethȧ found that fury echoed, and even amplified in herself as she thought of the fear
instilled in the people of M dȧ by Ūvthȧch‟s prophecies. It was all so unfair. She thought of how she
terrified them, and she detested and pitied them for that fear.
All for fear of her beauty? She paused and pondered. Was it all because of beauty – their distrust?
Sóethȧ was not sure if the prophecy was true. Was she even beautiful? She supposed so, otherwise she
would not be told so, caged for fear of beauty. But she did not feel it. She felt as ugly as mud, as base as
murder. Her entire life she had been paired with this vague and elusive concept. She could not even be
certain what real beauty was. She had so little to judge by.

46 |
She considered her nursemaid. Was Gānbȧ beautiful? When Gānbȧ told her old stories of great
women, famous queens and heroines from days of yore, she pictured her nursemaid, only a little
differently. Framed in the dramatic images of history and fancy, Gānbȧ could be quite beautiful, Sóethȧ
decided.
And what of F inu? Was he beautiful? The angle of his squared chin, the hollow of his cheeks,
his temper? Sóethȧ hated those parts of him that reminded her of Tánȧ. Guilt synched her gut again. F inu
had been her brother and only playmate. With disgust, Sóethȧ realized that she would become F inu‟s
step-mother. She squirmed in her sheets.
Her childhood playmate deserved better from Tánȧ. She had seen the rough way Tánȧ handled
F inu, trying desperately to bully his son into his own likeness, to mold his mind for war. And to a
degree, Tánȧ was successful. F inu had found controversial success as a warrior, she had heard. He
possessed nothing of his father‟s prudence or command, something Tánȧ persistently bemoaned. But
F inu did possess an undeniable fervor. He had the uncanny ability to shift the momentum of battle
around himself, though his impetus often degenerated into reckless abandon. F inu‟s temper, his most
valuable and costly quality, and what Sóethȧ disliked about him most, had only grown more virulent
under Tánȧ‟s discipline.
Sóethȧ realized then that she pitied F inu. She felt remorse for dismissing him so harshly. Even
though F inu had been a bit of a bully at times, most of her memories with him were fond ones. She
recalled the days when he would sneak over the wall while the yellowtails still carpeted the lawn. They
would pick the flowers by the root and tie them into crowns. Despite F inu‟s predictable reluctance to
play pretend, Sóethȧ would always eventually coax him into her games. Then they would proudly boast
that they were famous kings and queens, and loudly announce their decrees to a court of heathscuttles.
And sometimes they would forget formality to idle and watch the small birds come drink from the yellow
flowers. And when the heathscuttles had satisfied their thirsts, F inu and Sóethȧ would chase after them
giggling until the birds flew over the wall into open sky. Afterwards, F inu would leave.
Restless with unwieldy thought, Sóethȧ kicked back her bed sheets and jumped out of bed.
Without stopping to put on her slippers or a cloak over her gown, she ran out onto the garden lawn. The
full moon‟s light arrested in her delicate form, she was a white streak upon the darkened yard. In her haste
to the wall, the warmth of her breath floated away and dissipated into the cold, starry sky above. When
she reached the wall, she struck its great slabs of rock with both hands, and professed her hatred to the
night in screams more chilling than that penetrating anguish she suffered as she decried the name of the
man whose face filled the image of her mind in fitful thrusts.

47 |
Bitterly, she screeched damnation to the wall that kept her from knowing anything else beyond it.
There was beauty to be found elsewhere, Sóethȧ knew. She had heard in Gānbȧ‟s tales. A great many
marvelous things to witness. Instead, Sóethȧ was stuck wondering about something everyone else took for
granted, behind the barrier of fear they had built for her.
Beauty. Perhaps it was just a word.
Sóethȧ leaned into the wall and stared straight up. As she turned her head skyward, her thoughts
lifted as well. Her melancholy selected the memory of a poignant summer‟s morning four years ago, of
the time she had overcome guilt and fear with curiosity and climbed the wall. It was not the first time she
had tried to leave. When she had been much smaller her nursemaid had caught her playing with the door
and explained with so much fearful foreboding that if Tánȧ ever caught her trying anything of the sort
Gānbȧ and her open interpretation of discipline would be quickly replaced for a ruthless style of
vigilance. Sóethȧ had considered that formative, culpable moment the day she finally resolved, despite
her love for Gānbȧ and fear of Tánȧ, to climb the wall. Just to have a peek she had assured F inu. She
would not have been able to reach the top had it not been for him. It was her idea, but F inu had agreed to
the scheme without much coaxing. He had given her a boost and scrambled up with her help, though at
first he had determined to refuse her hand boasting his own capability.
Both of them straining, he finally crested the level surface of the wall. They had shared the vision
of their toils in silence. She remembered what awe and yearning she felt that day when she rose like the
sun over its horizon, and saw the height of the nest in which she lived, the world stretched out before her
in such distances that she could never have imagined before. She remembered what daunting realization
she felt from that pinnacled vantage, how exhilaratingly sick she felt gazing over the miniscule-looking
buildings and coiling streets below, how tiny she was surveying an endless expanse of green hills and
brown heather.
It could not have been long before Gānbȧ found them, captivated by the vast scope of their world
and their own small statures within it. After being startled out of her awe with a flurry of flustered
reprimands, Sóethȧ slipped back down the wall sheepishly. F inu was sent away. It was the last time
Gānbȧ had willingly let him enter the enclosure. The event had led to the girl‟s teary-eyed confession of
her desire to see the outside world, and ended in a lecture on the importance of being cautious in
regarding that world. It was full of people who feared her, Gānbȧ had told Sóethȧ, people who might
harm her. Dark people and dark things. After all, there was the prophecy. That damned, damning
prophecy.
But the vision of that morning lasted in Sóethȧ‟s mind despite Gānbȧ‟s efforts to distract her.
Even now, in the dead of night against the wall, the recollection was vivid for her, the memory of clouds

48 |
sweeping over a verdant, swelling landscape, perforated by swathes of sunlight. And the distance to the
bottom. That utter plunge was keen in her mind.
Sóethȧ let her forehead drop and touch the wall, and felt the world seething on the other side. For
a moment, she contemplated that freedom, that dizzying drop beyond the stone. Desire drove her nails
into the wall, bid her to drive her limbs over the barrier of her existence, and carry her toppling, spiraling,
laughing down. At least for the length of that fall, she would know liberty. They would find her broken
body and say the only destruction she ever caused was her own. Instead of hate they would pity her then,
and feel remorse for having kept her locked away for the entirety of her miserable, misconceived life.
Her eyes opened wide. Somewhat surprised after the vivid contemplation of her demise, she
found that she had not budged. Her fingers gripped hard on the stones high above, poised to hoist her
toward that desperate dream, but they were unable to lift her. Not for physical inability, though. No matter
how badly she wanted to leave the enclosure, to abandon the surly monarch who would be her husband,
she could move no further than grip the stone. Never before had she felt so caged. Even by her own will,
she was trapped.
Sóethȧ‟s fingers relaxed their grip. Slowly, she fell to her knees, palms sliding across the wall‟s
dimpled surface, until she knelt at its base. Tears brimmed in her eyes and brought with them a sudden
anger. All of her frustrations toward the cruelty of Tánȧ, toward the fear-abiding families of M dȧ, toward
her own impotent will, all coalesced into that sullen rage.
In seething, measured breaths she pounded the wall with her fists, but it remained unmoved. She
stopped when she saw the dark smatter of her blood upon the rocks, but tears continued to seep like the
blood from her bruised hands. So she wept through clenched teeth, kneeling in the shadow of her prison.
The wind sighed. It swept the soft sounds of her grief against unhearing stone.
It was then that Sóethȧ became aware of another presence. She could not be sure if she only felt
it, or that she actually heard the faint rustle of grass behind her. She had not even heard Gānbȧ enter
through the creaking enclosure door. Sóethȧ was embarrassed to be caught during that fit of private
anguish. It was not often that her nursemaid came back at night from the servants‟ quarters in the House
of T ephȯr where she kept her lodgings. She must have been greatly worried to have transgressed the
girl‟s orders that she be left alone. But Sóethȧ was not upset that Gānbȧ had come. It was not a good thing
to enjoy strife alone, Sóethȧ had realized on many separate nights. What remained of her anger dissipated,
abandoned her to stubborn-flowing tears. She waited for Gānbȧ to say something.
Sóethȧ wiped away the watery traces of a pitiable countenance. When Gānbȧ said nothing, Sóethȧ
shifted on her knees. She turned to face the nursemaid, only to be capsized and stricken dumb with shock.
Even in the dead of night, the bold moonlight allowed Sóethȧ a clear glimpse of the intruder. It was not

49 |
Gānbȧ standing over her. Instead, there was a man looming above her, but not one of the two she knew.
He was much slighter of frame than Tánȧ or F inu, swaddled in black with a beard to match.
“My child…” he said in a voice both soft and low.
His words invited her to speak.
“Who are you?” she demanded almost as a spasm.
“We have met before, but I do not expect you to remember me. I am Ūvthȧch, High Priest of the
order of the Òmȯr.”
Sóethȧ had only ever heard that name spat with upmost revulsion by Gānbȧ, embroiled in tales of
supposed deception and unscrupulous deeds – the principle name of her own lamentable genesis. Sóethȧ
never thought she would have the chance to confront the man who had held her as a babe, who sentenced
her to a lifetime of incarceration with a few brief words, and now blinking stupefied at the feet of that
same man, Sóethȧ felt drastically unprepared.
Instead, all she said was, “You‟re here,” which coming from one so obviously perplexed it nearly
sounded a question.
“I have come for a visit.”
“Why so quietly at this hour?” fear begged her ask the question. “I did not hear the door at all.”
“I did not enter by it.”
His answer did little to abate her growing trepidation. She found herself once more unsure of
what to say, despite the overwhelming abundance of questions streaming through her head. Here was the
man who witnessed and foretold her destructive future, but she could not snatch a coherent string of
words together. Sóethȧ attempted a query. She opened her mouth but all it chose was a sort of deflating,
improbable half-sound.
Ūvthȧch spoke instead, but the words he chose seemed casually chatty, unbefitting for a man who
seemed beyond idle conversation.
“Did you know that Tánȧ built this garden for Th i?”
She said that she did not, but he could have told by her eyes before he even asked.
“I‟ve never been here before, but I can feel her imprint all about the place.”
Sóethȧ did not respond, fiercely frightened by a man who felt the remnants of a woman who had
died the same day she was born. Sóethȧ wondered if the priest had caught her crying in the dark.
“He built it as a wedding present. It was a pen before, for the king‟s personal livestock. Back
then, when he married Th i, Tánȧ had been less troubled. He was still capable of the sentiments of love,”
the word made trivial by his unchanging tone. “It was not until much later that Tánȧ‟s ambitions made
him such a hard man, and that Théi learned to distrust him.”

50 |
There was a pause as though Ūvthȧch reflected on his own words. Sóethȧ waited for him to say
something else. He stared intently at her, probing her.
“Follow me,” he said finally.
The high priest turned without waiting to see if she would follow, knowing that she could not
help but be drawn by curiosity. So, Sóethȧ stood daunted and afraid, but driven by a reckless need to
understand. A shadow beneath the moon, the priest passed across the lawn leading the girl into the dark
vine-tangled corridors of the central garden. The moonlight was just bright enough that a lamp was not
necessary. Ūvthȧch‟s black shape loomed a short distance ahead of Sóethȧ, showing itself only enough
for her to follow around the next bend. Her heart pumped to a dread beat.
When their course ended before one vine tangled wall, Ūvthȧch turned around. He wore a thin,
tight-lipped smile that attempted at compassion. Sóethȧ remained speechless, expectant, ready to run at
the slightest danger.
“I do not think ill of you as others might,” Ūvthȧch announced. “Your portents have been
embellished, I think, throughout the years. Though, I do not revoke the prophecy I made that day. I saw
devastation in you, you quaking with new life and drenched in doom. But it is not improbable to think
that you were merely tainted by the blood of that day, and the prophecy given was not wholly yours. Alas,
I cannot be sure now.”
Fear was overcome by the curiosity that plagued Sóethȧ over the years she had spent imagining
the priest‟s eyes smeared with her infantile blood, the years she had spent cobbling together fragments of
rumors in order to piece together some comprehensible sense of herself.
“What did you see that day?” she had to know.
His poorly held smile fell to a grim expression that suited him better, but he did not hesitate to
answer, “I saw death and greatness.”
Greatness. The word was snagged upon the dreaming girl as willingly as the moth singes its
wings cozying to naked flame.
“But perhaps neither of those things belong to you now,” Ūvthȧch quickly added.
“Could you see? If I let you?” she asked with dire need, knowing what the cost would be.
“Perhaps,” he said, “though it should not be as easy to tell one‟s fate as when their blood is
unsullied by the detriments of experience, so clear of intention as when fresh-born.”
Fearlessly, needfully, Sóethȧ scratched her arm, dug deep into her flesh with her own nails, until
her perfect skin was broken by a thick, triple-track of jagged blood.
Once more, Ūvthȧch seemed pleased, an ill-fitting smile donned that would have put Sóethȧ off if
she did not so rashly want his wisdom.

51 |
“Wipe it across my eyes,” he commanded.

And she did so, smearing her forearm across his delicately clasped eyes. When she lowered her
arm, he inhaled deeply. For a time, neither one of them spoke. There was only the priest‟s steady breath.
Captivated by the focus of the man masked in her gore, Sóethȧ was afraid to exhale. Her ribs clenched
tight as she watched him. It was not until she was growing dizzy and unable to resist the urge to breathe
that she let out an exasperated gasp. When Ūvthȧch‟s eyes shot wide she thought she had spoiled his
concentration, but Sóethȧ noticed his body adopt a strange, sudden tenseness. His mouth drooped to
mumble unintelligibly. Like all those warriors who had stood above a blazing battlefield and listened as a
babe‟s clean blood was sown into the eyes of the high priest, Sóethȧ was silent. She waited while scraps
of sound fell from Ūvthȧch‟s mouth, listened to those unraveling secret noises that would be her destiny.
Prepared for whatever fate he would bestow upon her, whatever providence blood might provide to a girl
already condemned, Sóethȧ wore a pensive look.
When Ūvthȧch stopped mumbling, his eyes snapped back to focus on the girl. Her own eyes slid
wider. Her breath was abrupt. The high priest‟s face slowly reawaked, pulling together an expression
unexpected of the man. It was not that counterfeit smile he had worn before. Nothing about his twinging
mouth, his dancing, delighted eyes seemed false. That man of guarded emotion coveted true joy
unlavishly. Sóethȧ‟s heart skipped a beat, and she wondered if his delight was meant to concern her.
“Did you see anything?” she asked, anxious for an answer and eager to be free of his intense
stare.
His gaze did not relax, “Yes. There‟s nothing diminished in you. I saw a great many telling
things.”
He closed his eyes as though to delve into the memory of them, as though he had long possessed
them and they had not been things he had just seen.
“You are indeed destined for greatness. A greatness you will find in another man. A greatness
other than Tánȧ‟s. You will give rise to that man.”
“Do you mean my son?” she asked vehemently, all fear of the priest forgotten through a confused
hope.
But Ūvthȧch spoke over her, “The path toward this prominence courses on a thread. A thread that
begins this very night with you and I and this.”
Ūvthȧch produced a key from somewhere in the folds of his shirt. It flashed with silver moonlight
when he jammed it into a small recess in the wall. A quick turn and a hard clink. It had not escaped
Sóethȧ‟s notice. The wall that had seemed like sturdy stone slid open easily when he pushed it – a thin
facade of cut stone rolling over narrow-grooved tracks on the top and bottom of an entrance. She knew

52 |
her garden intimately, but what Sóethȧ had thought an uneven chip in the stone throughout the years, was
evidently a keyhole the entire time. She now stood before a gaping doorway, behind which stood a screen
of shadow that moonlight could not penetrate. Shock faltered her breath once more.
“Th i built this escape over the Urmurl tunnels, of which there are many left coursing throughout
M dȧ‟s great hill. As a precaution against her husband‟s growing enmity, she commissioned an engineer
from Mūnmȯ r, talented in the tradition of making secret doors. Eventually, she used this door to great
effect to elude him in pursuit of rebellion.”
Ūvthȧch paused to lean forward. Sóethȧ could not help but flinch slightly.
“He never discovered its existence,” the priest remarked suggestively.
She felt something cold in her hand, and realized he had pressed the key there. Reflexively,
Sóethȧ took it.
Ignoring Ūvthȧch‟s suspicious enlightenment of information exempt from Tánȧ‟s pervasive
knowledge, Sóethȧ asked the priest a separate, more immediate question, “Why are you doing this?”
“I have a talented intuition. It has told me more than once before this night, that whatever
consequence you might cause, the Òmȯr will benefit from it as well. That is what attracted me here
tonight. The traction of your destiny is irresistible. To think, I stood among those warriors calling for you
to be burned in the flames of that day and I agreed with them, when really you would have a purpose
much later for all of us. There is still great violence to be squandered in your name, but the destruction
that follows you is the vaster – a great and terrible carnage. Do not let this knowledge lead you to despair.
Know that in the wake of destruction every man does not suffer, for some will find advantage through the
change it brings.”
Ūvthȧch backed away from the rapt girl into the shadowy mouth of Th i‟s hidden passage.
“You have the key, and the choice to use it. I urge you toward this end for it will lead to our
mutual profit, but I also urge you toward caution. Tánȧ does not expect anything of you now, but he is not
so careless that he will ignore mistakes. As for us, should we meet again, it will be for the first time.”
Ūvthȧch reached for the door, and began to slide it back over its track. Sóethȧ made a half-step
toward the priest, her mouth moving inaudibly, trying desperately to put shape to the noises that lodged
themselves in her throat.
Ūvthȧch‟s blood-swept eyes peered at her through that last glimpse of moonlight before closing
the door, “You need not spend the remainder of your nights muffling your cries on deaf stone.”
The door clicked back into place, as though reality‟s gashed seam had been re-stitched, and that
unlooked for dream had never found her. An odd, pleading utterance finally escaped her.
“What do I do?”

