The forest has reclaimed the valley, filling it from hill to hill, but high above the restless green of hickory and oak towers the skeleton of a spruce, bleak against the annealed sky. From its scaling, brittle tip there hangs a bell, a bell of bronze without a clapper, alien in the wind's demesne. And the cataracting gale exacts a tribute from it, a tribute paid in moans, a groaning lament caught from the mouth of the bell and flung out over the forest, to break against the mountains and be funneled down into the mountain pass.

There, in the notch between the peaks, the dirge collects again, feeding in upon itself, slapping into the baffled granite and rebounding, rolling in its torment till it echoes up into a banshee wail, an eternal keening coronach, despair.

And far below, a patch of forest floor is bare, fused into obsidian. At its center stands a mummified cornstalk, paper wrapped around a hollow core, sole testament to the clan of Mannin.