Tnúthgal felt the warm summer winds from those fabled fields, smelled fertile soil and healthy cattle. He felt the warmth of that shynn-sun on the face of the child into which he hadn't yet been born. For a moment, the spirit of Tnúthgal believed again in Tirn Aill. The hope of being reborn into a new life.

You are nothing but an ambitious pretender, a traitor, the chief failure of your grandfather's declining branch of your clan.

Were those his own thoughts? Tnúthgal couldn't be sure. They seemed more like a whisper from the darkness, the merest allegation of a voice.

Just as he gained a sight of those ripe apple trees and blue, cloudless skies, Tnúthgal was blown away on a dark wind, blown across miles of stern pines. Cold, black blows landed on his face and hands, leathery slaps as of bats' wings. The wintry exhalations of the mountain spirit's guardians sighed down from the heights.

They have grown hoary with age. Tnúthgal didn't understand why he thought so. The rites have not been renewed. The barriers decay.

Before he could wonder more at the source these thoughts, he felt himself swept up a steep, deadly mountain pass, into the bleak tundra of the great Ushaam massif. A square fort, assembled from sharpened pine timbers of exceptional girth, stood upon a crag.

Wind and snow swept the dark night of the fort, lit by hearth fires.

Is this the fort of the Narada? The oldest of the eastern tribes, and the most resentful, they ruled a nearly impregnable mountain fastness. Tnúthgal wondered why it was given to him to see such things. Surely, his body in that world lay dead, speared through the heart. Surely he had not flown all this way, many long miles. Surely it was a dream, or a death-vision. Is that the Lord of Mórraith, King of the Narada, there upon the battlement of his tower?

Like a bird upon a branch, Tnúthgal found himself among the snowy trees of a mountain marshland of reeds near the Narada tribe's great fort. Forms moved in shadow nearby, hunched and not quite Mannish in their wyrd dimensions.

A wild, yellow-tinged eye rolled out of the darkness to look at him. "Remember: the boy is mine." The figure's other eye was patched with leather, stitched with arcane sworls of small gems.

Somewhere in his heart, the spirit of Tnúthgal felt a sublime sense of satisfaction. A sense of victory. Somehow, something in him had won something.

She will still be mine.

He wondered whose voice it was that echoed in his head. Not mine, surely.

The voice whispered back to him from the darkness: Oh yes. Ours.

—33—

Look for the next installment in this Continuing Tale of The Matter of Manred: The Romance of Eowain.

Want to learn more? Check out MDellertDotCom/The-Romance-of-Eowain. Or get the whole book now from Amazon for print and Kindle: getBook.at/Romance-of-Eowain.

And please don't forget to vote, tweet, post, pin, share, and otherwise help get the word out about this exciting new Adventure in Indie Publishing!