A Promise Fulfilled: Cairn Mist
Gráigdeireadh, Eastern Aurinsay, the Brythonic Isles.
The Seventeenth Day of the Ninth Moon, 610 AD.
Months turned into years. Memories faded. People moved on.
She didn't. Couldn't.
He should have been hers. He would be hers, as soon as he returned.
She'd stopped questioning the other boys about what had happened that night almost a year ago. They'd never answered her questions anyway.
Boys. They were still boys, even after all the happened. Not men. They were far too immature for that, no matter what the coming-of-age ceremony said. And of course, being boys, they were stupid.
The forest itself was rarely travelled now. The strange happenings made few hunters care to tread its paths, and any foolish enough to try wouldn't have found it worth their while; what had once been a wealth of wildlife had been depleted, and the few animals still lived amongst those trees were anaemic and sickly, with hardly enough meat on their bones to feed a bairn.
It was as though the life was being sucked out of the forest.
The harvests suffered too; a few years ago they had been blessed by the Jay, that most magnanimous of fertility goddesses, for their devotion to love and to live, but now the crops had begun to wither in their fields. How fitting, she thought, that a goddess of love would turn her back on us after one of the most kind-hearted people in the village was abandoned by his brothers in the woods.
And it was abandonment, of that she had little doubt. The other boys were supposed to be a part of his Waryouth band, a brotherhood that would be forged in hunting and battle. If they had stuck to their oaths to their band, they would have at the very least brought his body back with them.
But no. Nothing. Not even his bones to bury.
The poachers and woodsmen that came from other villages were the only people who she could glean anything from these days, but they all said the same thing.
There was a Siabhne in the woods.
She'd been warned about these creatures in fae-tales when she was a child; they were spirits doomed to linger beyond death, not of this world but tethered just enough to be able to watch as the world continued on without them. Unable to walk amongst the living, and yet unable to truly pass on.
As was the norm for such legends, the stories and myths were so splintered that they agreed on very little regarding these creatures. Some legends claimed they glowed a baleful green in the moonlight, others said their skin turned the blue and black of rot and decay, more still claimed a deathly pallor would colour them.
There was one common thread to the tales, however. All the stories she knew agreed on one thing: the tether.
The tether of a Siabhne was always yearning. Yearning of another for the spirit, the yearning of the spirit for another, both, it mattered not. It bound them here.
She wasn't stupid. She could put two and two together.
They had yearned for each other for so long, yearned for the life they would share together, yearned for fate to change the hands they were dealt.
Maybe the fates had listened for once?
Despite the absurdity of the situation she allowed herself a moment of hope, and an almost conspiratorial smile. The Brythonian isles remembered much of what the rest of the world had forgotten, and though no human could hope to harness the mystical energies that saturated the isles in any meaningful capacity everyone who lived within the embrace of the Corvids knew the truth well; these isles were moulded by magic, and the effects still lingered. Oh, for sure, no one knew who had dragged these isles from the sea, nor who had erected the Greystones at their heart. They did not know who, or what, or when, or even just why. But even so, the effects lingered. Mystical phenomena would occasionally sprout up across the isles, and to her understanding it was much like... how best to explain...
She pondered for a moment, thinking back to the tales she'd been told as a child, some by Old Kerwyn, others by Arwen himself.
The Greystones acted as a sort of metaphorical bowl, and magic like water. As with a bowl, if one dripped in water gradually but never emptied it, it would fill. So too with the Greystones. Over time the bowl had grown completely full, and with no-one alive who knew how to drink from the vitae contained within it would occasionally spill, like droplets of water slowly falling to stain the earth momentarily before evaporating into nothing.
Magical phenomena worked much the same.
Strange weather here, strange activity from an Umbra there, the possibilities were... well, wide, to say the least.
And yet even so, the thought of a shade lingering past death really felt like something she should have been more concerned about. She shrugged. Far be it from her to deny her one chance at answers, at moving on. If that meant accepting that Siabhne was tethered to her and able to be seen in the flesh then that was fine by her.
Old Kerwyn was on his last legs, but despite both that and the fatherly love he had borne Arwen, he still cautioned her against seeing his shade. She hadn't lied to him; she refuted his warnings to his face. For the wisdom and care he had shown her over the years, the old Druid deserved at the very least her honesty.
"Be careful at least. It's fickle, magic. It ain't predictable. If these things are true, then you're in danger."
She scoffed.
"Do you really think I care about danger at this point?"
"Gráinne, please. It's been four years since he went missing. Don't throw your life away chasing ghosts."
The old man looked at her with such intensity that she thought he meant to pierce right through her with his gaze. She turned away, any rebuttal or response dying on her lips. Instead she simply shook her head and moved to exit the old Druid's home. As she left she heard him sigh heavily to himself and tut, and she caught a glimpse of him shaking his head. Even so, he did not make any attempt to stop her. He would respect whatever decision she made as her own, this much she knew, only so long as she was aware of the potential danger.
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She'd gone that day and made a small cairn by the forest's border. Originally she had planned to make it in the field between Gráigdeireadh and Grywhendaigh that they had spent so many treasured nights in as children, but it seemed a fools errand to make her offerings each night so far from home. Instead she elected to have it within eyesight of her small home, whereupon she could watch over the shrine whatever the hour. A small bowl of food and a warm drink was left for him each night. He must be cold out there.