53 |
But it was only to stone she begged.
Much of the excitement from the day‟s celebration dwindled as the night deepened into the
sunless hours of the morning. Only a few g elėmbīch remained in the clanhouse. Most had left Òrmȯlc
and F rȧr were among them. Dūl was left to sit and stare down his mug at the last few sips of his drink.
He turned and peered at his company. Bórdȧ sat leaning back in his chair, in stupored slumber. A pile of
empty mugs laid before him, uncleared after he charmed the serving girl into having a few drinks. She
slept in his lap, her arms locked around his neck and head nuzzled into his broad shoulder. Somehow he
was able to support her despite his deep intoxication. Dūl smirked at the spectacle of his brother, fast
asleep, sitting in his armor.
“It‟s too bad King Tánȧ missed all of the excitement,” Dūl muttered sarcastically to his sleeping
brother.
Dūl looked down at the brāgȧic dóun game board between them. He noticed a move. Dūl pushed
a column of his square stone pieces across the board to take one of Bórdȧ‟s.
“Ho there, kinsman!” another man said as he walked over to the table.
“Ah, cousin Cèmrė,” Dūl said as he perked up. “How goes it?”
“Very well now that we are home.” Cèmrė had set aside his armor, and now wore simple britches
and a tunic, its long sleeves neatly rolled back and tied at the elbow by strands of wool velvet.
“Indeed,” Dūl agreed.
Cèmrė spotted the stone piece in Dūl‟s hand, “Who is winning?”
He looked over to Bórdȧ, his head cocked back in a loud snore with the girl wrapped around him.
“I guess that‟d be him,” Cèmrė said with a nod in Bórdȧ‟s direction.
Both of them laughed.
“I suppose he is. I would like a bit of sleep, or at least some fresh air, but I‟m stuck here watching
him dream.”
“Why don‟t you go ahead and take off?” Cèmrė asked.
“As much as I want to right now, I cannot leave him.”
Bórdȧ sucked in a hard snort from the back of his throat.
Dūl added, “And he will not budge when he gets like this. Not until he‟s ready, and by the looks
of him that might be awhile.”
“Where‟s his boy to take him home?” Cèmrė asked, referring to B cȯg.
“Doubtless out with yours and mine.”

54 |
“And where‟s your respectable older brother?” Cèmrė inquired of Òrmȯlc.

“He took our father home, and then went to find his son. That was awhile ago.”
“Won‟t let Cáenul far out of his sights, will he?” Cèmrė commented casually.
Perhaps he had drunk more than he thought, because Dūl‟s answer was unintentionally candid,
“The boy reminds Òrmȯlc of Óelȧ.”
As soon as he spoke, he wished he had withheld his remark. It was a fact Cèmrė no doubt knew
well. All those who knew Òrmȯlc were aware of the reasons for his descent into debilitating caution, most
evident in his stringent reign over his only child. Sorrow was Òrmȯlc‟s lonely passion its source lay in a
sheltered grave on the outskirts of M dȧ. No one discussed his obvious misery or how love could treat
death selfishly. Perhaps it was out of respect for the private, plaintive warrior that they withheld their
words, but silently and collectively they lamented the grief of the man whom they respected, the man who
had once been handsome with happiness before the unexpected illness of his wife which mirrored so
much the affliction his own mother suffered. All of this presented itself in Dūl‟s mind so that he regretted
breaking the unspoken ban on addressing Òrmȯlc‟s coveted grief, but Cèmrė only nodded thoughtfully
before relieving Dūl with a smile.
“Then, I will stay till he wakes,” Cèmrė offered.
So engrossed in thought over Òrmȯlc, it took Dūl a second before he realized Cèmrė was
referring to Bórdȧ again. Dūl politely protested the offer, “I can‟t do that. He‟s my brother…”
“And my kinsmen as well. I‟ll be up for a while longer anyway.”
“Are you sure? Will Cúnȧ not mind?”
“Oh, she‟ll be no bother. I think I wore her out enough for one evening. I‟ll get him home and
have him ready for tomorrow. You get yourself to bed, and get plenty of rest. You‟ll need it for the tòlȧd
match.”
Cèmrė‟s words struck Dūl.
“I‟d nearly forgotten!” the young warrior exclaimed, smacking hand to knee.
“How could you forget?! The clans always celebrate a victorious campaign with a tòlȧd
tournament, and we‟ve actually both been given the honor of playing for Clan T en. Best clear your head
before then. If today‟s frequent circulation of your name is any indication, then all eyes will be on you
tomorrow, my young cousin. It will be your first time playing as champion.”
“It had already slipped my mind. Thank you,” Dūl nodded graciously despite the urge to kick
himself in retaliation of his own forgetfulness, especially over another unfortunate opportunity to be
ogled.

55 |
Cèmrė smiled warmly. Dūl returned the grin. He stood. The two men locked forearms in a sign
of friendship, and shook firmly.
Dūl turned to walk out the door, then looked back suddenly, “Oh.”
“Yes, cousin?”
“Make sure he gives the girl back.”
With a wry grin, Cèmrė banged fist against chest in salute and watched as Dūl walked away.
The air cooled and freshened as Dūl pushed his way past benches, tables, and chairs, beyond the
warm glow of the clanhouse and through the door, out into unpopulated night.
Paved stones illumined his path by the white shine of the full moon. Steadily he made his way
along the downward turning road. Like some great serpent, the passage of its corkscrewed body coiled
down the length of the enormous hill, its hard stone scales glittering beneath the stars. He passed rows of
silent shops and houses carved from the hill, the same white stone that lined the street – brāgȧicc un,
polished bonestone.
As Dūl made his descent the road made a sharp turn around the hillside. The architecture gave
way to skyline, and Dūl stood before a bridge carved from a shelf in the rock – the Págtr dȯ Fāl, the
White Skybridge. It was one of the revered emblems of M dȧ, cut from bonestone and spanning a sheer
drop between the upper and lower road that wound around the hill. Like the cobbled street, the bridge
shined beneath the moonlit sky, but its smooth polished railing gleamed almost feverishly white in the
dark.
Dūl paused. He was coaxed to stay by the splendor of the night. He strode out to the middle of the
Págtr dȯ Fāl, and leaned against the side. From his perch, Dūl could marvel at the surrounding
countryside, a progression of rippling hills that passed beyond sight into a veil of shadow.
A breeze swept off the rolling landscape and up the side of M dȧ, reaching Dūl and tousling his
long black locks. He thought of the towns around M dȧ, of his early home in G llȧch. He had grown up
there, in the quiet town to the west. His father, F rȧr had been stationed there after the uprising staged by
Prince Fáemȧr and Queen Th i. Only a toddler, Dūl had gone with his family to live in the subjugated
town. What was meant to be a temporary post of a few months turned into the entirety of Dūl‟s childhood.
Anything he remembered of his birthplace was forgotten during infancy. Dūl found that he did not know
the city from which the rest of his family drew their identity. His older brothers could easily recall fond
memories of M dȧ. By the time they moved to G llȧch, Bórdȧ had already spent his formative years in
M dȧ, and Òrmȯlc, being considerably older than both of his brothers, was already training to become a
g elėmbēch.

56 |
Dūl always considered himself a child of M dȧ, knew that he had been born there, even knew that
he was a citizen of the city, but he never went there as a child. He relied on the stories of his mother to
imagine M dȧ, the tales of his father to suppose what it meant to be a clansman of M dȧ. He played with
the children of G llȧch, knew the streets of the subject city, and the hills and streams around it. He felt
more affinity for G llȧch, felt like the G llȧch children with whom he played, but he knew he was not one
of them, a fact that became more treacherously obvious to him as he grew: their fathers worked to make
food and weapons for his.
He had been an inquisitive child. Dūl would often ask his mother why things were so between
M dȧ and G llȧch. His mother told him that it was for the security and benefit of both cities that his father
protected G llȧch and his playmates provided for M dȧ. But her answers never satisfied his curiosity or
his nagging apprehensions. He knew that, if need be, his father would compel his friends‟ parents to work
by threat of violence. It was fear that promoted unity, and a reluctant one at that. They did not want
M dȧ‟s soldiers there, nor did they want the families of M dȧ ruling over them.
Later, as Dūl became older, his playmates realized that they were a subservient people, that he
was an accomplice of their plight and shame. They had less to do with him, until they shunned him
completely.
Once Òrmȯlc completed his apprenticeship and became a full-fledged g elėmbēch, Bórdȧ took
his place and entered into service as an inėnēch, a boy attendant learning the trade of the warrior from
his father. It was then that Dūl grew to understand that he too would one day be an instrument of his
former friends‟ exploitation. He remembered how he had struggled with the concept, trying to justify the
right of might over the weak, until he felt sick, confounded by dueling emotions. Dūl experienced the
same sinking feeling in his gut after his mother died. It was then that F rȧr made him Òrmȯlc‟s attendant.
Dūl had entered early into the ranks of the inėnīch, but his father insisted that he was physically and
mentally mature enough. F rȧr had no desire to leave his youngest son in the care of another after the
death of the boy‟s mother.
Not long after, Tánȧ mustered all veteran units for a summer campaign into the dominion of
Mūnmȯ r. Quicker than Dūl could comprehend, F rȧr was relieved of his post and his family mustered to
M dȧ. Dūl could still recall the sentiments of excitement and awe when he stood in the shadow of the
mighty rock of M dȧ, or the reassuring sensation of a long overdue homecoming.
Comfort had not been a lasting delusion. Dūl learned to be careful how he spoke and acted lest he
present himself as a G llȧch helot to his peers. He learned to fear the humiliation of the other inėnīch if
he ever forgot. That was the price of acceptance, denying many parts of himself that came naturally,

57 |
especially his G llȧch accent, something he was teased for mercilessly. He spoke only little at first, until
he could find the correct, assimilating sounds.
His ignorance of war was another failing point. Though he knew some things of battle through his
father‟s and Òrmȯlc‟s tutelage, warfare was a fact of life for the boys and men of M dȧ – a venerated
privilege, the entirety of identity. But it had not been so integral to the life of a boy in G llȧch.
A desperate drive to belong spurred Dūl to excel. Even in his first battle, he had acted with a
vigor that belied his inexperience. In a few years he could run faster and cast spears better than any of the
other boys.
F rȧr retired from service after forty years, so Òrmȯlc was elected into his father‟s vacant seat as
a captain of Clan T en. When Dūl completed his mandatory years of apprenticeship to his elder brother,
he joined the hallowed ranks of the g elėmbīch of M dȧ.
In the company of his elder brothers, Dūl achieved even greater martial prowess. From war with
the southern villages and Mūnmȯ r, the three shields of the sons of F rȧr were famed throughout West
Árnė. A blur of quick successes culminated in that very day‟s honor of returning first through the Gate of
Champions.
His thoughts turned to the morning‟s discomforting fanfare, and inexorably his hand returned to
the purse tied at his belt. Perhaps for the same inexplicable reason he had taken the boy‟s carved soldier,
he had been unable to relinquish it before the doors of The Summit House. It had been his chance to rid
himself of the thing and the conflicting passions it invoked. But he had held on to it. He stroked the
carved soldier with a cautious finger, and once again found himself pondering Tánȧ‟s lust for conquest,
and the path by which it took him. Suddenly, he yearned for his previous life in the countryside of
G llȧch, devoid of battle and the harsh acts of war.
Dūl shook his head. Composed with heady drink upon the skybridge‟s railing, dazzled by the
starlit hills stretched before him, Dūl was becoming a bit wistful. Dismissing disgruntled thoughts, he
sighed and looked up at the broad moon, and was reminded of a tune that his mother would sing
whenever they ventured out into the moors and gaze at the night sky. The words surprised him as they
conjured themselves from the mists of memory and leapt into his mouth.
Sóethȧ‟s hand guided her down the rough-hewn passage, aided only by the tinkling vision
afforded by one small light. She gripped the candle-holder‟s handle tighter as she combed the walls
around her, confiding in the safety of its flickering glow. By that meager light she hoped to find him – the
man that had lead her into unfamiliar darkness, the man that might answer her questions.

58 |
She had stood in front of the secret door he had shown her for a long time considering his words,
eyeing the key in her hand. Her thoughts had spun around Tánȧ and Gānbȧ and the lingering tingle she
felt when she repeated his words. Death. Greatness. She was not sure what they meant, uncertain if she
could trust the man who promised these things.
In the end, her decision was made with a quick thrust. She half expected it not to work, as if the
opportunity offered to her no longer existed, dispelled like a dream from an unexpected awakening. But
she heard that same gratifying click when she turned the key, and when she pushed the wall gave way.
The priest was no longer there, only a darkness unspoiled by the shining moon.
Gānbȧ could never find me hiding here, she joked to herself in a feeble attempt to lighten the
panic swelling in her breast, only to chide herself when she realized she was being inconveniently
childish. She acknowledged her fear calmly and confronted the fact she had little desire to plunge
sightless into obscure shadow. The thought of running into Ūvthȧch in the dark shot bumps through her
flesh. She could not help but think more and more that that was what the priest wanted, a man Gānbȧ had
passionately derided throughout the years. Gānbȧ‟s staunch belief in the older traditions no doubt wrought
her disparaging opinion of the man for his order‟s part in displacing the Vēuch from M dȧ. Meeting the
man herself did little to discredit Gānbȧ‟s opinions, but Sóethȧ remained firm in the hope that she could
find some salvation in him. Perhaps, Gānbȧ would have told her she was being naive to think so, but it
seemed true enough that he saw advantage in Sóethȧ‟s well-being. If he wanted to harm Sóethȧ, he could
have done so at any time, she considered standing before the door of a passage she had never known to
exist before he showed her.
That had been enough to convince her to fetch the light from her house. The greater part of her
urged her toward caution, warning her not to let anything else through that untested portal by leaving it
open and unattended. She closed the door only hesitantly before leaving, some small part of her fearful
that she had exhausted its use, as though the magic that revealed itself to her after all these years would
wear off if she attempted to invoke it again. When she took the candle from her room she made sure to
don a shabby coat and dress that Gānbȧ had set aside and deemed fit for staining.
Her first step into the passage had not been nearly so intimidating with a light. In fact, she had felt
confident enough to close the door behind her once she checked to make sure the key was still in her coat
pocket. In the unlikely event that someone entered the garden at night, Sóethȧ did not want to reveal the
trail of her whereabouts. However, the door had snapped back into place with a much more ominous echo
once she was within the wall.
Now, Sóethȧ passed along the narrow, unchanging course provided to her in the rocky confines.
Unsure of what to search for, she found protrusions and recesses along the way which looked like they

59 |
might be doors. None of them would budge, or yield to the manipulations of her key. She continued on
her frustrated path, searching the wall with her fingertips and her glowing eyes, unable to find anything.
The absence of anything but the tunnel itself made it difficult to imagine any human had come this way
before. But they had, she told herself.
As she traced the wall, Sóethȧ let her mind wander to forget its fear. She imagined herself as
Th i, Tánȧ‟s last queen striding confidently away to defy him, to meet her entourage of priestesses,
artists, and soldiers in secret and steal away with them. Among them would have been Tánȧ‟s rebellious
elder son, Fáemȧr – a boy barely made g elėmbīch before he went against his father and caused his
younger brother a debt of resentment that could never be paid. Sóethȧ wondered if F inu himself had been
with his mother then, if he had passed down the same dark corridor clutching his mother‟s hand so many
years ago and been smuggled innocently into rebellion.
When sheer rock loomed out of the darkness ahead, obstructing her path, Sóethȧ rushed forward
thinking she had come at last to some door. Only just in time, her eyes caught sight of the pit lying before
the dead-ended wall. She tittered forward on the brim of that expanse for a brief moment, saving herself
from a plunge into its dark mouth by a graceless backward toss of her weight. She fell hard to her seat,
just in time to watch the candle spiral out of sight into the deep gap.
Raising herself carefully onto hands and knees, she crawled cautiously to the precipice and
peered down. Miraculously, the candle‟s flame had not extinguished itself from plummeting. Sóethȧ
praised herself for possessing the foresight to spread a gracious dose of oils on its wick to make it burn
stubbornly. It sat far below, nearly swallowed but for the faintest of flickers in the pitch. But in that brief
moment of its shining descent Sóethȧ had seen the length of rope flung over the pit‟s edge, its darkened
residual image slowly faded from her eyes into absolute black.
Still on her knees, Sóethȧ felt around until her hand ran over the anchored cord of sinewy rope. It
did not feel worn. She traced its length until she discovered the cold touch of metal. A stake, she
discerned by feel, to which the rope was bound. Sóethȧ‟s thoughts and unseeing eyes passed over to
where the pit yawned. Was it a new tunnel below where she could find Ūvthȧch? Or was it merely just a
pit? Surely, it was he or one of his order who had tied the rope here. It must lead to something. There was
no reason not to try as long as the rope held, Sóethȧ told herself. She gave the line a tug and found, almost
to her dismay, that it was knotted fast to its stake, and the stake firmly imbedded in the stone.
Hardening herself with a steady sigh, Sóethȧ grabbed a tight hold on the rope and flung her feet
over the edge. Lowering herself one hand at a time, she began her slow descent. After awhile, Sóethȧ
paused to peer down the line. By the miniscule light of her candle below, she could tell it was a far drop
from the bottom. Sóethȧ wondered how she had gotten herself into such a mess. Her desire to seek

