Homeward Bound: Fire-Rider, Books XIII - XVIII (Fire-Rider, Collected Stories Book 3)

The warrior bands of Okan and A'o, rescued from extermination by the heroics of Kaybrel Kubna of Moor Lek and Jag Bova Mayr of Rozebek, have fled into the high mountains bordering the long inland valley where they spend their summers raiding. After a long and difficult march, they approach the rich trading center of Lek Doe. High in the mountains, the ancient marketplace maintains a strict neutrality, its wealth and power making it uniquely situated to create a safe haven for merchants, travelers, and warring parties. From Lek Doe, the allies plan to drop down the eastern face of the Serra mountain range and journey homeward across a sere desert unlikely to be haunted by their enemies.

The time is nineteen centuries after the fall of the vast Mercan Republic, a technological marvel that brought humanity into a brief glorious blaze of light and then plunged it to near extinction. In the period since the global collapse of Mercanized civilization, a catastrophic climate change has given way to a deep and lasting ice age. The Hengliss peoples of Okan, A'o, and Foshinden, like their Espanyo counterparts in Socalia, Galifone, Zoni, Vada, and Methgo, struggle to survive in agrarian villages and small cities, Henglis and Espanyo locked in perpetual warfare.Thirty-seven hundred years after the events related in the Fire-Rider stories, a crew of herders found a cache of crumbling documents hidden in a cave where they had taken shelter from a storm. These were the remains of the Cottrite Codex, a collection of arcana and journal entries gathered by wandering scholar Hapa Cottrite, one of the few literate men of the Great Lacuna: the dark period be-tween end of the Mercan time and the rise of our Methgoan culture. What follows is a fragment of that precious trove, translated and narrated by the famed storyteller Estabnya Estabanya Marcanda do Tilár i Robintál do Nomanto Berdo of the Methgoan Academy of Written and Oral Performance.