“Um, this one says… something about an ‘orm,’” Duncan said, squinting as he read the text. He didn’t know very much Trylic, but since he spent so much time researching with me, he’d picked up some.

“What?” I lifted my head, thinking at first that he’d said Oren.

“Orm,” Duncan repeated. “It’s like a snake.” He tapped the pages and straightened up. “I don’t think this wil be helpful. It’s a book of old fairy tales.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“We grew up hearing these stories,” Duncan shrugged and sat back down in his chair. “I’ve heard that one a hundred times.”

“What is it?” I pressed. Something about that word, orm, stuck with me.

“It’s supposed to explain how trols came to be,” Duncan said.

“The reason we split up in different tribes. Each of the tribes is represented by a different animal. The Kanin are rabbits, the Omte are birds, the Skojare are fish, the Tryle are foxes, and the Vittra are tigers, or sometimes lions, depending on who tels the story.” The Kanin, Omte, and Skojare were the other three tribes of trols, like the Tryle and Vittra. I’d never met any of them. From what I understood, only the Kanin were stil doing reasonably wel, but they hadn’t thrived as much as the Tryle or even the Vittra. The Skojare were al but extinct.

I’d only heard of five tribes, and al of the tribes were accounted for, yet Duncan had mentioned the orm.

“What about the orm?” I asked. “What tribe does that represent?”

“It doesn’t.” He shook his head. “The orm is the vilain of the story. It’s al very Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.”

“How so?” I asked.

“I can’t tel it with the same flourish as my mom did before I went to bed,” Duncan said. “But the basic idea is that al the animals lived together and worked together. It was peace and harmony.

Orm, which was this big snake-like creature, had lived for thousands of years, and he was bored. He watched al the animals living together, and for fun, he decided to mess with them.

“He went to each of the animals, teling them that they had to watch out for their friends,” Duncan went on. “He told the fish that the birds were plotting to eat them, the birds that the fox had set traps to ensnare them, and the rabbits that the birds were eating al their clover.

“Then the orm went to the tiger and told him that he was bigger and stronger than al the other animals, and he could eat them al if he wanted to,” he said. “The tiger realized he was right, and he began hunting the other animals. None of the animals trusted each other anymore, and they scattered.