60 |
answers had led her to do something she regretted, she thought as she looked down at the distant ground.
From where she hung, one slip meant disaster. Unlike the candle, she would not last the fall. Sóethȧ
gripped tighter on the line, trusting to her judgment of the stake‟s reliability.
She took a deep breath and began her descent again. Delicately she walked, foot over foot, hand
over hand, down the wall of the chute. When she neared the end of the line, an anxiousness to be done
caused her to quicken her pace. In her haste, one of her feet slipped, and the momentum of her legs
carried her downward, scraping her body over the rock side. Her hands streaked a short distance down the
sinewy line before she found her grip again. Sóethȧ heard loose rock and grit tumble upon the floor
below. She opened her eyes, and peered down at the narrowly avoided drop. Sóethȧ could not imagine a
scenario where she would have escaped breaking a dozen bones. As the sudden shock of fear faded, pain
set in. She could feel sore bruises rising down the scraped length of her right arm and leg. A tender burn
spread across both palms. No matter how badly she wanted, she could not yet let go. Once more she
resolved to plant her feet and press onward, though with more caution.
When she at last reached the bottom of the line, she saw that she was still about a half a body‟s
length from resting her feet. Sóethȧ took one more deep breath. With a final grandiose effort, she leapt
from her rope and came crashing down next to her candle.
Tensed muscles eased and relaxed. Sóethȧ stood up and dusted off her clothes. As foreseen, she
had gotten them quite dirty. Their soiling was of little consequence. She had only to make an easy excuse
to her nursemaid who had stitched them from sackcloth for the very purpose of absorbing spots and
stains. The initial pain that spread across her palms was replaced by an irritating itchiness, one that each
hand took turns scratching. Even in that lean light Sóethȧ could see that they were red.
She turned her head up and gazed at the dark way she had come. It would be a formidable climb,
but she was too distracted by her surroundings to worry about the return ascent for the moment. Sóethȧ
retrieved her resilient candle from where it lay on its side upon the dusted ground. Another cramped
tunnel led her away from where the rope‟s tail dangled. Again, Sóethȧ searched the walls for any sign of
passage or the priest, making sure to check her path for more chance disaster.
Finding another rope cast over a pit would have been more encouraging Sóethȧ decided when she
ran into a dead-end only a very short way down the immediate corridor. Instantly, she began to panic.
Rushing back down the tunnel, she expected to see the rope down which she had just climbed to be
stolen. That was his plan. He would confiscate her return, remove any way for her to go back to her
enclosure, keep her in the dark pit of the mountain for his own insidious schemes where Gānbȧ and Tánȧ
would never find her. She would last only longer than that small light she clutched and be lost forever to

61 |
the dark. Gānbȧ‟s condemning analysis of the Òmȯr priest should have been enough to lead her from such
an end. Why had she not heeded her, neglected the foreboding of her heart?
In the same moment she cursed her gullibility, speeding down the corridor, she saw the rope
dangling as she had left it. Sóethȧ skidded to a halt below and peered up its length as though she could see
past the modest glow of her candle. No sabotage seemed to have been committed. She stood there for a
few seconds imagining Ūvthȧch‟s treacherous presence in blackness far above, watching her through the
screen of shadows, or gently unslipping one knot through the other. But all she could hear was her own
thrashing heart, and she was too afraid to say anything.
“Are you there?” she asked at last of the darkness.
It did not return a response. She waited for one, but it never came.
Perhaps she had been hasty. Want settled her back into the belief that Ūvthȧch deemed to aid her,
but less assuredly for sake of the warning that timed itself to her thrusting veins. She wandered back
down the tunnel she had just traversed, making sure to search all of its surfaces. It was with great relief
and grumbling self-reproof that she found another access. At the foot of what she had previously thought
a dead-end Sóethȧ found a keyhole cut into the floor. Bending over, she felt the inconspicuous trace of a
trap door. Elated, Sóethȧ brandished the key Ūvthȧch had given her and thrust it into the small niche upon
the ground. A familiar reward of moving gears sounded, and the door flung open taking the lodged key
with it.
Sóethȧ was greeted by light and air. Setting her candle down beside her Sóethȧ leaned her head
into the opening. There was a hard-tiled, slanted floor not far below. Gingerly she slid down, and
squeezed her way out from between the trap door and the tiled surface beneath it.
Once out from beneath the rock she found that she had emerged into open night, the glow of the
moon appeared an unseemly iridescence after so much uncertain darkness. Without quite realizing where
she had arrived, she looked back to the hole from which she emerged. Reaching back into the trap door,
she realized it was at the bottom of an overhanging rock protruding from a cliff. Sóethȧ peered up and
witnessed how far she had come the summit of M dȧ‟s hill, crowned by the walls of the White Garden sat
high above her. It was a surreal emotion that struck Sóethȧ to be standing outside those walls, so small
from that distance it took an undeniable moment to admit that she was truly beyond them. Then, with
irrepressible confidence Sóethȧ rose and admired the aspect of her freedom.
For the first time she could remember, she was not in her enclosure. Sóethȧ gaped about her at the
world she had tried to imagine so many times before. She stood on a small stone structure built into the
side of the hill. Its shingled roof slanted down toward the street, which curved around the hillside and
earthward. The road was paved in the same white stone as the building she stood upon, gutter channels

62 |
lining its sides. A row of buildings continued in both directions down and up the street in one continuous
line from the roof she stood upon. Gānbȧ had described the streets so many times to her, but Sóethȧ had
still pictured something different. Sóethȧ had heard the busy sounds of the street so many times before,
and even come to recognize and expect the familiar voices of some of the louder denizens of M dȧ – the
aggressive merchant hawking his wares in the street, the vulgar gossiping of M dȧ‟s prostitutes, the
complaining whine of the boy that lived below. It was odd to see it vacant now, devoid of life as if they
had only been specters of her imagination, as untrue as the vague images she had conjured when trying to
picture her city.
Sóethȧ looked out in the distance she could see the hilly heather-specked countryside beyond
M dȧ. She clambered down the side of the front of the building, and ran to the edge of the street to gain a
better view. Poised on the edge, she stood in amazement, gazing upon the moonlit moors of a world
which she had only dreamed of since she saw it those years ago. The wall that had kept her from such a
view suddenly felt very thin. She looked down the daunting slope, over the many roofs that dotted the
enormous hill, and at once felt the terrific sensation of exhilaration and fear. The bounds of existence
suddenly widened beyond anything she could have expected. Ecstasy turned quickly into an
overwhelming sense of foreboding. Sóethȧ felt very exposed.
She peered about the streets. No one was in sight. Everything was silent. Part of her wanted to be
back in the safety of her enclosure but a prevailing sense of curiosity compelled Sóethȧ, guided her
elsewhere. She crept down the street, combing the dark for tattletale eyes. She passed houses and shops,
and though she looked intently she could not tell them apart.
One of the buildings she came upon exuded a flickering light from the cracks of its shuttered
windows. It was much longer than any of the other edifices she had passed. The thought of people
terrified and thrilled her. She crept closer to a window and leaned forward. She could hear music. She
recognized the slow pluck of a tóundȧ, an instrument that Tánȧ had made her learn to accompany her
singing. There were voices too. They were low and mumbled, but she could hear them. She tried to make
out their words but the wooden shutters muffled them to incoherence.
A boom of laughter pricked her ears. It was accompanied by the sound of wood scrapping across
stone followed by the thud of heavy, trudging steps. Someone was walking toward the door. Sóethȧ
panicked. She ran the way her feet were pointed, further down the street, around the bend and past the
long string of buildings. Onward she ran, away from the person, and further from her return to safety.
When she turned a sudden corner she halted dead in her tracks. Before her the rows of buildings
cleared. In their place there was a spectacular, glittering white bridge. A man stood at its rail. His head
was cocked back and the moon illuminated his dark face. The bridge shimmered with white light. A wind

63 |
blustered up the hill, and in its throes whipped his long curls behind him. This was the first person she
had seen on the outside, the first man who had not come to see her, rather who she chanced upon. She was
captivated.
By his mailed attire she thought him a warrior. Sóethȧ had not known what she expected another
g elėmbēch to look like, perhaps a bit more like Tánȧ and F inu. But this man stood before Sóethȧ to
defy her expectations. He looked little like either one. He wore the same type of armor and garments she
had seen king and prince wear before and after campaign, but his dark features, slender frame, and
smooth black hair were nothing like theirs. Unlike Tánȧ and F inu, whose faces were sharp and angular,
this man‟s was simple. His cheek bones were not so stark, his brow or nose so shapely, but his eyes were
large, and even from a distance Sóethȧ could see their silver twinkle. She realized then that there might be
many shapes of men.
The warrior shook his head. Caution returned, and Sóethȧ was afraid he would see her.
Just as she turned to leave the way she had come, he parted his lips and began to sing. His voice
was soft and melodic, the tune, one she had never heard before. She was rooted to the spot, a captive of
his song:
Though the day was bright

it bore no joy for me,
for Sun was severe in his distance
and ruthlessly bright.
With sheltered eyes
I wandered beneath
his scorched gaze.
But the term of his fierce reign is done,

his tyranny cast
behind the curtain of the sea.
Day’s bustling confusion

and empty sounds
are drowned with him.
Thus, I am abandoned
to the silence of desire.

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That’s when my only companion

ever comes to me.
She greets me with her crescent grin,
her wide, beaming face.
O Moon, see my injuries and touch them.

Render my wounds as storied scars.
Trace them with your delicate, glowing fingers.
Let night deepen around us

and match my bleak heart
with shadow.
My feet have traveled far,

never owning the land beneath them,
never recognizing home,
never coming to any place
but the next.
The days are long in roaming.

I hunger for the night with you,
and when you come, fair Moon,
I rejoice in my solemn way,
bask in your pale beauty,
and let you whisper
that darkness is surer than light;
loneliness is deeper than love;
death less cruel than life.
Sun will come again,

and in the savage dawn
I will mourn our parting.

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Then he will reveal once more

that I belong nowhere,
that there is nothing I possess,
save a long shadow,
an endless path
and this weary song.
Once he finished he lowered his head and braced himself on the bridge‟s railing with a burdened
sigh. Sóethȧ reveled in the beauty of the song. Then she realized herself. She felt shabby in his presence,
bare before such grace, humbled before such saddened splendor.
She inched away as silently as she could manage, but as she stepped back her heel caught the
corner of a protruding cobblestone. Momentum carried her backwards, down to the road with a heavy
thud. The man jerked his head to the sound of her fall. She looked up from her seat upon the ground. A
surge of panic froze her body while the man ran over to her.
Sóethȧ thought of what she would say, what he would do to her – the girl who bound the doom of
M dȧ in her fate. He bent down to her and reached his hand out. She stared at it.
Then to her utter amazement, he laughed and smiled. He did not grimace or stare graven-faced at
her as Tánȧ and F inu would. His laughter did not even resemble their throaty guffaws. It was a musical
mirth, full and pleasant, like Gānbȧ‟s satisfying chuckle when she deigned to be playful.
“Must‟ve had a few to drink tonight,” he grinned. “You‟ll have to watch your step.”
She puzzled over him. He did not seem angry with her. In fact, his calm demeanor and generous
smile indicated otherwise.
“Here, take my hand,” he leveled it before her in invitation.
Sóethȧ, still dumbfounded, grabbed it without thinking.
He pulled her to her feet. She only stared.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
Sóethȧ was able to speak coherently again, “Yes, I‟m fine. Thank you.”
“No trouble,” he added with a boyish grin.
She still gaped at him. He looked back smiling, “I‟m Dūl in F rȧir nóen Tèun,” he informed her,
a slight twitter to his voice.
Another awkward pause while he looked back at her with wide expectant eyes. Then, it dawned
on her. He did not know who she was. Only Tánȧ, Gānbȧ, F inu, and Ūvthȧch knew the specifics of her
face. Here was a stranger that wished her no harm, only the courtesy of his name and a quaint smile.

66 |
Sóethȧ had never felt so ordinary, so genuine. She was at once very relieved. Her cowered expression
relaxed into an excited smile.
“And your name?” he prompted after a brief span of silence.
Sóethȧ had not thought that far. She assumed that everyone knew the name of Tánȧ‟s cursed
foster-daughter. Sóethȧ tried quickly to think of another one. Though she was used to dealing evasively
with Tánȧ, this situation was an unfamiliar source of stress. As she probed her mind for a suitable alias,
Sóethȧ forgot to guard herself from displaying her emotions. Dūl looked suspiciously, as well as a little
bemused at the curious girl.
The first name she could think of burst from her lips. “Sūndȧ,” she blurted. “I am Sūndȧ.”
Dūl waited and looked at her expectantly.
Despite hearing a great many names from Gānbȧ‟s stories, she could not think of one for herself.
“Just Sūndȧ,” Sóethȧ confirmed apprehensively.
Dūl‟s merry laugh sounded once more. She laughed too, not knowing why except for the
giddiness that stirred within her.
“Well then, just Sūndȧ, it is my pleasure to have found you floundering about on the streets at
such a rare hour.”
She caught his joke and laughed, “And I‟m very glad that you found me, Dūl in F rȧir nóen
Tèun.”
“Please, just Dūl.”
“Very well then, just Dūl,” she quipped back.
Dūl stepped backwards and the moonlight struck her face. His grin widened, and his gray eyes
danced with her reflection.
“Sūndȧ. That‟s an odd name, but I can see you‟ve earned it. A curious nighttime gale, indeed,”
Dūl teased her with the connotation of her name.
“Not always. I can be like the breeze,” she said coyly hinting at her true name. For a split second
she was afraid that she was becoming too familiar and that she had given up her identity, but Dūl did not
seem to guess.
“And where to, may I ask, were you riding the breeze at this hour?”
“I came to see,” Sóethȧ glanced past Dūl, “this.”
“This? This what?”
“This bridge,” she said with a gesture in its direction.
“The Págtr dȯ Fāl?”
“Yes,” she answered positively.

67 |
“Have you never seen it?” he kidded.

“No,” she responded before she could consider her answer.
“No? Well, surely you were not blindfolded and I can see that you don‟t have wings,” she still did
not catch his meaning. He continued, “There‟s only one road around the hill of M dȧ and you‟ve come
from the upper road above the bridge.”
It suddenly struck her what Dūl was suggesting. How could she have been so foolish? She
floundered for a satisfactory explanation for her curious answer.
Her best response was nearly lost in a series of mumbles, “Well, what I…um…mean, is that, I did
not get a good look at it since I last came this way. This morning,” she added in desperation, hoping it
made her seem more believable.
He laughed again. More music. “You‟re not from M dȧ are you?”
“No,” Sóethȧ eagerly accepted the explanation offered to her.
“Oh,” he shook his head as though satisfied with that reason for her peculiarity. “Where are you
from then? Fr cmȯr, G llȧch…”
“Yes,” she interjected before Dūl could guess any of the other villages in the region.
Dūl tried to specify, “Yes Fr cmȯr or yes G llȧch?”
“G llȧch,” she answered boldly. The only reason she chose it over Fr cmȯr was because it was
Gānbȧ‟s birthplace.
“Really?” Dūl asked with relish, exactly what Sóethȧ hoped he would not do.
“I‟m from G llȧch too,” he exclaimed. “Well, not from G llȧch. I‟m M dȧ-born, but I grew up in
G llȧch while my father was garrisoned there.”
“The same for me,” Sóethȧ wanted to kick herself for getting further embroiled in a lie she could
not maintain, but Dūl seemed very excited at the prospect and she did not want to disappoint him. More
than that, she did not want to divulge her true background. She wondered what Dūl would do if he found
out who she truly was. He seemed amicable enough. She liked to think he would not mind, but she was
loath to find out.
“Your father was garrisoned at G llȧch too? Our fathers must be well acquainted then. What‟s his
name so I can ask mine?”
“He‟s dead,” Sóethȧ blurted.
“I am sorry,” Dūl gave a polite bow in apology. He dropped the matter. “It is odd to think that we
both grew up in G llȧch. I cannot be much older than you. We must‟ve lived there at the same time, yet
we‟ve never met before tonight,” Dūl stroked his chin as he mused. “Strange how things occur.”

