The Stone Over Clover Mountain

In the terraced slats of the verdure-laden pastures of Ireland, just beyond the highest peaks of the Blackstairs and far away from the tawdry village of Tír Giorria lies a lone, moss-encrusted stone. To call it a boulder would be more accurate; the behemoth nearly reached four yards towards the sky, and I know not its circumference, but to lap the beast was a tiresome task. I'd know, for I was one of the lucky children who made the pilgrimage here across the Blackstairs. You see, this rock I recount--it is no ordinary formation of some or other tempest of millennia gone by; the history behind it is much more sinister and, coming from this old lug, a whole lot more enthralling.

I couldn't have been more than ten, though it's been so long... it was grade school, back in old Tír Giorria, land of the hares... and land of the rotting homestead, you'd figure if you'd spent more than a minute near my abode. That old town sits at the bottom of a trough formed by two large mountains: Blackstair Mountain, and Mount Leinster--the two giants of the Blackstair Mountain range. The views were great, but rainy Ireland can't help but pour her lifeblood right through our homes' foundations every spring. It always made for a proper hassle of keeping our walls upright; my only solace was the school... the only bloody building that anyone had the sense to put up with stone instead of solely timber.

So, I spent most my afternoons there. Evenings, too. Usually the old janitor had to kick me out when he'd lock up. I'd while away the hours in the library room reading whatever I could pillage from the shelve that my eyes hadn't already scanned front to back; those rare days of new book shipments were magical. Eventually, one of my teachers took notice of my habits--probably when she'd realized I already knew all the curriculum before we'd gotten to it! Turns out she had been planning an exclusive field trip for the top performers in the class--no doubt as a stroke of incentive to our more lackadaisical classmates. While my peers would have to scrap to make it into the top quarter of results on our midterm, I'd been given a by due to my unquenchable thirst for knowledge--which, of course, arose since walls are... rather quenchable. Where was our destination-to-be? None other than the Mossrock.

You see, most students couldn't care less about the most esteemed of city museums, nor the most expansive of libraries. No, our professor was bright, and knew that a certain destination much closer to home would have everyone studying nightly. There existed legends of a sort, and us kids--as kids do--perpetuated, embellished, and marveled at these. Everyone knew about the Mossrock; it was storied to contain the reincarnated body of Niall of the Nine Hostages, an old king who'd become legend in our folklore--and it sat just beyond our home mountain. The story goes that, after Niall's legendary and mysterious death,