Painting for The Last Song of War (April 2019)

 

The Witch and the Kites (May 2021)

 

Morydd's Songs

"The Huntsman" (https://laurelinarchives.org/node/49367)

"The Last Song of War" (https://laurelinarchives.org/node/51652)

"Hierophant" (https://laurelinarchives.org/node/57598)

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Morydd of Dunland is a keeper of sacred clan songs, medicinal herbs, and rites of the dead. She holds disdain for the Rohirrim, but had long ignored the warring of her people. When she lived alone in her hovel she was known as the 'Cliff-Ghost', and the Witch of the Gravenwood.  

Suspicions and rumours about Morydd were many, especially among Dunlending children in nearby villages, who included her among their rhymes and games. According to them, she would turn into a bird or a beast during the night, or sing evil songs and walk out through the air across the canopy of the Gravenwood.

Traders and messengers who once climbed the cliff path to her now abandoned home have found the place strange and overgrown with shrubs and thorns, unfamiliar yellow berries, and small pools of rain collected in the rocky ground filled with unnatural black water. She trades tinctures and poisons, but they do not always work.

Morydd spent years as a hermit before the war. She survived the Battle of the Hornburg and escaped under the protection of the warlord Pren. Having lost this, she began to wander Dunland, a white hound as her only guardian. Now she is alone once more, a hound's skull bound to the back of her mantle, and she has followed Canwr, Lleucu and the Blaidd-luth in their exodus from Dunland to the North.