68 |
They spent a long time talking of their homes in G llȧch. Dūl‟s nostalgia had already been
touched on earlier in the evening, and the presence of a kindred spirit only reignited it. He did most of the
talking. Sóethȧ liked listening to him, only adding details about herself every so often which she had
gleaned from Gānbȧ‟s childhood. Her story felt quite believable with one exception when she mentioned
a dried well that Gānbȧ had fallen into as a child. Only after Dūl looked at her curiously had she realized
that Gānbȧ‟s fall had also prompted the filling of the well, years before Dūl or she were even born. She
was able to pretend that she meant her aunt, and not herself. She laughed when Dūl merely complied with
her correction, and continued jabbering. His gullible enthusiasm only made him more personable.
After a few hours, Dūl finally said, “Look. We‟ve talked the night away.”
She looked in the direction of his hand and saw that a tinge of blue light perched on the horizon.
The moon was quickly vanishing.
“I have to go,” Sóethȧ said, an expression of horror shot across her face.
“So soon?” Dūl kidded.
He realized the urgency of her statement though when she bolted in the direction she had come,
clutching the corners of her skirt in a sprint. She was surprisingly fast, Dūl marveled. In an instant she
was around the bend of the hill, leaving him standing dumbfounded, gaping in the road.

69 |
Episode IV: Contest of Glory

It was night. Dūl and Sūndȧ stood on the Págtr dȯ Fāl. Nothing existed beyond them, save for the
eternal moon and stars above, gleaming so brightly that the bridge shone vivid white beneath their shine.
He said something. She laughed. Her smooth skin creased, and charmed him with a dimpled smile. He
leaned forward.
Dunt! A hard blow against Dūl‟s shoulder jarred him from his daydream.
“Catching up on your sleep, brother?” Bórdȧ shouted over the laughter that erupted around them.
Trying to recoup from his daze, Dūl looked about, reconfirming his presence in the world.
It was early afternoon. White clouds lazily scudded around a brilliant sun. Dūl stood on a field, a
square basin of the earth amid the rolling hills around M dȧ, leveled flat under the labor of a hundred
slaves. The grass was carefully kept and mown, and designated as a tòlȧd playing field by the large
rectangular boundaries cut into the turf. Eight g elėmbīch and their inėnīch attendants gathered before
him. None of them donned the battle-gear that they had worn the prior day during their homecoming
march through the Gate of Champions. Instead they wore simple tunics and britches dyed black,
emblazoned with the crest of Clan Tàen – a white mountain pinnacled to a sharp spire.
Among them were his brothers and his cousin Cèmrė. Òrmȯlc and two of the inėnīch stood at
the forefront.
“Throw it back, brother,” Òrmȯlc ordered once the chuckles had died down.
Dūl looked down at the object that had hit him. It was a hard oaken rod, circular on one half,
while the other was hewn into six flat edges and bound with a trailing sleeve of deer skin to aid in the
accuracy of flight. He picked it up and tossed it back to Òrmȯlc.
“You play tòlȧd with your hands,” Bórdȧ reminded him teasingly. “Now catch this one else these
lads will think you a greasy-fingered goat tickler,” the brawny warrior indicated the two snickering boys
before him.
Of the two of them, Cáenul was taller and leaner with a crop of curly black hair. In pursuit of the
likeness of his father, he was starting to outstrip the other boys of his age. The other boy, Dūl‟s inėnēch,
was pudgy by comparison. Fěrm‟s face was round, his fingers plump indeed, it seemed as though the
young boy had managed to retain his toddler-like softness even after the rigors of marching beneath loads
of equipment all summer. As a rule of custom, only females and g elėmbīch were allowed to grow their
hair long, so, like all of the inėnīch, Fěrm‟s auburn hair was cut relatively short. The frazzled length he
did have stuck straight on end.
Both boys were barely old enough to have started their apprenticeship. Only a few months before
M dȧ‟s summer campaign, Cèmrė had approached Dūl about accepting Fěrm, his youngest son, to be

70 |
Dūl‟s inėnēch. Cèmrė already had an attendant with his eldest son, for it was customary for fathers to
apprentice their sons just as Òrmȯlc did with Cáenul, and F rȧr did with Òrmȯlc. Though they sometimes
took on more than one trainee, it was far more common for fathers to ask one of their trusted kinsmen to
adopt a younger son into his service. In that manner the kinsman was honored with the responsibility of
tutoring his relative‟s son in the ways of warrior-hood and his reputation was salvaged, for it was deemed
by the men of M dȧ that a g elėmbēch long without an inėnēch was considered too unskilled,
undistinguished, or untrustworthy to teach another man‟s son. Though Dūl had been quite early in his
career he had more than proved his worth to mentor an inėnēch of his own. So Cèmrė gladly entrusted
his son‟s education to his young cousin in confidence that Fěrm would grow into a capable warrior and
achieve prestige through Dūl‟s fine conduct and superb prowess.
Òrmȯlc held the rod above his head, and with the rounded side‟s flat end pointed forward he cast
it at Dūl. The rod passed swiftly, levelly over the short distance to Dūl, its leathern tail streaming behind
it. Dūl plucked it from the air and in nearly one motion, flipped the rod around in his hand and threw it
back to Òrmȯlc. The tall warrior‟s hand snapped closed on the leathern end of the rod with a satisfying
smack.
Looking down at the young boys beside him, Cèmrė spoke, “Did you see that? How he turned it?
Remember to hold at the middle with your fingertips. It is easier to grip that way. That means easier to
run with and easier to throw. And you don‟t want to throw it any other way either. Always overhand with
the rounded half pointed the way you‟re throwing. So do not catch or grab the rod by the tail. Not only
will we penalized if the judge thinks you have intentionally done so, you will need the tail unfurled when
you throw it.”
Òrmȯlc held the rod out before their eyes, “Even with the leather on the back, the front is slightly
heavier, because the other end has been cut to have six sides. You need that extra weight to carry forward
rather than backwards against the throw.”
“None of those end-over-end throws I‟ve seen you lads give,” Bórdȧ inserted. “That sloppy stuff
will lose us the game today.”
“Make sure your casts are as straight as though you were tossing javelins,” Òrmȯlc reiterated.
“Plant your lead foot and turn with your body as your arm releases forward.”
“We know how to play,” Cáenul insisted.
“Watch your tone,” Òrmȯlc quickly reminded his son of the respect due to elders. “No matter
how many times you have played it is important not to lose sight of the fundamentals. Besides, a boy‟s
first tournament game is quite unlike any other game he has played before on the practice fields. The
stakes are higher now. The older boys and g elėmbīch will not be so lenient with you in this match. They

71 |
are playing for the honor of their clan before all of M dȧ, as are you. Do not forget that. I repeat the things
you already know so that you do not lose sight of them and become over-daunted when the match
begins.”
Words intended for comfort had the opposite effect evidenced in the boy‟s slipping expressions.
They seemed to be reeling where they stood as they considered the upcoming competition.
“Look, all we are trying to do is hit the king down there,” Bórdȧ pointed across the field to a large
bronze bell topped by a smaller one. They were fastened to a sturdy post that stood at the end line. A
semi-circle etched into the earth ran around the prop, and an even larger one encompassed that line.
Bórdȧ continued, “Just like in the other matches you‟ve played, if we hit the king with the rod,
either with a throw to his head or by running up and touching it anywhere on the head or body, then we
win. If they hit ours, then they win, so try to tackle them. You know all of this stuff.”
The boys nodded in agreement
Òrmȯlc added, “Don‟t forget, if you get a tackle or get tackled yourself, try to get up and out of
the way as soon as possible. Reset to your backfield position so our g elėmbīch can form up against the
other team‟s g elėmbīch. You must do this quickly to give us a chance to win possession of the rod.”
“That‟s my job,” Bórdȧ belted, beaming.
Òrmȯlc ignored his brother and kept talking, “No matter who wins it, we will try to push the other
g elėmbīch backwards. If we drive the other team all the way against their own king, we win. They will
be trying the same.”
Bórdȧ waited for Òrmȯlc to finish before talking about his duties, “As the caller, I‟ll be in charge
of winning the rod. Dūl‟s the backer. He‟ll pass the rod back to you inėnīch once I win it, so watch him
and wait for his word.”
Distracted once more, Dūl did not hear his name. He was looking at the crowd gathering on the
slopes bordering the field. There had only been a handful of people moments before, but their audience
was mustering quickly as the multitudes swarmed out of the streets of M dȧ. A body of armed men parted
the crowd near the crest of hills overlooking the tòlȧd pitch. They wore short woolen capes with hoods
and baggy britches, nothing more. Their heads were shaved except for a few that donned beards, the only
vanity allowed to the slave-soldiers of M dȧ. Though he could not see him yet, Dūl knew Tánȧ had
arrived. Sure enough, when the escort reached a platform raised upon the highest lip of the bowled earth
the guards parted and Tánȧ stepped up to take his seat.
“Be careful not to incur a penalty,” Cèmrė chimed in. “This is a tournament game so there will be
judges present, and they will call the game stricter than you are used to on the practice fields. Remember
you cannot pass the rod to anyone in front of you and you cannot catch a pass from anyone behind. Try

72 |
not to drop the rod, and never go into our king‟s inner circle unless the rod passes into the outer circle
first. Any of those gives the other team the rod at the spot of the infraction, so we don‟t want that.”
Òrmȯlc stared down at the boys “Since you‟re flankers it will be important that you line up
quickly in formation every time we reset, and do not cluster. Make sure there is space between you to
pass the rod and get it to the king anyway you can as long as it is in bounds.”
Excited grins burst onto the boys‟ faces.
“And try not to get tackled,” Òrmȯlc added.
Cáenul and Fěrm glanced over to their purple and white-uniformed opponents on the other side of
the field. Large men of the opposing team practiced pushing against one another, while their inėnīch
darted around expertly tossing and catching the tòlȧd rod. The boys' smiles hardened. But the men around
them, the men that had come to know their indefatigable spirits over the months of the first year of
training and even more during the rigors of war, knew it was not a potential of injury that lent their faces
such cautious looks. They were eager to prove themselves, uphold themselves to the same tradition of
honor that their clan embodied.
No longer with any arrogance toward what their seniors imparted, the boys focused on their
upcoming performances while they practiced passing the rod between them.
“Line up,” one of the judges said as he walked out onto the field.
“Dūl,” Òrmȯlc called for his brother to focus.
Dūl turned from scanning the gathering crowd to get into position with the rest of his team.
Though he lacked for sleep after last night‟s rendezvous, he was not tired. He was used to marching great
distances, sometimes with only an hour or two of rest between. In fact, he felt invigorated. But Òrmȯlc
only noticed his youngest brother‟s lack of attention.
“Sharpen yourself,” Òrmȯlc said as Dūl passed by him on their way to the center of the field. It
was not brotherly advice, rather, a superior‟s order which Dūl reflexively straightened to hear.
The teams drew up opposite of each other at midfield. The judges stood between them in their
long, heavy-sleeved robes. Each of them was a grizzled elder, donning the scars of past decades. Like all
retired warriors of M dȧ, they had served a mandatory twenty-four years of service and provided the city
with two children to replace themselves and their wives. They had been chosen by their clan and accepted
by Tánȧ as judges – purveyors of justice under the ancient laws of M dȧ. A judge‟s duties also included
presiding over tòlȧd matches. So sacred was the tradition of the game that it was deemed that only the
highest authority of justice could administer it.
“Who represents Clan T en today?” The judges‟ paired voices boomed across the field.

73 |
“I do,” Mèil stepped forth and announced with a bang of fist against chest. He was a gray-headed
veteran, past his required years of service, but he and his wife had failed to produce any children. So he
continued to serve as g elėmbēch in the ranks of M dȧ, for even though well past his prime, Mèil was still
a hard warrior to contend with and an asset to Clan Tàen. Indeed, he had been chosen for the match
because of the great admiration that everyone accorded him, not only for his skill, but for his steadfast
honor as well.
“And who represents Clan Dáedȧlāch?”
“I do,” a voice emitted from the cluster of purple and white garbed g elėmbīch that faced Mèil.
F inu strode from their midst and slammed his chest with a clenched fist. Undoubtedly, F inu‟s recent
compliment of returning first through the Gate of Champions had afforded him the accolade of captaining
Clan Dáedȧlāch‟s team, if not for the precedence that he was the heir of M dȧ.
“Who is eldest among you?” The answer was obvious but the judges were obligated to ask by
tradition.
“That‟s you, you wrinkled old cock,” Bórdȧ whispered to Mèil.
“I am,” Mèil said simply, maintaining dignity despite Bórdȧ‟s attempts to subvert him.
The judge of Clan S thrė, a meaty, crooked-nosed senior, balanced the playing rod on his
outstretched palm before hiding it behind his back.
He looked at Mèil and told him, “Choose.”
“Point,” Mèil made his selection, picking the rounded end of the rod. In its entirety, the sport of
tòlȧd was a simulation of warfare, and the rod itself was no exception. It was made in imitation of the
javelins so often used by the inėnīch to disrupt enemy formations before the g elėmbīch closed in for
hand-to-hand combat. The circular, heavier half was known as the „point,‟ and the leathern end as the
„butt.‟
The judge held out the rod, his hand grasping the point. Mèil had chosen correctly.
“What‟s your decision?” the crooked-nose judge inquired.
“We shall take the rod first,” Mèil stated with confidence.
“And yours?” the judge turned to F inu.
“We shall defend this side of the field.”
Opening his hands wide, the same judge addressed the awaiting throng of spectators on all sides
of the field. His booming voice echoed, “Clan T en has chosen to receive the rod. Sides shall remain as
they are.”
T en and Dáedȧlāch clansmen cheered from the sidelines as Mèil and F inu returned to their
teams.

74 |
“Alright lads,” Bórdȧ said as Mèil walked back, “you heard him. We‟ve got the rod first, so take
it to them quick, and let‟s get this over and done with.”
Dūl looked over at Cáenul and Fěrm. Clustered together, the two inėnīch tried to appear brave,
but grimaced expressions betrayed their nerves. He reminded them to move further apart with a gesture of
his hands.
“Do not worry,” Dūl told them. “Just keep your head down when you‟re running with the rod.”
Memories of Dūl‟s first game came to him. Like the two boys he had only seen one summer
campaign before playing in a tournament match of tòlȧd. Òrmȯlc was his mentor then, and had earned
both of them the distinguished privilege of competing for T en. Dūl remembered how nervous he had
been. He recalled the grisly image of the inėnēch that broke his ribs after being tackled onto an upright
rod. No amount of javelin skirmishes could prepare you for a tòlȧd match like this, Dūl decided. In tòlȧd,
boys were matched against hardened warriors, and unlike in war, there was a screaming mob watching,
reacting to your every move. It was an important rite for a boy of M dȧ.
“You‟ll do fine,” Dūl reassured them with a brief smile.
The boys nodded, and tightened their resolve.
In truth, it would likely be a hard match for them. Dáedȧlāch played each match like it was their
last, a final chance for redemption from the disgrace of their seditious brethren. Sixteen years‟ duration
had not been sufficient to erase the memory of that devastation upon their legacy – the awkward shame
that most of them were dead because they chose to follow a woman and a boy only to be crushed by a
king.
“Spread out,” Bórdȧ yelled to his team.
Cáenul and Fěrm hustled to move apart.
The players of Clan Dáedȧlāch parted as a tall warrior stepped forth, brandishing the tòlȧd rod.
He proceeded to walk forward, his pace gaining momentum into a run. Before he reached the midline he
planted his front foot and sprang off of it. His arm slung in a wide arc in time with the jump, launching
the rod high into the air. It was a superb cast. The heavy shaft arched high above the heads of Clan Tàen.
And with that mighty skyward thrust, the game had commenced.
The rod almost passed into the ring of cheering spectators that lined the slopes around the field
when it landed with a solid thud at the back of the field near Fěrm. Clan Dáedȧlāch charged down the
field after it.
Fěrm was distracted by the size, noise, and fervor of the crowd. Next to him, the far-flung rod
struck earth startling him back into action. The shouts of his teammates blared in his ears. He bent over
and plucked it from its divot.

75 |
The thunderous charge of Clan Dáedȧlāch resounded. Fěrm could see them, striving down the
field toward him while he held the rod dumbly with one hand. It suddenly seemed absurdly large in his
small fist. He caught sight of Dūl, a welcome sight among all the chaos, calmly motioning for him to pass
the rod.
In the instant it took Fěrm to perceive despair and hope, he tossed the rod to his g elėmbēch
sponsor. Dūl caught the short pass easily and started sprinting down the field. The g elėmbīch and
inėnīch of Clan T en were not far behind. Dūl pulled out to the front.
For mere seconds, both teams looked as if they were charging headlong into the other, but just
before the clash of T en and Dáedȧlāch, Dūl swerved mid-step and pitched the rod back into his pursuing
teammates.
Écmȯen, a T en g elėmbēch in his middling years, caught Dūl‟s throw. Instinctively, he rolled it
over in his hand to grip its butt, just before the teams collided. F inu jumped from the fray and landed on
Écmȯen. But the stalwart warrior managed to toss the rod back to a teammate as he went crashing to the
turf under the weight of the sturdy prince.
The only one there to catch it was B cȯg, Bórdȧ‟s inėnēch and one of the older boys playing.
B cȯg was already quite strong for his age, and had long excelled as a charger, a player who specialized
in short runs and who pushed at the back of the g elėmbīch pack when some extra force was needed.
A slew of Dáedȧlāch players swarmed past F inu as he clambered off of Écmȯen to rejoin the
action. B cȯg had to think fast. A desperate charge through the thick of Dáedȧlāch‟s warriors was
unlikely to succeed, and if he was to be tackled it would place his team in a dangerous position, deep in
their own territory.
B cȯg spared no time. He spotted Òrmȯlc far to his right, towering above all of his teammates
between them. With a hefty lob, B cȯg sent the rod spiraling toward the tall warrior. Òrmȯlc snatched it
from the sky with a casual reach of his long arms.
Dáedȧlāch players swerved from their headlong rush at B cȯg, brushing past him toward the
current rod-bearer. Òrmȯlc stepped down the field in his gaping stride, but it was not his intention to run
the whole long way to the king. Though his steps were wide, he knew he was not fast enough. He meant
merely to buy his team some much needed breathing room from the players of Dáedȧlāch that closed in
upon them.
On his third step, Òrmȯlc leapt forward, his arm cocked back. His slender frame belied
impressive strength, and the tension of his muscles was like a drawn bow. Spectators marveled at the
perfection of his casting form when he loosed the rod into the sky. Of all the warriors of M dȧ, few had
better aim, but none could throw as far as Òrmȯlc. His leveraged height allowed a mighty cast.

