<div class="floatright">(https://images.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fs-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com%2F564x%2F19%2Fe8%2F98%2F19e8985d5544b1182f665dd4d7698a35.jpg&amp;f=1)</div><br/>She kept low and quiet while the ogre looked to the left and then to the right, trying to suss out what it caught a whiff of. Unable to find its source, or just no longer interested, the monster finished his meal, the unnerving sounds carried on for a few minutes longer than Tandi would have wished. Eventually sated, or at least, nothing else visible ready to be eaten, the ogre wandered off. Only then did Tandi breath a sigh of relief. She wouldn't have had to worry about the thing killing her if it found her now, but... if it caught her, she might wish she were dead. Ogres were brutal with those women they caught, fucking them every which way and beating them if they resisted too much, or not enough, or just because they wanted to, turning women into compliant breeding stock to welp the next generations of ogres and repeat the process again. Horrible things they were.<br/><br/>Shivering at the thought of what could have been, Tandi's hand brushed over something unusual. It wasn't dirt or grass, and while it felt hard, it didn't have the worn faces of a rock. Picking it up and looking at it, was a ring. A slim band of black gold with three prongs that almost formed a loop. Tiny circlets pocked it's outer wall, and the inside was smooth to the touch, with no engraving upon it. Most bards were just simple musicians trying to make their way through the world, but a select few knew there was power in song and in words, indeed, the first gods of the universe spoke with such powerful words, but that was eons ago. What it meant for Tandi was that she could feel a thin current of arcane power running through the black band. She would need to spend some time with it to begin to figure out what it did.<br/><br/>A couple minutes went by and Tandi began to feel a pull from the ring in her hand. It wasn't compulsive, rather, Tandi could feel the direction the ring wanted to point towards. Walking around the hill, the direction Tandi felt would shift, always pointing to the cairns in the center of the hill. She wondered if this was like what migratory birds felt, some unseen direction or lodestone that pointed the way home.<br/><br/>Looking at all sides of the hill, Tandi would notice that the south, east, and west slopes were covered in thick blackberry briars and stinging nettles, and the north slope was a large slump of eroding soil, somehow pocketed between the barrow and the sloping foothill that lead to the peaks of the Sword Mountains.<br/>