LITMIR.BIZ

      This is what the legend says. Nobody knows whether it is true, but in the 16th century, a cursed child of the Ice People was born. He tried to turn evil into good, which is why they called him Tengel the Good. This legend is about his family. Actually, it is mostly about the women in his family – the women who held the fate of the Ice People in their hands.

      Chapter 1

      Tiili’s story.

      It was like no other story in the world. It was unique in all of world history.

      Fortunately. Because no one had been hit harder by Tan-ghil’s malice than little Tiili.

      She was a sensitive and cheerful girl in the year 1284 in the Valley of the Ice People. She lived happily at home with her mother, Dida, and her twin brother, Targenor. She was particularly fond of animals; she felt great sympathy for those defenceless creatures who were so often made to suffer. During any frosty, harsh winter you could be sure to see Tiili walking about setting out whatever pitiful fodder she had managed to gather for both domestic and wild animals. The people of the valley smiled at her, but it was a tender smile. Someone like Tiili could never have any enemies.

      She did have one, however ... But she also had a protector.

      She had a strange doll. It looked almost like a small tree root, but to her it was like a friend, almost a living friend. The hardship and poverty that beset the Valley of the Ice People never really touched her home after she got that doll.

      Her world stretched exactly as far as the eye could see. A bowl-shaped valley with tall, steep mountains, wonderfully beautiful in the summer and autumn, and sometimes also in winter and spring when the sun shone down on the bright snow. And she knew all the stars in the sky: they were her guardians, she felt, they twinkled so pleasantly down at her.

      She had many friends and knew nothing about life outside the valley.

      There was only one shadow to be found in the bowl-shaped valley. An unpleasant old man named Tan-ghil. He lived alone in a hut down by the lake. Everyone feared him. So did Tiili. And Dida, her mother, hated that man with all the force that was humanly possible.

      Tiili didn’t know why. She didn’t know that Dida had been raped by him almost twenty years before. She didn’t know that Tan-ghil was Dida’s own grandfather. And that the same Tan-ghil was also the father of Tiili herself and Targenor. Dida had sworn that her children were never to learn about it.

      No one knew that Tan-ghil now had his eye on Tiili.

      Ugh! How she feared him! He could perform magic, it was said. With a single spell he had managed to freeze people in the ice or burn them into the mountain wall if they tried to escape the valley. He had put a curse of death on all those who had accidentally harmed him, even in a trivial matter like getting in his way walking along the path.

      He was immortal, they whispered. But Tiili didn’t believe that.

      Her mother and brother loved her immensely. Precisely for that reason, she was kept on a tight leash and they always kept a close eye on her. Nothing must ever happen to her.

      Nevertheless, something did happen.

      One day some children got hold of her wooden doll. Tiili didn’t know that it was Tan-ghil the Evil, the old man who lived in the scary house, who had tricked the children into doing it. Precisely to force Tiili, “the little flower”, out of the house, as well as getting rid of the doll that protected her and had prevented Tan-ghil from getting his hands on her.

      She set out for the children’s house. But she never got there. She disappeared somewhere along that short road and was never recovered during Dida’s brief lifetime.

      At the same time that Tiili disappeared, Tan-ghil did as well. But he returned after thirty days. Secretive and satisfied, maliciously triumphant.

      Only Tiili knew what had happened.

      She had been walking along the path between the houses. At one point the view was blocked by tall cliffs.

      That’s where the abhorrent little old man was standing.

      Tiili stopped abruptly and wanted to turn around and run back home. But Tan-ghil did something to her. He made a small gesture with his hand and muttered a few words, while his piercing yellow eyes gave her a look that paralysed her.

      She was unable to move from the spot where she was standing.

      He came closer. Tiili had turned pale with fear and couldn’t take her eyes off his nasty face. All he had left on his head were a few streaming wisps of hair, growing from leathery grey skin. His mouth resembled the wide gape of a newly hatched eaglet. His eyes were misty and surrounded by wrinkled skin.

      “You were created for this

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