rohan

Hild was thinking hard.

It was not as if she didn’t have enough to do with trying to make her supplies last out. Or with talking to folk in the village about dropping in for a drink and some of her ‘special’ onion and bean pottage. It was never as popular as her mutton stew for some reason, but she had to make the meat last.

It had been another rainy day. Not cold exactly, but the sort of day it was good to be helping out in the kitchen rather than the fields. And that is what both Bronaa and Ethel had been doing until recently. 

Under Yllfa’s careful watch, Bronaa had been making a syrup to ease winter ailments. The autumn was slowly progressing, and the chill months ahead often saw more of the older folk in particular laid low with chest and head pains, and with stubborn coughs. It could lead to the death of weaker folk, both old and young. 

Hild climbed the stairs at the back of the ‘Roaring Dragon’ and headed to the door of Bronaa’s room.

“Ethel is here” she stated, as she knocked on the wood and entered.

The following words were called loud and relentlessly into the darkness of midnight many, many years ago, in the time of the Long Winter, T.A 2759. Ice and snow fell from the sky upon the woman scorned; the moon veiled by the blackest of clouds and the whitest of mist, and her voice the harbinger of doom and ruin upon the world and her lover, the one who had left her in the cold as she lay in childbirth, screaming of thirst, of hunger, and of pain.