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Though the rod was heavy it flew far and high. Both teams raced after it. The two Dáedȧlāch
guards, both inėnīch that acted as a last defense, backed deep into their own territory, their eyes squinted
skyward awaiting the descent of the tòlȧd rod from out of the glare of the sun. One of them spotted it as it
plummeted earthward, gaining momentum in its fall. The boy ran back into the semi-circles bordering the
target. In a terrific leap backwards the young man caught the rod just before it could strike the bronze
head of the king. The nearly achieved brilliance of the moment was echoed in the awe of the audience.
Òrmȯlc had not really intended to end the game so early, but he had come close at such a formative
period in the game. His effort did not go unlauded. Hoots of approval issued from the mouths of all the
assembled clans. Only the members of Clan Dáedȧlāch remained silent as they recovered bated breath.
Still running, Bórdȧ complimented his brother and urged his team, “That‟s the way! We‟ll take
their king‟s head off yet!”
If Òrmȯlc heard him, he made no indication. He strode silently down the field in the direction of
his throw.
The Dáedȧlāch guard had stopped his backward motion and regained his feet, narrowly missing
knocking into the dummy behind him. With his feet once more planted firmly on the ground, he set off
toward the other end of the field. Both teams fanned out – Clan Dáedȧlāch to create opportunities to pass,
and Clan Tàen to disrupt them.
The inėnīch guard took his first chance. When he caught up with a member of his team, he
shucked it to him so that he could return to his defensive backfield position. The receiver was a spritely
inėnēch flanker, not much older than Cáenul and Fěrm, but already well familiar with the pace of the
game. He dashed along the sideline at breakneck speed. Compared to the nimble boy, the g elėmbīch who
turned to stop him looked like lumbering behemoths. He darted through their clutches, leaving only
empty grasps in his wake.
Just before the Dáedȧlāch boy could escape the gauntlet of muscled arms, Cèmrė jumped into his
path. The inėnēch veered to his right in attempt to avert his obstacle, but Cèmrė pounced sideways and
caught the boy by the calf. As gently as he could manage, he jerked the sprinting boy down to the ground.
It was customary courtesy for g elėmbīch and older inėnīch to attempt as much caution as possible when
dealing with the game‟s youngest players, but not for mercy‟s sake. The rigors of an upbringing bent on
war allowed little sympathy for the youths it incorporated. Pain was a process in training towards
toughness, but injury at such an early age could be devastating for long-term careers as g elėmbīch. For a
city that relied on force of arms to ensure its prosperity, any lost recruit could be costly.
The boy fell forward into the turf, his leg snared in Cèmrė‟s hold. Immediately, one of the judges
ran up to them counting, “One…two…”

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Meanwhile, the inėnēch dropped the rod where he fell. Cèmrė and the boy stood, and like all the
other players, scrambled to their positions. Shouts from both teams hustled everyone into their positions.
Bórdȧ could be heard over all, “Get to your spots lads! Not there Gēuld! Écmȯen, you lazy
bastard, get up here!”
Discipline of training showed as scattered players snapped together in an orderly block in a
matter of seconds. The g elėmbīch lined up on either side of the rod, three abreast and three deep, in a
tight square of locked shoulders and woven arms. Éinėnīch strung out behind them like delicate wings on
the end of an armored shell.
The judge concluded his count, “...eight…nine.” He motioned for both packs to join. With a
collective grunt, the teams slammed together forming one solid mass. As his team‟s caller, Bórdȧ leaned
forward and locked shoulders with the man across from him. Écmȯen braced his left arm. Bórdȧ and the
other team‟s caller poised their right hands above the rod.
After a quick inspection of the formation, the judge shouted, “Seize!” swinging his arm down in a
great show of enthusiasm. The Dáedȧlāch caller swept his hand over the rod in an attempt to win it for his
team. He was an instant too late. Bórdȧ swung the rod back through his legs and exclaimed, “Push!” The
g elėmbīch drove forward with all the might that they could muster. Team strove against team. Bodies
pressed, necks flexed, arms tightened, and legs ground the grass to dirt, all to the urgent cries of the
crowd.
No ground was given, and none gained. Dūl, the backer of Clan T en stood at the center of the
third and last rank of his pack. He could feel the momentum shifting in favor of Dáedȧlāch when his back
foot started slipping. It was his responsibility to communicate with the inėnīch. Without pausing in his
efforts, he called “Fourth rank!” back to Còurn, Cèmrė‟s eldest son, and the team‟s big boy. Còurn‟s age
and maturity privileged him with the duty of captaining the inėnīch.
Còurn echoed Dūl‟s command. The two inėnīch chargers hurried to his side. Còurn locked
shoulders with B cȯg and the other charger beside him. Lowering their shoulders, the new rank rammed
into the back of the pack. The sudden burst of force gave Clan Tàen an inch of ground which they
capitalized upon. As Clan T en exploited this new momentum, the Dáedȧlāch drive began to buckle and
slip.
“Push for all you‟re worth lads!” the muffled holler of Bórdȧ came from the midst of the grinding
press of bodies.
Striving legs found traction, and soon Clan Tàen was shoving its opponents back in great strides.
When it emerged from the mass of thick legs, Còurn grabbed the rod as he passed, and continued to push
onward.

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Before they could reach their midline, team Dáedȧlāch checked their efforts. The Dáedȧlāch big
boy called for “Fourth rank!” An ordered row of inėnīch clambered forth and heaved against the growing
impetus of their opponents, but they only managed to slow the rapid progress of the Tàen pack.
“Keep on!” Bórdȧ urged his clansmen again.
In desperation, the Dáedȧlāch backer called, “Fifth rank!”
The line of boys shoving at his back shouted to the younger boys behind them summoning
another rank from the less experienced inėnīch flankers. Though they lacked the skill earned from
veterancy, they possessed a feverish enthusiasm. Their charge was enough to halt the tiring Tàen pack,
and set it on its heels. The men of T en were forced back a step, all Dáedȧlāch needed to attack.
When the closest judge spotted the rod moving in another direction other than forward, he
shouted, “Free!”
With that signal, the Dáedȧlāch broke rank and charged forth, rounding their opponents to tackle
the rod-bearer. Còurn ducked out of his comrades‟ loosening arms and tossed the rod back to one of the
free flankers. In a quick series of passes, the rod skipped down the line of flankers until it came to Cáenul.
He grabbed it from the air before realizing what he was doing. Cáenul looked up at the warriors
thundering down upon him. Feebly, he fumbled to spin the leathern end of the rod into his palm, as his
father and uncle had shown him.
“Run,” Fěrm called to him from the side, his eyes as stupidly wide as Cáenul‟s. With that uttered
word, Cáenul forgot himself. In his awe, all he could do was as his friend suggested. Cáenul bolted down
the field, faster than he ever thought himself capable. Fěrm and the other young flankers followed after
him, trailing on either side of him.
There was a great deal of space ahead. Most of the inėnīch had been taken out of a defensive
position to help the pack. Now Cáenul and his peers were stripping past the cluster of both teams, unable
to detach themselves quickly enough to reach him.
One very young flanker remained in his way. His confused mannerisms betrayed his
inexperience. The Dáedȧlāch boy made a feeble attempt to tackle Cáenul, but only grazed an arm as
Cáenul whipped past.
All that was left were the two older inėnīch guards. They ran out to meet him, legs bent and set
wide, prepared to pounce at Cáenul from any angle. Cáenul looked at the guard before him. It was the
same tall lad that had snatched Òrmȯlc‟s cast. He was expressionless but alert. Cáenul could tell by his
fingers which flexed menacingly. As he neared, the Dáedȧlāch guards crouched slightly, readied to spring
for a tackle. Cáenul clinched his eyes shut and braced himself. He discerned the shouts of his teammates
from the cacophony of cheers and frantic yells.

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“Pass the rod!” they told him. “Hand it off!”

Cáenul‟s ample eyes shot wide again and he glanced back to his left. He could see Fěrm running a
little behind him, just on the periphery of his vision. He lifted his arm and the heavy rod it bore, but as he
did so one of the Dáedȧlāch guards sprang at him. The guard caught him above the hip, spearing Cáenul
in the side with the entire force of his body.
A hasty pass tumbled through the air to the plump boy running beside Cáenul. Panic unsteadied
Fěrm and he bobbled the rod in his hands. The other guard anticipated the pass, and leapt into Fěrm‟s
chest before he could firmly possess it. Fěrm bounced to the ground, clutching the rod with one hand.
Again, the nearest judge began his count, booming out the numbers as he ran up to the spot of the
tackle amid the other players. When the g elėmbīch reached them, the tacklers stood and eased away,
leaving Cáenul and Fěrm to slink off to their positions with a new compliment of scrapes and bruises.
Once more the rod was set, and both clans aligned their g elėmbīch in opposition, forming up in
dense ranks of three. Again the judge called “Seize!” and both callers vied to snatch the rod, though this
time Clan Dáedȧlāch was the successor. The rod swept through the legs of their g elėmbīch. The
Dáedȧlāch pack rumbled forward slowly. From the midst of the drive, a Dáedȧlāch third ranker broke
free. He was a stout fellow, broad shouldered but agile and sure-footed. He side-stepped Mèil, and
knocked Cèmrė away with an angled shoulder, but the blow slowed his charge enough for Dūl to reach
him. The young g elėmbīch brought him down with both arms tight about the man‟s broad waist.
Again they assembled in their packs over the rod. Thus they battled on, the tòlȧd rod passing back
and forth between them. Both clans braved the field in bold drives, frenzied runs, and cunning throws
demonstrating the prowess of their heritage, until the sun passed into the lower quarter of the sky and they
were exhausted in the struggle. The crowd never tired though. Men and women, the young and the old, all
of M dȧ urged them on, begging for the final moment of glory when rod touched king.
“Come on lads,” Bórdȧ panted, his voice rasped by thirst. “It‟s no time to give up now.”
“Seize!” The Judge announced.
Bórdȧ snaked the rod back to his fellow g elėmbīch. Both packs struggled to shove each other,
but the action had degenerated into a sloppy pushing match. The two factions fought to a standstill.
Gaining no ground, Dūl decided to try a run with the inėnīch. He shouted to Còurn and the big boy
heeded. The inėnīch heard their captain‟s command, and strung out in a single sloped line behind the
right of the pack. The Dáedȧlāch scrambled to defend against them, lining up across from their T en
counterparts.
Dūl handed the rod to Còurn who stood just behind him, and Còurn passed the rod to B cȯg who
now stood a little to his right. The line of inėnīch powered forward. Though, worn and weary they

80 |
dashed down the field, pattering at a mad pace. The g elėmbīch were too far to the left to reach them. It
was a match between inėnīch.
In turn, the boys of Dáedȧlāch closed in on them, but those of T en were ready. Before a tackle
could be made, each boy would toss it to the next, enabling the next inėnēch in line to run past. Their
timing was precise, each waiting just enough time to draw a defender before passing to a teammate.
Down the line, the rod skipped. Even Cáenul executed the strategy perfectly. He eyed his oncoming
adversary, the boy he had dodged earlier, before passing the rod to Fěrm on his right. The Dáedȧlāch boy
did not miss this time, however. Cáenul struck the ground under the brunt of a hard tackle.
All that remained of the inėnīch were Fěrm and Sōnėn, a slightly older boy, lithe and agile.
Sōnėn was one of the fastest players on the field, and if he could manage past the last of Dáedȧlāch‟s
defenses no one would catch him. Only one inėnīch opposed them. Fěrm charged his match. Both boys
flinched before they collided. Fěrm crumpled into a heap upon the ground, but he no longer bore the rod.
Instead it spun through the air toward Sōnėn‟s open hand. No sooner had hope beamed, when it was
utterly dashed.
To the horror of all Clan T en, the same skilled Dáedȧlāch guard who had snatched an early
victory from Òrmȯlc bounded by and snagged the rod before Sōnėn could seize it. In his rush to steal the
rod, the guard had made an impossible leap. He paid for the attempt, landing awkwardly on his feet
before tittering a few steps and stumbling into the turf, much to the relief of the on-looking Tàen.
But respite was only momentary. Twisting his neck to peer over his shoulder, the guard lofted the
tòlȧd rod backwards as he tumbled earthward. For a brief instant the rod seemed suspended in the air
spinning before a den of eager eyes. Downward it fell, captivating the audience to silence in its dance of
descent. But someone was there to catch it. Féinu clasped the rod and tucked it close to his side. Shirking
off the two closest g elėmbīch, F inu bolted onward. His nearest pursuers trailed at a distance. Dūl was
closest, chasing his rival with as much vigor as he could muster from his tired muscles, but even he
followed F inu behind a great gap of open field.
Wild cheers erupted from the multitudes. F inu pressed on, bargaining the remainder of his
energy on one final run for victory. All that stood between him and the king were two wary inėnīch
guards. They crouched in stance to dive whatever direction F inu might cut, but to their surprise, he did
not change his path. F inu lowered a shoulder and hammered his way through. One of the boys slammed
into the earth with a busted mouth. Many witnesses decried the harsh hit. The other inėnīch just barely
latched on as F inu crashed through him. Spun around by the undaunted force of F inu‟s run, he was only
able to grab the brawny warrior from behind, around the neck with one over-slung arm. The inėnēch dug

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his feet into earth trying his best to drag his catch to the ground, but F inu continued to hulk down the
field, closer to his target.
F inu broke the boundary of the first circle and even the second, and kept thundering onward.
The boy grappled for a better, crippling hold on the large warrior. F inu raised his arm before the king,
rod in hand, to deliver the final blow, but before he could the boy jumped on his arm and jerked it down.
If he was not strong enough to tackle F inu, he would at least use all of his weight to hinder him. F inu
grabbed for the rod with his other hand, but the boy released F inu‟s arm and pulled the rod with all his
might, lowering himself to the ground and heaving with his entire mass. F inu‟s strength was relentless.
With clenched arm F inu began to pull through the dangling weight of the inėnēch however, the boy‟s
struggle was not in vain.
Dūl witnessed the mismatched contest before he reached them. When he arrived he thrust his
hand into the squabble and clapped his hand around the boy‟s. Dūl yanked the inėnēch back down so that
his heels rested once again on grass. With another hefty tug, the rod came free. The boy spilled to the
ground. Pulled by the force of his own weight, F inu slammed against the hard resounding body of the
king. The hollow din of F inu‟s failure echoed over the mouthing crowd. Dūl stared at his prize with as
much awe as his audience. His eyes did not linger long, nor did he tarry. Dūl spun around and took off
toward the other end of the field, into the oncoming rush of g elėmbīch and inėnīch. Bellowing in
frustration, F inu pulled himself up and set off in pursuit, stepping over the befuddled inėnēch as he
went.
Dūl ran at the oncoming swarm with gritted teeth and desperate intent. He had no idea of what he
was about to do. Soon they were upon him, but he dodged their grasps, weaving through their ranks while
his teammates tried to maintain his vicious speed. A quick spin afforded Dūl a narrow escape from the
hard, flying tackle of one of the Dáedȧlāch g elėmbīch. A rapid pump of his feet deceived an inėnēch
into a premature dive. The boy skidded past him as Dūl charged forward again. Dūl‟s swift maneuvers
had won him much of the field, but they had not bought him any time. Dáedȧlāch g elėmbīch blocked
him. He attempted another spin, but did not fool anyone a second time. Mid-rotation, a burly warrior
seized him around the shoulders from behind, pouring on all of his girth to carry Dūl down. Steadfast, Dūl
remained on his feet, driving back against his aggressor with all his might.
“All you‟ve got brother!” Bórdȧ impelled before plowing into Dūl. The bulk of his stout body
stabilized Dūl. Together the two warriors pushed against the tackle, Dūl driving his heels backwards
while Bórdȧ powered into his brother‟s waist. The combined force of brothers turned the momentum in
favor of Clan T en. Being carried toward his own end line, the embroiled Dáedȧlāch tackler struggled to
shove them back. G elėmbīch and inėnīch from both teams hustled to support their teammates, latching

