Fire Arrow

What Has Gone Before...

On a small farmhold in the land of Eirren there lived a gardener named Collun. He dwelt quietly in the village of Inkberrow with his mother, father, and sister; and his prized possession was a trine with a lucky blue stone embedded in the handle. When his sister, Nessa, went to visit her aunt in the city of Temair, seat of the royal family, she mysteriously disappeared, and it fell to Collun to find and rescue her.

Forging his trine into a dagger, Collun set forth, accompanied on his journey by the aspiring bard Talisen; Brie, a female archer with a quest of her own; an Ellyl prince called Silien; and Crann, the wizard of the trees.

As Collun and his company made their way through Eirren, facing many perils, they learned that Medb, ruler of the evil kingdom of Scath, which lay to the north of Eirren, had kidnapped Nessa and was in pursuit of Collun as well. Medb believed the brother and sister to be in possession of a shard of a great stone of power called the Cailceadon Lir.

Back in the days of the hero-king Amergin, there was an evil sorcerer named Cruachan, who by trickery and murder acquired the Cailceadon Lir. With the stone he created a host of malformed, deadly creatures that laid waste to Eirren; among these creatures was the loathsome Firewurme, Naid, which ultimately turned, on and destroyed Cruachan himself.

It was the hero-king Amergin who retrieved the stone and wielded it to subdue the creatures and to trap them inside the very cave from which Cruachan had first summoned them. During the sealing of the cave, the Cailceadon Lir shattered into three pieces.

One shard of the stone was taken safely to Eirren and was guarded well over the years by the reigning kings arid queens of Eirren. The other two pieces of the Cailceadon Lir were lost.

In the early days of the reign of King Gwynn and Queen Aine, Medb found one of the missing shards of the Cailceadon Lir, and it became her desire to reunite all three pieces, thereby gaining unlimited power to pursue her evil ends. Believing the girl Nessa to be the link to the third shard, Medb kidnapped Nessa and set the monstrous Firewurme to guard her on the isle of Thule.

As Collun journeyed to Thule, he learned the long-hidden secret of his parentage—that the cold and remote blacksmith Goban, who had raised him, was not his father. Cuillean, the legendary hero of Eirren, was his mother's first husband and Collun's true father. He also learned that the stone in his dagger was the last of the three shards of the Cailceadon Lir.

While Collun and Brie, the archer, made their way across the forsaken land of Scath to rescue Nessa, Medb was mounting a massive invasion of Eirren using Scathians as well as a host of morgs, evil creatures with yellow eyes who dwelled in the island kingdoms of Usna and Uneach.

And so did Collun face the Firewurme, with its lethal ooze that burned like fire. Sorely injured by the creature, Collun finally killed it, using the dagger with the lucky stone embedded in the handle. Finding that Naid was also guardian of Medb's shard of the Cailceadon Lir, Collun took it away with him, and his defeat of the wurme and the taking of the stone caused Medb's planned invasion of Eirren to collapse.

Given the name "Wurme-killer," Collun journeyed back to the dun of his true father, Cuillean, and there had his dagger forged back into a trine. His injuries slowly healed, and he and Brie found a measure of peace as they brought the long-deserted land around the dun back to life.