The Hound of Cuillin

Cold brine and mountain frost bite into the split skin of your knuckles. The impact still rings through your forearms—a sickening snap of hardened steel against obsidian bone that left you gripping six inches of jagged iron. Above you on the basalt shelf, the Cuillin hound gathers its immense weight, black fur shifting like peat smoke in a gale. Each breath from its flared nostrils coats the heather in needles of rime. Down in the gulley below, your kin slip across the wet scree toward the inlet where the sea-boats bob, their muffled sobs swallowed by the roar of the surf. Torquil skids across the loose shale to your flank, his soot-streaked face pale and his ash spear shaking in hands that have never held a weapon against anything larger than an island red deer. Before the lad can shout a fool's challenge, Sorcha catches his wool sleeve. The blind seer stands motionless against the howling wind, her coarse shawl pinned with tarnished iron, her milky eyes turned not toward the towering shadow of the beast, but directly toward the ridge where Chieftain Cormac ushers the last children into the defile. "The hound does not track the scent of meat," Sorcha says, her voice cutting clean…