82 |
onto their comrades in an effort to drive the other side. Dáedȧlāch strove to capsize Dūl, and T en to keep
him on his feet progressing toward the king.
Impetus remained with Tàen. Onward they trudged against the tide of boys and men. The judges
jogged beside them. The crowd continued its roar. Still, the Tàen pack plodded on, employing every bit of
force that remained in their tensed and wearied muscles. Suddenly, they began to slow. They were losing
energy quickly. Dūl stood wedged at the center of a mass of tangled arms and legs, stuck facing the
opposite direction in which his team strove to move him. He gulped for air, his ribs pinched by the jam of
bodies. Dūl‟s legs tightened, and his knees threatened to buckle, but he could not fall if he wanted to, so
tight was the vice the g elėmbīch had designed for him.
A burst of power whipped into his back, and lashed his neck. F inu had caught up with him. The
massive warrior had circled the g elėmbīch and slammed into the rear of his pack giving it fresh
momentum. Dūl stumbled with the motion of bodies.
“Take it,” Dūl wheezed to Bórdȧ with gasped breath. Bórdȧ was still hunched against his brother,
arms around him, his head tucked to Dūl‟s side. He heard his brother‟s plea amid the chaos and clamor,
and knew what he meant. Bórdȧ tried to unwind his limbs from the others and reach around to the rod. He
felt for where Dūl was shielding it. At last, he touched the leather butt of the tòlȧd rod, and took it from
his brother.
“Break, break!” Bórdȧ shouted over the trample of feet, much louder than Dūl thought he could
manage at this taxed stage of the match.
The g elėmbīch knew their cue. The inėnīch followed. The players separated and scattered.
Bórdȧ ran a few feet back, and looked for an opening. The Dáedȧlāich stumbled forward without the prop
of the other team, and glanced momentarily around in the confusion for the rod-bearer. Nothing showed,
then Bórdȧ caught sight of his brother, towering above all others on the field. Òrmȯlc ran horizontally to
the far right and raised one lengthy arm in signal. Bórdȧ shot the rod to the warrior who snatched it easily
from the air and began running along the sideline.
Dáedȧlāch heads turned in the direction of Bórdȧ‟s throw. Their feet followed. Òrmȯlc tore down
the flank of the field in great strides, though he seemed a lumbering giant compared to the onrushing
inėnīch. Nearer and nearer he came, until he could see the lone dummy clearly and brightly beneath the
sun. He wound his arm back, and slung it forward, loosing a lightning-paced cast. He had tried his hand at
the king once before, much earlier when he had not been so tired and the day had not seemed so toilsome,
but there was no one there to defend against him a second time. He would not miss again.
Whack! The rod bounced off the head of the king, point first. For an instant, all that could be
heard was the clear note of that bell tolling its gloried notes over the speechless, hearkening multitudes. A

83 |
wild uproar ensued. In their thousand varied cries, all the clans of M dȧ praised the prowess of the
players, the valor of Dūl‟s run, and the talent of Òrmȯlc‟s cast. Angry cries of disbelief from the
Dáedȧlāich only supplemented the din. Games of such caliber, such ferocity and heart were a rare and
beloved spectacle to the people of M dȧ. Only the old men would be able to compare that day‟s match
against Dáedȧlāch and T en to anything they had ever seen. Such a game would be recounted by old men
many decades after they had witnessed it as boys, held as the basis for entertainment among a generation.
Utter jubilation made the T en players forget their exhaustion. The other g elėmbīch ran to
Òrmȯlc with beaming grins and congratulatory pats.
“You lanky bastard, you did it!” Bórdȧ shouted over the chanted name of his clan.
Òrmȯlc merely nodded humble thanks as his kinsmen danced around him. He was distracted by
his youngest brother. Dūl stood beyond the circle of jovial teammates, searching the mob of spectators for
something that seemed lost to him. Òrmȯlc noticed Tánȧ as well, seated upon his elevated bench. The
king applauded, slapping hand to knee, then leaned over to a man who was not there mere seconds before.
The Hound knelt beside his master, and Tánȧ muttered a something into his ear. With only a few words
spoken to him the Hound‟s eyes snapped to the side. Òrmȯlc traced the slave-captain‟s gaze to Dūl. He
wondered what Tánȧ could be telling the Hound, the only man that Tánȧ fully trusted. Òrmȯlc looked
back at the Hound. Piercing, scar-rimmed, gray eyes stared back, causing him to quickly avert his eyes.
He waited a few seconds before attempting to steal another casual glance. Tánȧ sat alone.

84 |

85 |
Episode V: Temptation
Sóethȧ stretched her arms to the head of her bed. Then, with the back of her hand, she scraped the
pall of sleep from her eyes, gave a contented yawn and sat up. She had slept soundly, so deeply that she
had not heard Gānbȧ enter. Sóethȧ‟s waking eyes creaked open. A dull image sitting at the end of her bed
sharpened, revealing the nursemaid wearing a pensive look of concern.
“Did you sleep well?” Gānbȧ asked.
“Yes, very well,” Sóethȧ said with a drowsy smile.
“Oh, well, I suppose that‟s good,” Gānbȧ returned a meager grin. She looked the girl over.
Though Gānbȧ tried to subdue it with a smile, her expression drew tighter and her eyes narrowed.
“What does that mean?” Sóethȧ chuckled.
Gānbȧ took the opening, “I just mean that you‟ve slept past noon, which usually means you
couldn‟t go to sleep, and I did leave you in a sorry state last night, not by my own wish, but at your
behest, mind you.” The nursemaid paused to sigh, her already poorly concealed concern now unbridled in
a grimace, “I just want to know there‟s nothing wrong.”
When Gānbȧ spoke that phrase, Sóethȧ always knew that she was as curious as she was upset. It
was her way of hinting toward the discussion of whatever problem Sóethȧ was facing. She must have
found out about Tánȧ‟s plans.
“Well, yes, I suppose something‟s amiss,” Sóethȧ said through another yawn.
“You suppose?” Gānbȧ‟s brows arched to match the pitch of disbelief in her voice.
“Yes, I suppose. But I‟m not letting it bother me at the moment.”
Gānbȧ only looked bewildered at the girl.
“I‟ve heard about Tánȧ, Sūndȧ. I know you must be upset. Please, just talk to me,” she pleaded.
“I don‟t really care to,” Sóethȧ feigned nonchalance.
Confusion scowled Gānbȧ‟s features.
“That‟s all fine and good but you‟ll have to face this soon,” she said as she stood up. She sighed
and then smiled pleasantly, “In the meantime, I know what might cheer you. How about some of my fresh
bread that you love so much?”
The girl smiled and nodded. Gānbȧ‟s grinned affectionately, then turned to duck through the door
of the little house.
“Gānbȧ,” Sóethȧ stayed the woman. “There‟s something I‟d like to talk about when you return.”
“What‟s that, child?”
“Will you tell me more about G llȧch?”

86 |
Gānbȧ considered the strange request for a moment, then smiled again and nodded. After Gānbȧ
made her exit, Sóethȧ looked down at her hands. Pink streaks still shown on her palms. Sóethȧ inspected
her rope burns. She realized then, that she had lived the finest night of her life. The thought warmed her,
but the bliss did not last more than a brief moment. Sóethȧ was left with the cold, numbing realization that
the ecstasy she felt would not exist again other than in memory. She would not be using the door again. In
opening it to look for answers, she had only found more frustration. It was clear Ūvthȧch did not want to
be found. She determined the risk was too great, no matter what alluring uncertainties the priest had
spouted for her. Sóethȧ could not imagine what Tánȧ‟s wrath would be if he found her sneaking around,
probing the limits of his control. He had already taken so much from her. The ire of strangers was an
equally terrifying danger. As she had so many times in her life she recalled the fiery, gnashing image of
warriors baying for her incineration, so vividly it seemed her own memory. No, it was not safe for her to
prance around at night pretending she was someone other than Sóethȧ. Pretending she was Sūndȧ.
Sūndȧ.
She heard him say the word, repeat it in his casual, tuneful way, and her heart caught fire with the
music of his voice. Night unfolded around her once more, and she stood sheltered in that perfect moment
of twined isolation when he had sung his saddened song and unwittingly sung for her, when she at last
comprehended the meaning of a word she had just been pondering earlier that night, a word that had
eluded her her entire life. Beauty was a feeling, not just a simple thing. She understood that now. At that
moment, more than anything she wanted to sing that song with him.
Greatness. Destruction. For good or bad she did not believe in the prophecies anymore. She never
had, she decided, though that was another lie. When Sóethȧ had returned early that morning by Th i‟s
passage, emerged into the gray light of that budding day, she had buried the key next to the doorway in a
bed of withering bloomshades. There was nothing beyond that night for her. Nothing but Tánȧ.
A sudden burst of jubilance startled her from brooding. She ran outside into the grass, barefoot in
her nightgown, and stared in the direction of the roaring cheers, but all she could see were hard walls and
open sky above them.
A brisk wind swept up the side of M dȧ shivering Dūl as he stood upon the Págtr dȯ Fāl. The first
chill of autumn had arrived, and he was not quite prepared for it. He could hardly believe such a night
belonged to the same day that had nearly sweated him dry. A rift of sleep separated the two making them
feel wholly disconnected.

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Fatigue had finally caught up with Dūl after the tòlȧd match. He had fallen asleep at The Summit
House, and when he had woken and realized what hour it was, he excused himself from the celebrations,
not that any one of his fellow clansmen noticed. They had consumed a great quantity of ale before his
nap, and Dūl was certain they kept drinking in the meantime to properly commemorate T en‟s most
recent victory in tòlȧd. Indeed, he awoke to one of the bawdier songs in Bórdȧ‟s repertoire. His brother
had been leading a sloppy chorus to the blaring tune of „I‟ll be a Badger‟s Wife.‟ It was a crass ditty of
suspicious origins, popular for its jilting rhymes and suggestive narrative, and considered complimentary
to the convivial atmosphere which Bórdȧ so swaggeringly created. Bórdȧ claimed that it was an old
melody, but no one had known it before he started insisting on singing it. With Bórdȧ back in the city, it
had become a fairly accurate measure of midnight in The Summit House, and a sure sign that F rȧr‟s most
sociable son had passed a point of lavish inebriation.
That had been hours ago. Dūl had spent them on the skybridge watching as the lights of the
houses stretched below him dwindled and extinguished for the evening. The chill had only thickened with
the deepening darkness. No one had passed him by in quite some time. Yet, still he waited. Though for
what, he was not sure anymore. Dūl did not know what he expected from their meeting, but he could not
stop thinking of her. He envisioned her perfect form. The pleasant image of her smile pervaded his mind,
and for a moment he forgot the cold. He recalled the tinkling sound of her laughter, and it warmed him.
Whatever part of him could provide joy he wanted to offer it to her, just to witness her mirth once more.
Dūl had to admit to himself that he was smitten. He had not been able to talk with anyone else as
he had her, not even his brothers. Bórdȧ could never manage to be serious. Even to battle he went with a
hearty laugh. As for Òrmȯlc, it was not that he would not listen, but he did not seem to understand Dūl‟s
perspective on many things. Perhaps, the discrepancy between their years accounted for much of their
difficulty in seeing eye-to-eye. Òrmȯlc was almost twice as old as Dūl, and the rift of their age and the
disparity of their childhoods seemed irreconcilable – Òrmȯlc‟s steep foundation in the traditions of M dȧ,
and Dūl‟s rustic upbringing in the countryside of G llȧch. Besides, Òrmȯlc was no longer the best man to
ask for counsel. Dūl did not think his eldest brother unwise, arrogant, or ungenerous. He knew he was
none of those things, but Òrmȯlc‟s advice was based solely on logic. He had little accommodation for the
vigors of the spirit. Òrmȯlc had always been a more sober individual, but in the recent years following his
wife‟s death, he had become stern in his pursuit of the practical including the traditions of M dȧ and the
proper rearing of Cáenul. Dūl could recall a time when Òrmȯlc had been a more even-tempered
companion, even a bit teasing at times. Bórdȧ and he had looked up to their brother so much then. But
since, Òrmȯlc had become stingy with smiles and miserly with praise, and his demeanor had turned many

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shades more grim. Òrmȯlc would probably dismiss Dūl‟s unbelief in Tánȧ, and even his affection for
Sūndȧ as the misguided energies of youth. But Dūl did not think they were.
He had been able to talk to Sūndȧ so openly. He felt comfortable in her presence, liberated from
all of his anxieties. In fact, he had forgotten himself several times the previous night, becoming excited
while talking about something or hearing her mention something in agreement. More than once he had
noticed his subdued G llȧch accent slip in a moment of enthusiasm.
For the tenth time that night Dūl fixed the hay-crown upon his head. The circlet of tender river
grass weaved a purple-lacquered wreath over his brow, drawing down dark curls that flitted in the frigid
wind. All of the g elėmbīch who had played and won at tòlȧd that day were gifted that emblem of their
triumph over Dáedȧlāch. Over the course of the night he waited for her, he had gone back and forth on
what she would find more attractive: modesty or the prowess of which that braided coronet boasted. Dūl
did not think she cared about such things, but he could not be sure. Much of him did not want her to be
swayed by such laurels, as he himself cared little for them, but it would make things easier for him if she
was. Everyone else seemed more than awed with his performance. It was not unlikely that she might be
similarly impressed by his achievement. But Dūl recalled his memory of the night before as he had
countless times already. She had seemed uninterested in the casual mention of his championship, so he
had gratefully turned to other topics. Perhaps his donned trophy would only seem a garish vanity to her.
Then he remembered dejectedly the way she had run off. He did not even have a chance to say
farewell, and she had not given him so much as a glance back. Suddenly, Dūl felt very stupid. She had
probably not thought twice about him, and here he was in the dark with nothing but the chill to keep him
company, standing, waiting, pining for her on the spot where they had met, just wishing that she would
pass by and recognize him. He would be lucky if she even looked in his direction. The wind touched upon
his skin, suddenly very cold.
“I‟ve been foolish about everything,” Dūl said despondently, aloud to no one but himself.
He slipped off the hay-crown once more, then patted the bridge‟s rail and turned to leave.
“What are you being so foolish about, Dūl in F rȧir nóen Tèun?”
Startled, Dūl spun around to face his inquisitor. Sūndȧ stood before him, her arms folded, wearing
a demure grin. Her golden hair was bound in two long tresses that hung over her bare shoulders and down
the front of a white dress. Her big brown eyes encompassed his reflection. She sparkled with the night,
and was more beautiful to him than his memory served.
“Sūndȧ!” Dūl exclaimed, the smudge of disappointment across his face instantly transformed into
an expression of exuberant wonder.
“I told you that this windstorm could be as soft as a breeze,” she eyed him playfully.

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Dūl smirked.
“So do you always stand out here for no reason, or are you just waiting for young girls at this
unlikely hour?” she asked him.
“I nearly gave up waiting,” Dūl divulged.
“I was afraid you would not be here,” she blurted back.
Dūl scratched the back of his neck, Sūndȧ blushed, both embarrassed to reveal how eager they
had been to see each other. But relief outweighed awkwardness. Dūl could not repress a grin that she
instinctively returned. They chuckled nervously.
After a moment Sūndȧ noticed something.
“What‟s that?” she asked, pointing to his hand.
After so much debate, he had forgotten about the hay-crown which he now held at his side.
“It‟s a hay-crown. The winners of today‟s tòlȧd tournament received them,” he told her, less
confidently than he has earlier imagined himself.
“You played in the match today?” she seemed enthused at the thought.
He was encouraged. “I looked for you in the crowd.”
“I was not able to come watch. I only heard it,” there was some layer of dejection beyond
disappointment in her voice that Dūl decided not to question.
He thought for a moment.
“Here,” he said. “This is for you then.”
Dūl handed her the hay-crown. The gesture provoked its intended response in her delighted smile.
She slipped the braided grass down on her own head. It looked oversized on her.
“Like this?” she asked just before it slipped down her forehead to the bridge of her nose.
Delicately, he reached out and tilted it back on her head.
“Perfect,” he answered and she laughed in her striking, mesmerizing way.
The image of her standing before him, joyed by what he had won for her, caused Dūl a happiness
he had never known. He was overawed by its existence.
Another breath-robbing gust blew up the side of M dȧ. Sūndȧ‟s uncovered shoulders trembled
with the cold.
“Let us go some place warmer,” Dūl offered with a gesture of his outstretched hand.
She looked at it, then glanced back up the road. He felt stupid holding his hand out to her while her head
was turned the other way. Reluctantly, he started to retract his arm, but before he could, she grabbed it.
He grinned. She smiled back. Dūl turned with her and they set off down the road, hand-in-hand,
carried lightly by a mutual bliss.

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As the two rounded the corner, and the girl pulled herself closer to the young g elėmbēch,
someone watched from the other side of the bridge, sheltered by the dark. When they passed from sight,
the figure leaned back into the shadows and reentered the night.

