shaped which would be quite uncontrollable.
Into Radu's mid-teens, the bullying of the Zirescus went on unabated; the youth suffered many a bloodying, many a sore bone and broken face, but never once complained to his father, whose health had for long and long been failing. But if Freji Lykan was feeling the weight of his years and the weariness of many deprivations under his swine of a chief, then Giorga was likewise declining ... except in his case it was the good plum brandy and surfeit of meat that were taking their tol. And of course his brutish sons looked on like the vultures they were, wondering where and when he would fal down for the last time, and who would bully the Szgany Zirescu when Giorga was no more. Perhaps both of them, if only out of mutual fear and suspicion. Oh, for they knew well enough how much they were hated among a majority of their people.
All of which brings us to a time approximate with the era of Shaitan, when he came out of the west on Starside and built his aerie on the boulder plains, and the swamps in the badlands seethed with vampire spores. But as yet the incidence of their evil manifestations on Sunside were few and far between. As in al mankind, however, other evils were ever present. And in the Szgany Zirescu, the evil was in the name of their most prominent family: the Zirescus themselves.
The morning came when Freji could no longer work. His eyesight was failing, and in any case he had never been much of a hunter. Now his back gave him such pain that he could scarcely walk, and it was his turn to go into the forest to gather nuts and fruit.
In the Szgany Zirescu, a man worked till he dropped, then lay there while the tribe moved on, or until he found the strength to get up again. There were few drones among the Zirescus (with the exception of Giorga, of course, his sons and a handful of their cronies), and precious few old ones. And despite that Freji was half-crippled, his chief sent him stumbling off into the forest with a basket - from which task he failed to return. The Sunside days were worth four of those in a parallel world that lay all unknown beyond the Starside Gate, yet night fell and stil Freji was not back.
Radu had had his own duties that day; likewise his sister Magda, now grown to a beautiful girl, even as beautiful as her mother had been.
And when finaly Radu left the camp and went off into the woods to search for his father, he went without knowing or suspecting that it would be Magda - or her beauty, or her loss - that would finaly forge the iron in his blood into cold, hard steel.
Magda - and the Zirescu twins, of course ...
But when he'd found his father's body, and seen the truth of his dying - that it had been no accident, and certainly not the natural end of Freji's life - then the rest of it had gone blazing across Radu's mind like some mad meteorite through Sunside's night skies!
For more than a year now the Zirescu twins had been paying court (of sorts) to Magda, not yet fifteen ...
Giorga had said that eventually she must choose one or the other ... Magda had scorned both of them; she knew that already they were a scourge among the Szgany Zirescus girls and young, unmarried women - and among some of the married ones, too ...
Her father, Freji, who had a parenfs say in such matters, had been stalling the twins and their father, telling them that Magda was too young. But it was not uncommon among Szgany girls to take husbands at the age of thirteen, and Freji had known he couldn't delay matters indefinitely. Giorga had fumed, cursed, threatened! He wanted grandsons from his sons (real grandsons, and not bastards), to carry his name on. Freji Lykan had fumbled and fawned, but still he'd stood his ground ...
The twins had poured scorn on Magda, and declared that she would end up an old maid, or a tart for any man. And deep down inside, Radu had bubbled and boiled ...
And now this:
Freji stiff and dead - murdered and left to the flies in an area of the forest rarely visited. His body had been tumbled into dense undergrowth; Radu discovered it when a vixen