: Yeah…but why would the Bowman be tootling his horn, then?
: Why would any army of the Light be anywhere away from
: Alric at this time (since they need all they can get
: defending Muirthemne and Alric himself; they need to
: stick together, like in Assassin). And why, exactly,
: would the Myrkridia be centered around the Tain? More
: appropriately, why would the Dark be looking for a
: piece if the Tain if they already have the Summoner to
: get Myrkridia?
The war is raging across all the lands of humanity, pretty much. As you can see from the "Walls of Muirthemne" narration, some Light forces are fighting in the West while a part of the Legion goes to Muirthemne with Alric. They couldn't afford to withdraw entirely from the Province, or Soulblighter would wipe out every civilian left behind.
The Archer is probably either a member of a detachment of Alric's army, or of a local militia protecting the Forest Heart settlers we later see massacred in "Relic."
As for the Dark's relationship to the Tain--what happened, remember, is that Soulblighter took a piece with him after it shattered during the Great War. When he found the Summoner, he brought him inside the Tain-world via that shard and sent him to resurrecting Krids.
Since it's apparently possible to enter the Tain-world from any shard, it's doubtless equally possible to leave it that way. (Hence how The Deceiver was able to teleport everyone out of the Tain to Soulblighter's camp--he exited via the shard which Soulblighter personally kept.) So the resurrected Krids would be able to spread outward from every known surviving Tain Shard. And most of these, of course, were in Forest Heart. So that area would be the center of the Krid expansion--and indeed, that's where we see the heaviest distribution of uncontrolled Krids, as well as the first "encampment" of Myrk Giants.
--SiliconDream