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Episode VI: The Assembly of Heirs

A procession of g elėmbīch filtered through the narrow doorway of the House of T ephȯr. A
frigid night had warmed very little with the coming of day. Blustery winds blew at their backs, ushering
them up the mountain road and into the palace with a cold shove. The men stretched out in a long line that
wound its way up to M dȧ‟s leveled summit. On this occasion, the g elėmbīch were not gird for war.
Their long sleeves, usually tied above the elbow during times of conflict, were unfurled as a sign of peace
for the upcoming congregation. These were clan chieftains and their closest relatives, the male members
of the noblest g elėmbīch families in M dȧ. Each one of them could trace his lineage back to a son of
T ephȯr, M dȧ‟s founder and first monarch. The four sons of the hero-king formed the basis for clan
membership through line of their descent – the four clans of M dȧ.
Dūl and his brothers were among their number. Òrmȯlc towered over the procession as he
plodded beside Dūl. Unsparing of any attention other than what he gave to his own morose thoughts,
Òrmȯlc seemed to be in a particularly surly mood. Bórdȧ walked ahead of both of them, a cluster of other
g elėmbīch gathered around him laughing at one of his more obscene anecdotes. Òrmȯlc, on the other
hand, remained silent, grave as he marched toward the open mouth of the palace. Dūl knew that matters
of the upcoming assembly were weighing upon him. Ever since Òrmȯlc had inherited his father‟s position
as one of Clan T en‟s captains he had been thrust into a role of upmost responsibility. In his position of
authority and for being the eldest of F rȧr‟s three champion sons, Òrmȯlc would be expected to make his
opinion known at the impending congregation.
It was the anticipation of frustration that no doubt already put Òrmȯlc in an aggravated state. He
would enter into the hall and for once be given open, legal opportunity to announce all private
dissatisfaction of M dȧ‟s current decadence and misdirection. On this day, without anyone questioning the
resolve of his sworn loyalty to M dȧ‟s king, he could loudly speak his mind for a return to the stability of
old ways before an audience of men who might echo him. But he would not. Òrmȯlc‟s reservation in the
Assembly of Heirs seemed a contradiction of his convicting personality, but it was a strategy he deemed
necessary. Rationally, Òrmȯlc decided it was better not to make rivals in a room of ready opinions before
a clever, subtle king. By way of practicality, Òrmȯlc did not want to make enemies for him and his son.
These days, there might be many to have, the greatest of which was the most powerful man in the north of
West Árnė.
Glimpsing at the heads in line, Dūl noticed a great many younger warriors among the governing
members of the clans. It was a well known, though unaddressed matter that Tánȧ had pushed for the
installation of these up-and-coming g elėmbīch into stations that allowed them the privilege of attending
legislative meetings. They were men whose trust he had bought, malleable men still early in their careers.

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They were the same warriors who ambitiously bestowed precious materials after campaign dispensation,
and were rewarded so plentifully in return. In that way Tánȧ had buffered favor within the assembly
against the older men who so often questioned his policies.
While they made their slow progression, Dūl attempted to ease his brother‟s worries, “Hard to
believe it is already this cold,” he offered as a feeble attempt for idle conversation.
He paused and gauged his silent companion‟s reaction, but Òrmȯlc had little patience for small
talk.
Dūl started again, “It will not be much longer before every day is like this and even colder. I…”
“Where do you go at night?” Òrmȯlc interjected without looking at him.
Though Òrmȯlc‟s abrupt and intrusive inquiry caught Dūl by surprise, he responded honestly, “If
you must know, I‟ve been seeing someone every night.” He was careful not to show any of his
embarrassment, hoping that none of the other men around them were paying him any attention.
“Seeing?” Òrmȯlc muttered the question.
“A girl.”
“What girl?”
“Just a girl.”
“Who is she?” Òrmȯlc‟s concern was persistent and unsettling.
“Her name is Sūndȧ,” Dūl could not say much more.
There was a wall of quiet between them while they neared the assembly hall. Bórdȧ and his
companions had already gone inside. In silence, Dūl and Òrmȯlc mounted the white stone steps of the
House of T ephȯr.
When they reached the doorway, Òrmȯlc stopped and stared at Dūl, his expression rigid, “Be
careful, brother.”
Before Dūl could ask what he meant, Òrmȯlc ducked through the entrance. Dūl followed.
Once he stepped inside, Dūl immediately noticed the warmth of the assembly hall. Then he
realized the richness of his environment. The whole hall was carved from the same rock as the building.
Bonestone benches rounded the room in several tiered flights, save for the far wall. Instead, there was a
high dais on which sat a high stone chair. A large fire, the hall‟s source of heat, crackled in an ember-
bedded pit below. Hard gusts of intruding wind from outside were whittled to mere whispers between
bodies shuffling through the door. What little blew in of the dwindled wind barely wavered the ascending
smoke while it exited in tendrils through a screen of iron mesh in the ceiling.
The benches were marked off in four sections by intersecting staircases. One of the four clan
banners draped the wall behind each – the long-spined blue deer skull signifying Clan S thrė, the yellow

93 |
lyre representing Clan Bēphȯm, the white raven guzzling purple gore denoting Clan Dáedȧlāch, and the
white mountain of Clan Tàen all were unified by a common black backdrop. One other banner adorned
the walls of M dȧ. Behind the white stone chair, elevated high above the sputtering flames, was hung a
banner fixed with T ephȯr‟s personal emblem – a crowned raven astride a black bull. This was the crest
of the kings of M dȧ, set on a background of purple to demonstrate that though the king of M dȧ was
considered above all the clans, he did not belong to any of them.
Many of the seats below Dáedȧlāch‟s banner remained vacant. In comparison to the filling
benches of the other clans, their numbers were scant and revealing of their long path toward recovery,
toward a glory they had boasted only sixteen years ago. The obvious deficit in Dáedȧlāch‟s representation
only made their transgressions that much more glaring. They still endured the humiliation of their
faithless dead and the frustrations of an inadequate bond that left half of them forsaken and slain. The
other half continued to pay the debt of treason. Th i‟s father had been of Dáedȧlāch, an oath-loyal hero of
the old kind, a blood-relic of M dȧ‟s legacy. That was why F inu took his place among that desecrated
kinship so abased before his father and liege. Only one man could belong to the clan of T ephȯr, could
bear that solitary membership. Therefore, the sons of M dȧ‟s kings named their heritage by their mother‟s
side and took clanship from their maternal grandfather. Pinned beneath such a heavy reminder as the
white raven of Dáedȧlāch, F inu was doomed to the repercussions of his mother‟s infidelity and his
father‟s perpetual dissatisfaction.
Dūl spotted Bórdȧ and his friends sitting along the wall in their clan‟s seating area. His father, a
man grayed with age and grizzled by the long years of martial service, sat among the elder members of
the clan upon the benches nearest to the fire. F rȧr was well respected by his peers in age. Most of them,
like F rȧr had retired from service after fulfilling their terms of service, but still others, like Mèil who
conversed with his father, had passed into their winter years without providing the progeny necessitated
by law.
“Keep on young man,” a middle-aged g elėmbēch urged Dūl from behind. Embarrassment
blushed Dūl‟s cheeks when he realized he was blocking incomers from taking their seats. He gave a
humble apology and hurried to take his seat amid his fellow clansmen.
Once Dūl had scooted beside Òrmȯlc, and the rest of the g elėmbīch had taken their seats, the
judges emerged from a small doorway below the dais accompanied by Tánȧ. The king wore his most
sumptuous clothes for the occasion – a black tunic of fine wool velvet laced with smooth silken black
thread and trimmed with sable. His white seal skin boots were high, cut just below the knee where his
matching black wool velvet britches were tucked. Like the g elėmbīch seated before him, his sleeves
were large and passed over his hands. Ribbons of black silk tied tight around his elbows only accentuated

94 |
the girth of his upper arms. But what caught everyone‟s attention was that which adorned his brow. The
Mantle of M dȧ shimmered silver-red in the firelight. The crown was a simple two-pronged circlet of
silvered iron, but it was a relic of ancient days worn by T ephȯr himself and all the kings of M dȧ after
him. Dūl knew that Tánȧ only wore it for certain ceremonies or times he had especial want to demonstrate
his authority. Truly, the crown bore an innate majesty that made the king an even more imposing
dignitary, and demanded the reverence of all those present.
Silently, the assembly watched as Tánȧ ascended the stone steps beside the dais to his throne. The
judges each produced unlit brands. With synchronized pomp they lowered their sticks into the crackling
flames and lifted them burning into the air, then turned and together lit a brazier set in the front of the
dais.
Turning to face the assembled g elėmbīch, the judges shouted and gestured in wide circles,
“Honorable g elėmbīch, you have mustered here today for the Autumn Council, today being reckoned by
the moon as the first day of the month of Gèbėl , and thus the first day of autumn. The king has had you
gather here as demanded by the customs of our ancient laws to hear your pleas if you so have any.”
The judges took their seats at the foot of the dais before the fire. There was silence. The tension in
the air was palpable. Outside of the assembly Tánȧ commanded the g elėmbīch to utter obedience, but
this was the only venue where they could express their estimations to their ruler and did so vehemently.
Dūl knew, as well as Tánȧ or any other man there, that many of the older g elėmbīch, his father one of
them, were dissatisfied with some of the changes and neglect their king had assented to in recent years.
“I would like this council to address something,” everyone turned to look at one of the graybeards
seated on the front row of Clan Bēphȯm.
Dūl recognized him as an old champion tòlȧd player. Everyone could probably guess what he was
about to say.
The man continued, “As you all know, we are nearing the first full moon of autumn, and the
Festival of Gèbėlēch-vō with it. Until the previous year, in all the many centuries since its inception, M dȧ
has always competed at the West Árnėch Games. And each year every city, town, and village in West
Árnė that can put together eighteen men and boys gathers on the Plain of the Blade for this rite of sport. It
would be a travesty to cancel the competition for another year.” The old man addressed Tánȧ directly, “I
beseech you to remove the ban on the games.”
Many satisfied grunts could be heard among the front benches.
“The ban still stands,” Tánȧ said gruffly.
Gray heads bobbing in agreement jerked to a halt when they heard the king‟s dismaying words.
The elder clansman of Bēphȯm began anew, though a bit more indignantly, “The games are not just a

95 |
time-honored tradition. They are sacred, and you would do yourself and M dȧ a disservice if you continue
to deny all of West Árnė this rite,” the Bēphȯm man finished with an expectant look toward his king, but
Tánȧ merely sat in judicious silence.
Another man from Clan S thrė rose to his feet and began shouting, “Just because you can now
boast control of the Plain of the Blade, it does not give you the right to control the games themselves.
They are important to all of West Árnė,” he protested.
“Then let the other cities play if they want, but M dȧ is not attending,” Tánȧ responded dryly. “If
you have forgotten, let me remind you that we are currently at war.”
“That has never been a reason to cease the commencement of the West Árnėch Games before,”
the S thrė man argued. Every summer we participate in raiding campaigns and tribute expeditions against
our neighbors, as they do to us and to one another. But every fall since the time of our forebears, we are
able to set aside our hostilities for the sake of sacred competition. You would deny the pattern of our lives
and our traditions?” Even many of the younger g elėmbīch applauded the man‟s words.
“Do not be so naive,” Tánȧ scoffed. “We have never been so embittered in war, never reached a
level of power in West Árnė of this magnitude. There‟s not a settlement in the north that does not house a
garrison of your peers, and we have given our neighbors to the south more than just a fierce shake.
Mūnmȯ r fears losing the rest of its vassals to us and succumbing to our clientage. In my long reign as
king we have buried six sons of King Cáegid, four princes of Mūnmȯ r. Do not think that Cáegid will so
soon forgive us that, and do not believe that any holy connotations the games might have would override
his desperation to injure us. If we let him Cáegid would massacre us, throw us to the mewling slaves and
helots baying for our blood,” he ended his rant with a snarl.
“It‟s just not right,” a despondent comment was all the old man could manage in wake of the
king‟s furor.
“As I have proclaimed countless times, once we‟ve secured our power and restored peace to West
Árnė, the games will recommence, but not before.”
There were only grumbles of discontent for awhile. No one stood to fill the void.
“Are there any other matters to discuss?” the voice of one of the judges rounded the room in a
bold echo.
“There is something that has troubled me, my lord,” announced a voice beside Dūl to his surprise.
Òrmȯlc‟s low words rumbled in the House of T ephȯr, “It vexes me, as I‟m sure it does many of my
brethren here, that we are no longer permitted to the Isle of the Holy. We have tolerated this new order,
these Òmȯr that you have brought to M dȧ, and even made due when the Vēuch were expelled from our
city based upon your claim that their priests were attempting to assassinate you. But now that the Vēuch

96 |
have been cast from M dȧ they have returned the favor and have barred us from their most sacred shrines,
the temples on the Isle of the Holy. I implore you to repeal your order of banishment on the Vēuch so that
they will relinquish theirs.”
Òrmȯlc sat down to the applause of the congregation, but he did so heavily. No amount of
agreement would cheer him from what he had just done. The tall warrior must have been deeply troubled
to have risked speaking his displeasure to a man he had many times called dangerous and conniving, Dūl
thought to himself. He looked about the hall, to see about half of the present attendees slapping their
knees or nodding in consent. Most of the young men, close to his own age and slightly older seemed to
care little about Òrmȯlc‟s opinion. In fact, those that did applaud looked unsure of themselves, perhaps
acting so only so that their elders would not notice their lack of religious devotion.
It was common knowledge that the youth of M dȧ had been reared in unconventional times when
the Vēuch took a secondary role to the Òmȯr, and though the older generations were resistant to adapt, the
young men of M dȧ were much more accepting. Indeed, they had only known success under the guidance
of High Priest Ūvthȧch and his Òmȯr acolytes. Even Dūl had to admit, he often felt the reason that he
cared for the Vēuch at all was because they embodied a tradition and belief that his father and Òrmȯlc
seemed so eager to impart to him, and still their order meant little to him. In his mind, the Vēuch
promoted passive oppression and hypocritical corruption, which they masked by venerating themselves as
much as the old gods.
Once the din of knee claps had dwindled, Tánȧ spoke to the g elėmbīch, “I am glad that you have
brought this matter to the attention of the assembly, worthy Òrmȯlc. I have plans to resolve this
unfortunate incident. As you know, the Vēuch made a bid on my life, and their plot was only discovered
and averted by the timely intervention of the Hound. I was forced to banish them to account for all your
safety as much as my own, but my intentions were never to deny any man the rights of his forefathers. It
was a regrettable consequence that the Vēuch felt slighted and acted out their frustrations on all of you,
barring you from the most sacred of places. That is why I am sending an ambassador to negotiate your
reentry.”
The hall was flooded with mumbled chatter. F rȧr stood to Dūl‟s further surprise. Just from the
quick way he jumped to his feet, Dūl knew that his father meant to rebuke Tánȧ‟s proposition.
“We must not ignore the fact that this all came to be because you banished the Vēuch, and for
what, the sake of the Òmȯr? Feh. Do not let your ears be fettered by Ūvthȧch‟s honeyed tongue. The
Vēuch have never been malicious, nor does their doctrine allow it. But the Òmȯr? They would have us all
pluck out our own eyes if they saw profit in it.”

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Even anticipating such disapproval, Dūl was surprised by the old man‟s contemptuous tone. At
first Dūl thought Tánȧ had stoked F rȧr‟s anger with his description of the Vēuch as corruptible, an order
comprised of men willing to neglect their moralizing messages and bend to the devices of political
murder. It seemed that the king had struck away at the sedentary layers of the aging man and uncovered
the fierce spirit of younger days. But then, though all that might too be true, Dūl realized that Òrmȯlc‟s
own boldness had heartened his father‟s conviction more than anything.
“You claim that the Vēuch tried to murder you,” F rȧr spoke more evenly. “The Vēuch say you‟re
being unfair, slandering their good order. Well, I‟ve not seen or heard any proof of their malevolence, but
I have seen plenty of grim days since the Òmȯr took your shoulder for a seat. Arming slaves like
warriors? Encouraging our warriors to take blindly like desperate slaves? At the moment, it seems that the
Vēuch are correct in calling you unjust.”
Tánȧ was quick to respond, but collected, “I would think the attempt on my life would only
validate my need for protection. You know well that I am king and by the law of our forebears I cannot
raise an army of g elėmbīch for myself. I am dependent on the agreement of the clans to lead g elėmbīch
beneath T ephȯr‟s banner. But since you will not lend me a bodyguard, I am forced to provide my own
security. So, I have resorted to using slaves for this purpose, but have transgressed no law in doing so. I
have never lent any of my slaves shield or spear. Only the g elėmbīch may carry these. Call me false, but
I‟ve been true enough to that. It is a sad necessity that I must keep the Hound and his slave-soldiers so
close. So too is my encouragement to collect the wealth of which you no doubt speak. If we are to fund
our war against Mūnmȯ r we shall need more resources than in the past, and if you think it is slavish for
warriors to do what they must for the sake of their city, then we are a nation of slaves and I am your
servant-king. Those who greater benefit M dȧ will benefit greatest themselves. We shall repay those
helots faithful to us when all of West Árnė is under our sway.
“As for the crime to which you refer, the Vēuch man who committed insurrection already
professed his guilt publically, and though he would not name his accomplices directly, he spoke of a plot
within the order of the Vēuch. What more proof do you want of me?” Tánȧ asked squarely.
“What proof have you given us?” F rȧr inquired without the slightest hesitation. “A frightened
man that the Vēuch did not claim to know, that no one could identify? And his verdict was handed down
with such haste that no one had time to question him.”
“What would you have me done? Shown leniency to a man who attempted to take my life, who
attempted to unbalance the power of M dȧ. Was a swift execution not a fitting justice?” a rumble crept
into Tánȧ‟s tone, though he maintained composure.

