The Ring Оf Fire. The Wolf Bell

The Ring of Fire

Part One: The Curse of Ynell

The mountains were jagged and black, a circle of volcanic peaks a hundred miles across. No man of Ere ventured far into them, or knew what lay beyond. Ere’s eleven countries crowded at their feet, pressed in by the empty sea and by the barren high deserts to the west; beyond the mountains were the unknown lands. Or perhaps nothing lay beyond. The countries of Ere were Cloffi and Kubal; Urobb and Carriol and Farr; Pelli and Sangur and Aybil and Zandour; and on the edge of the high deserts where life was barely possible, Karra and Moramia.

The history of Ere was violent with raiding and with war, just as the mountains themselves were violent sometimes in their eruptions of lava and fire that would spill across the warring nations, when the gods were angered.

In the old times it was the Herebian tribes who killed and tortured and took slaves, who hung the heads of their enemies from the center poles of their bivouac camps. But since the Herebian had formed themselves into a nation, driving out farmers and herders from a hilly section and naming this land Kubal, their warring had become less frequent. The eleven nations lay quiet: Ere was poised in a time of peace; though dark Kubal humped in eternal threat there between the borders of Cloffi and Urobb.

It is Cloffi where this story begins.

High up the mountain, above Cloffi’s three cities, lay the little herd village of Dunoon, its pastures scattered like green velvet among the black lava ridges. A small nest of freedom. Dunoon, maintaining stubborn truce against the tyranny of the Landmasters of Cloffi who ruled the nation below.