England's New Chivalric Epic: Remus & Gwilherm Ch VII: Morcar's Redemption

Great chapter

A great cry went up from vale to vale, from sea-shore to sea-shore, in the land of Estria, as news at last reached the great hall of Morcar, of the great sorrow that had swept over the land, at the claws and fangs of Balthrorth. The first fugitives came from the easternmost monastery of Ilkharizon, where the monks lived in isolation away from the rest of the world behind high-walls. Built for them thirty years ago, on the orders of the King Ealdmund, who had imparted it as a gift to defend them from Norse-invasions from the sea, in turn they were to note down and copy all the histories of Estria going back to the age of Cormac Sea-Crosser. Dutiful followers of Saga, the great goddess of scribes and history, sadly their walls and papers of history were of little use in the face of the wroth of the red-winged terror of Estria.

What began with the monks, moved next to the villages to the south and slowly westwards until all the villages, from Glaciathorpe to those but a day or three from Falsveal, namely the villages of Gedham and Aslthorpe.

The cry that poured through the land from the north, to the south, from the mountains in the north-east to the Waldr River in the south and that of the Aven River in the west was such that the whole of the land shook. Of all those in Falsveal none held themselves aloof from the terror and the pain, of those who poured past the gates, or who sent pleas for aid and for Morcar to offer up recompense to Balthorth for having stolen what was his by right; Elena. Somehow, the memory of how it was two girls who had been rescued from the great drake had been forgotten in the terror and violence that now broke out, throughout all the eastern-lands.