98 |
“The matter might have been resolved for you before this man‟s death, but it was not resolved for
us,” F rȧr stared defiantly at his king.
“I know I can listen well enough, but it seems I have heard you wrong, venerable F rȧr, for it
sounds as though you are accusing our king of corruption before this assembly.”
All heads turned to the speaker, a tall man of elaborate manner and smoothed voice who rose
among the Dáedȧlāich. In grandeur, he seemed second only to Tánȧ. Though Dūl had never met the man
before, he immediately recognized him by the flare Òrmȯlc and his father so often referred to in
clanhouse discussions after assembly meetings. Écmȯen in Fōthȧd was a respected warrior and
spokesman of the Dáedȧlāich. Though he was an overt individual, his criticisms were deliberately
passive. In fact, he was often said to be one of Tánȧ‟s most subtle public enemies. That was why it was so
strange that Écmȯen should so readily stand to defend the same man whose authority he depreciated on
countless other occasions.
Despite Écmȯen‟s attempt to entrap him, F rȧr was not to be dissuaded from his argument so
easily, though when he began again, it was with noticeably more tact. “Let the guilty judge themselves,
Écmȯen. I merely mean to say I cannot tolerate the fact that, as a free man of M dȧ, I cannot make my
observances and pay homage at my gods‟ shrines upon the Isle of the Holy. I am an old man, and know
well that there is little time left for me in this world. I would like to make the pilgrimage to the Isle of the
Holy before I die. But I am disallowed as long as the Vēuch remain barred from our city and I remain a
man of M dȧ. Both of these seem foolish reasons to deny me, but only one is alterable.” F rȧr addressed
Tánȧ directly, “Amend this strife immediately, and rid M dȧ of the Òmȯr. Restore the Vēuch.”
F rȧr finished to thunderous applause of the elder clansmen before sitting down again. Tánȧ tried
to reply but he could not be heard. The judges did his best to quiet the g elėmbīch.
Finally, Tánȧ sprang to his feet and shouted so that the entire chamber was filled with his
impatience, “Silence!” Tánȧ stared down the rabble from atop the high dais, his visage fierce, his muscles
flexed in anger. His tall crown smoldered in the glare of the chamber fire and made him seem all the more
imposing. Beneath his baleful eyes the congregation mumbled and became silent.
Tánȧ‟s voice was grating though his words were not harsh, “I have told you all, I plan to rectify
this circumstance, but you must give your patience and your loyalty. We have done many great things,
performed mighty deeds and achieved glory in battle. Together. Do not discard the honorable bond of our
oaths for the sake of some jealous priests and priestesses. And do not be so quick to fault the Òmȯr. More
than you may know, they have shared in fashioning our successes. But what of the Vēuch? It is not just a
few mere times they have obstructed our endeavors. I ask you noble g elėmbīch, was it jealousy or spite
that compelled them? You should not be too hasty to dole out brash accusations when I have already

99 |
suggested your restoration to the Isle of the Holy. And you seem to have lost your memories, because you
have forgotten that I forgave the past transgressions of the Vēuch. It is no secret that I have little love for
their order, but I forgave them when they conspired, convinced my son and queen to insurrection, and I
did so for you. The second attempt on my life is what I cannot forgive, and still I will not. But you have
been loyal, proud g elėmbīch, and I shall continue to do everything in my power to honor that loyalty.
M dȧ‟s place on the Isle of the Holy shall be restored,” Tánȧ finished with an emphatic thump of the
chest. “I shall select the emissary party over the next few days. In the meantime we shall enjoy the
festivities of Gèbėlēch-vō.”
Many g elėmbīch seemed pleased with the king‟s words. Dūl could see that Tánȧ had left an
impression on many of the young warriors, as they clapped enthusiastically. Even several of the older
men seemed acquiescent to Tánȧ‟s argument. Others accepted with a quiet restlessness. But Dūl was not
concerned with them. He looked then, to his father seated before him, F rȧr‟s head hung low, sunken
between his shoulders.
“You‟re being awfully quiet tonight.”

Dūl looked down at the girl talking to him, her big brown eyes staring back at him. Both of them
stretched out on his bed, one of his arms around her while Sóethȧ lay on his chest, the other bent behind
his head while he was thinking.
It had become habit over the course of the last week for Dūl to meet Sóethȧ on the Págtr dȯ Fāl
late every night and return to a house he shared further down the mountain with another young, unmarried
g elėmbēch. They would sneak inside upstairs and spend their few hours together in his room. Usually he
talked at great lengths of the many things he had seen and done or heard, and she would listen
contentedly. But tonight Dūl kept mostly silent, lost in thought.
“I‟m sorry,” Dūl apologized for his distance. “It‟s just something that happened earlier today.”
“What is it?” she asked, propping her chin in the hollow of his chest and blinking at him
inquisitively.
“It‟s nothing.”
“You just said it was something. How can it be both something and nothing? Come on. I‟d like to
hear.”
“That‟s alright. I feel like I‟m always talking.”
“I like it when you talk,” she flashed a smile that he could not deny.

100 |
“Just tell me,” she tried to avert any conversation from herself. She was relaxed and did not want
to fabricate more of a background nor borrow any more stories from Gānbȧ‟s life for her rapidly evolving
persona as Sūndȧ.
“Some of the things we were discussing in assembly…”
She looked at him expectantly when he paused.
“They have made me think about things.”
“What sorts of things?” she cocked her head to the side in sympathetic gesture.
“Some of the things Tánȧ has been doing lately. They‟ve been pressing on me. A lot of the
g elėmbīch do not seem to notice on what sort of path he is taking us, banishing the Vēuch, associating
with the Òmȯr, making desperate enemies out of all West Árnė. And those that follow willingly do not
mind that he is disregarding tradition for his ambitions. They are eager to pursue this supposed glory he
promises.”
Sóethȧ chuckled.
Dūl peered quizzically down his nose at her, “What‟s so funny?”
“It‟s just that you sound like an old man.”
“That‟s just it. I think the elder g elėmbīch are right. They were the only ones who would argue
against Tánȧ‟s policies, and even when they did, Tánȧ only hushed them with more promises, while the
others applauded.” Dūl leaned back and said, more to himself than to Sóethȧ, “You should have seen
him.”
“Tánȧ? Why?”
“No. My father. He‟s always been so strong, so steadfast,” Dūl gave a faint chuckle. “He used to
carry Bórdȧ and me, one on each shoulder. And if that doesn‟t sound like a feat you should meet Bórdȧ.”
Sóethȧ laid her ear next to Dūl‟s heart and smiled as she listened to its lulling beat.
“He would spin us around, and keep going as long as we begged him or until we got sick.” Dūl‟s
expression and tone turned somber, “But today, today when everyone was applauding Tánȧ and they had
all forgotten my father‟s words, those broad shoulders sagged. He seemed so old. So feeble. I hate that
more than anything Tánȧ has done. And maybe the worse part, is that when I‟m honest with myself, I
realize I care just as little for those traditions as the people that praised Tánȧ.”
Sóethȧ too grew despondent, “Tánȧ is nothing more than a bully.” The years of abuse she had
suffered under his fosterage flashed through her mind, and now she was soon to be condemned to a
lifetime of marriage, bound to the same man she despised. “I wish I had never met him,” she muttered.
Dūl thought the comment peculiar. She had never mentioned Tánȧ before in any one of their
many conversations. “You know Tánȧ personally?” Dūl asked disbelieving.

101 |
Be careful brother, Òrmȯlc‟s warning resurfaced in his mind.

Dūl had not pondered his brother‟s caution long, having been distracted by the unsettling events
of the assembly, but it struck him now as he lay with the girl over whom Òrmȯlc had urged prudence.
Before she realized what she had said, Dūl popped up to his elbows knocking her off him. She
recoiled at his feet, both staring at the other with separate evident alarm.
“What do you mean you wish you had never met him?” Dūl demanded incredulously.
“Simply that I have met him, and I think him a great boor and a brute,” she offered, hoping he
would be appeased with such a succinct account.
He was obviously unconvinced with her scant answer. Dūl‟s jaws clinched and his eyes searched
her for satisfaction, “Sūndȧ, up till now you‟ve been vague with the details of your life, and I‟ve accepted
your half statements and discretion for love of you, and because I can see that there is pain in your past.
But I can no longer. Why can I only ever see you when no one else is around? You‟ve got to be honest
with me. Tell me how you know Tánȧ.”
Her sweet demeanor was cowed before his visible frustration. She merely looked at him and
pleaded, “Please, do not.”
“Tell me!”
Dūl‟s bark startled her.
She stumbled over her words, “My…my parents both died when I was young and I‟m not even
sure who they were. I was brought to live and work in Tánȧ‟s house, and I despise every day of it.”
Sóethȧ‟s eyes began to moisten. She wished she could tell Dūl the whole truth, but she knew now
that she could not. She would have to content him with half-truths.
“Tánȧ is so cruel to me and his other servants. I can only get away at night to visit you, and I did
not want to tell you because I thought you would take me back to him, or not think a slave girl worth the
trouble,” she finished softly.
She gazed into his eyes, and her long-lashed browns pierced his guard. Gradually, Dūl‟s stern
expression melted with pity.
“You are worth far greater trouble,” he said at last.
He rubbed her arm affectionately with one hand, and wiped the tear from her cheek with his
other. He leaned forward and calmed her with a kiss. Sóethȧ scooted up into his lap and slid her arms
under his, and they each laid their heads on the other‟s shoulder.
After a few seconds Dūl asked apprehensively, “So all that about growing up in G llȧch, none of
that was true?”

102 |
Sóethȧ did not want to disappoint him by ruining their supposed common ground and first
connection, but she could not keep pretending, “No, it was not. I‟ve never been to G llȧch,” she winced
as she told him. But I did not know what else to say,” she offered.
Dūl‟s chagrin only made her more remorseful, but a smirk resurfaced on his dark features, “I
must confess I am impressed with how much you know about G llȧch, never having been there.”
“Someone else I know is from there. One of the older servants. I took her stories and changed
them around for myself. Tánȧ has several ladies from G llȧch in the palace,” she added hastily so he
would not make a connection if he should ever chance to meet Gānbȧ.
She noticed Dūl was being pensive, “Maybe, I can go and meet with Tánȧ.”
Sóethȧ was already shaking her head disapprovingly.
“I could ask for your hand,” Dūl meant as a concubine but could not say it to cheapen her, to
demean his vision of them together. No man of M dȧ could marry his slave, only keep her as his official
mistress, and for him to contradict this convention, to treat a slave as his wife, he would cause himself
utter disgrace.
He persisted, “I‟ll pay whatever Tánȧ asks.”
Dūl‟s desperate disregard of insurmountable circumstances only pained her more. He was
stubbornly or foolishly ignoring sense for want. For wanting her. She felt more like telling him the truth
then, but knew it was not what he needed to hear. If she let him, Dūl could cause a great deal of trouble
for the both of them. So instead she attempted to discourage him, though she felt herself wanting the same
lie.
“You cannot go to Tánȧ! The price he‟d ask, you could never pay. No amount of money will ever
satisfy that man. All he wants is power. You will only push me further into his pocket if he finds out you
want something of his. Promise me you will not approach him.”
“How can I be happy with you beneath his roof?”
Jealousy soured Dūl‟s words, and Sóethȧ knew he was wondering how close Tánȧ kept her, a
question she was not willing to answer for the moment.
“Please promise me!” she insisted.
“Alright, I promise,” he said less acidly before smiling. “For now at least, until I figure some
other way to marry you.”
Sóethȧ‟s eyes glittered. The girl knocked Dūl to his back with a powerful kiss.
When they regained their breath, she rested across Dūl‟s body once more, both of them in a
blissful embrace.
“I‟ve got to ask,” Dūl‟s voice almost became a whisper, “have you ever seen Sóethȧ?”

103 |
Sóethȧ‟s body clenched with fear, “What?” she asked hoping she had misheard him.
“You know. Tánȧ‟s foster-daughter, the Corpse-Child. That girl that Tánȧ keeps locked up behind
those walls. Discord and doom surround her,” he said half-mockingly, but there was still a subtle quiet in
his voice, as though if he spoke too loudly he would make the prediction true.
Sóethȧ responded, trying not to say anything to incriminate her, “No. No one but Tánȧ and her
attendant are ever allowed in.”
“I wonder what she is like. They say she is supposed to be beautiful, but I bet she is more hideous
than anything, brooding in her cage, waiting for Tánȧ to hand-feed her orphaned slaves,” Dūl speculated
in jest.
Sóethȧ giggled. He thought that she laughed at his joke, and squeezed her tighter for it, but it was
the irony of his embrace that made her laugh.
Dūl mused, “It is hard to think that you live with Tánȧ. It must be awful.”
“It is,” she smiled.
“And with F inu too?” his brows rose slightly.
“Yes.”
“I figure he is as bad as his father to live with.”
Sóethȧ considered for a moment, “No, not as bad.”
“Really?” Dūl asked dully, his eyes already dipping with sleep.
“He might be a bit of a bully too, but he does not mean to be. If you had suffered Tánȧ as a father,
you would be the same way. It‟s a wonder F inu turned out as well as he did. He can even be kind at
times, and unlike his father he does not always have a motive to do something nice. It‟s just because he
wants to.” Sóethȧ recalled the times F inu would sneak into her enclosure just to bring her something as
simple as a pebble, always attached to a story of how it reminded him of her when he had found it.
Dūl‟s paced, heavy breathing stole her attention from memory. She lifted herself up and looked at
the young g elėmbēch. He was fast asleep. Just watching him breathe made her smile. She could not
contain the adoration she had for him, that she knew he shared for her. She imagined their life together, as
husband and wife, free of Tánȧ. But the reality of the situation seeped in and peeled the grin from her
face. Both of them were deluding themselves by conspiring toward a secret, unachievable ambition. She
would be married to Tánȧ instead, and one day she would have to stop visiting Dūl, to spare him the peril,
to save him the grief. She looked down to see the scabbing lines of her arms, and the prophecy she had
bought with that blood came to mind. She considered Ūvthȧch‟s second prophecy for a moment: She
would give rise to another man‟s greatness, a man other than Tánȧ.
Could he have meant Dūl? she asked herself.

104 |
As she looked upon her sleeping lover, it was a comforting fantasy, though a brief one. As soon
bitterly gone as she imagined it.
How could he have meant Dūl? What had Ūvthȧch meant by anything he said?
Ūvthȧch had also said that death would arise on her account, something she refused to believe.
Once more she dismissed the priest‟s perceptions as the ramblings of delusion that came with his kind of
power.
It was time for her to leave. She slinked off the bed and gave Dūl one last glance before opening
the window and crawling out.
All readers are invited to continue their journey into the Exiles & Tyrants series with Exodus, the
first book in the saga, which can be found at worldofei.com. Additional tales and commentaries are
made available to expound upon the diverse cultures and rich mythology that Éi has to offer.
Alongside an array of member-designed fan art, worldofei.com showcases a trove of official Exiles &
Tyrants artwork, while interactive features like maps and the in-text glossary allow you to navigate
the elaborate Éi universe with ease.
At worldofei.com, the audience is the focus of entertainment. Together we can design a conduit of
unlimited potential for our collective imagination.
The World of Éi awaits...


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1

Important Characters ...........................................................................................................................................................iv

Prologue: Day of the Bleeding Sun.................................................................................................................................................... 1

Epilogue: Scent of the Trail .................................................................................................................................................................... 260

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Representation: Sounds like:

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Description Represented by Examples

long flat tone ā, ī

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Clan Tàephȯr (ty-fohr)

Clan Dáedȧlāch (dy-dah-lahk)

Fáemȧr (fy-mahr) prince of M dȧ elder son of Tánȧ and Th i

F inu (fay-noo) prince of M dȧ younger son of Tánȧ and Th i

Clan Tàen (tyne)

Òrmȯlc (orm-olk) champion eldest son of F rȧr, father of Cáenul

Bórdȧ (bor-dah) champion middle son of F rȧr

Dūl (dool) champion youngest son of F rȧr

Cèmrė (kehm-reh) warrior cousin to the sons of F rȧr, father of Fěrm

Cáenul (ky-nool) son and apprentice to Òrmȯlc

Fěrm (ferm) son of Cèmrė and apprentice to Dūl

B cȯg (behk-ohg) apprentice to Bórdȧ

Clan Bēphȯm (behf-ohm)

Éphȧim (ef-im) warrior cousin to Fābum

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Sóethȧ (soy-thah) foster-daughter of Tánȧ

Sūndȧ (soon-dah) alias of Sóethȧ

The Hound an Ocsrae captain of Tánȧ‟s slave guard

Gānbȧ (gahn-bah) Sóethȧ‟s nursemaid

Róeni (roy-nee) queen of Mūnmȯ r

Ùthėnmōr (oo-then-mor) prince of Mūnmȯ r

Rácȧg (rahk-ahg) sailor

inėnēch, pl. inėnīch (ayn-eh-nehk, ayn-eh-neek) – boy apprentice to g elėmbēch

M dȧch, pl. M dȧich (mee-dahk, mee-dik) – blood-born citizen of M dȧ

Mūnmȯ rėch, pl. Mūnmȯ rich (moon-mo-eer-ehk, moon-mo-eer-eek) – citizen of Mūnmȯ r

Vēuch (vook) – spiritual order comprised of numerous cults

Urmurl* (erm-er-ul) – race of giants long ago pursued to extinction

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Prologue: Day of the Bleeding Sun

“Mother!” a wild, desperate cry burst the still air.

“I know,” she said between sips.

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“Not without Prince F inu‟s contribution, of course,” Dūl added.

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Exiles & Tyrants: Exodus

Exiles & Tyrants: Exodus