Sinner: A Prequel to the Mongoliad

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He had grown up in this forest. As a child, Otto had hunted rabbits along the band of white ash that grew along the track of the old river. He remembered the last time the wash filled with water, during the unseasonably wet spring in 1226. His uncle, Heinrich, had lost two dozen cattle in the deluge of water that had come pouring out of the trees. For weeks after, he and the other boys had found all manner of treasures buried in the dark silt carried down from the mountains by the floods: shards of earthen pottery, scraps of leather, bits of metal rounded by their long journey. Dierk, the largest of the boys, had found a piece of a broken blade, one of the old swords used by the Romans. They had even found a woman’s arm, battered and torn, wedged among the tangled roots of an ancient oak that had been torn up by the waters. Dierk had thought it belonged to Elsa, a local girl who had vanished during the flood. Perhaps she had been out here, among the trees, with another boy that night when the waters had come.

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