The hounds were silent in the woods nowadays. They hadn't suffered a direwolf attack in years. Any huntsman questioned said the same thing; "They're all dead. There's neither umbra nor wild dogs left in the copse."
On the one hand, people were happy. There wasn't a threat in the wild forests to them anymore, or at the very least not one they recognised. She wasn't stupid enough to think it was purely his shade, this rumoured Siabhne. No; the harvest was failing, the game was depleted, and their livestock were underfed, malnourished things. The last few years had been tough, and there was simply nothing left for the wildhounds and direwolves in the forest to fight over.
Even still, she had some faith he was keeping to his oath out there. He once said he'd protect the village with his life, that he'd been reborn anew of it's soil. That much, she thought, he seems to have taken rather more literally than most people do.
Despite her situation, she still managed a small smile at her own half-joke.
He was one of them, one of the village, and even if everyone else forgot that she knew that he wouldn't. She swore that she wouldn't either, even if it meant she was the only one who made the effort to let his memory live on, to let that tattered thread of his life that was left behind know that he was still loved. If she could do nothing else, then at least she could do that.
She stopped as she went to leave her house to put a small drink out by his shrine, her eyes being drawn to the small collection of trinkets he had once treasured. She had held onto them this long but... but they weren't hers. She was being selfish with them. She moved over to the shelf, but found herself unable to part with all of the objects. Instead she picked out a few that she knew once meant the world to him and pocketed them, before picking up the two mugs of nettle-tea on the table and walking up the gentle hill towards the woods, towards the shrine.
"Hey. I know you probably can't hear me, since your shade is still in the woods out there, but if somehow you can, know that I'll leave these here for you. You once loved them, and I thought it wrong that I keep them with me when they should be with you. I... I also thought I would share a drink with you, here, even if you aren't actually here to drink it. I'll... I'll drink mine then leave you to yours."
She took a sip of the scalding liquid, the heat banishing the chill of the night.
"I never thought you'd fall out there. You were always so... so good with your bow. I don't understand how anything could have touched you out there. I don't understand how no-one knows what's happened to you. How could-"
Her breath hitched, and she wiped away the moisture gathering in the corners of her eyes.
"How could every single one of your own sworn brothers not have noticed your disappearance? Your death? I should have gone with you instead, I'm ten times the man any of them will ever be."
She took a moment to calm herself before letting out a shaky laugh.
"Heh, not that it really matters anymore. The harvests have failed, again. That makes for three in a row now. The stockpiles have run dry and we haven't the coin to buy any more from the other villages. Half our number have left for greener pastures. A few have even left Aurinsay entirely, making for Brythonia. Heh, you'd probably laugh at the irony of that if you were here, wouldn't you?"
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She waited for a moment to hear the sound of his soft laughter, echoing through her mind like that wonderous night four years ago, but no sound stirred the stillness of the night save only the stiff autumn breeze.
She took another swig from her mug and stood.
"Goodnight, Arwen."
And then she walked back home.
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It couldn't have been more than a few nights later that something truly extraordinary happened. She actually saw him. She would say "in the flesh", but she didn't know if that was strictly true anymore. He had a sort of... otherworldly glow about him now, a pale light that seemed to seep from the space he occupied. It was as if the magics that sustained him were roiling from his half-living form, or the very laws of nature were bending around the creature he had become, the creature that according to those same laws should not be.
Not that that seemed to stop him.
She couldn't go to him, not yet. No matter how close she tried to get he would match however far she ran, only in the opposite direction. He wasn't ready to be truly seen yet, and she would have to respect that a little longer. Even so, with the right tokens of appreciation, the right level of patience, even something so simple as setting aside the hour of the hound each night, all of this would surely bring him closer to her.
The first time she truly saw him, saw his whole form and not some small glimpse, she couldn't be sure she wasn't imagining things. Actually, the first few times she truly saw him she thought grief had finally driven her mad.
He would appear at the treeline, near her shrine to him, and watch her, or rather the house that should have been theirs, not just hers, as the days whiled away and she awaited the fall of night. No-one else in the village believed her in truth, and whenever anyone looked where he was standing there would never be anything there. She suspected Kerwyn knew more than he claimed before he passed away, given his advice on this subject he'd previously given, but there was little she could do to confirm that now. That was a sad day, she thought to herself. The old man had lived a good, honourable life. A full life. There was little to be sad for, but nonetheless he was mourned. He was a well-loved member of the community, and she would have liked to have him buried here, but the younger Druids claimed he was to be sent to the Greystones. It was the highest honour any Druid could be afforded, and even if he hadn't been the Druid of a particularly influential place for the last few decades of his life it was clear that he had served in many places and for many years. He deserved that honour. The only other place holy enough for him would have been the Ouroborisian Tor out to the far west, but that path was closed to them all now. It had been closed to them since that... that madness almost a millennium ago, during the darkest hours of the Days of Silence.
She shook her head and cleared her mind. None of that mattered at the moment. Arwen's ghost, his shade, his Siabhne, was ever-so-slowly growing nearer to her. It was hard to notice in the day-to-day, but there were slight tells that meant only one thing; he was growing nearer.
Gráinne was practically buzzing with a need to rush out there and see him again, but it was tempered by the iron will she had developed in her time as an assistant to the village council.
To think, that once seemed to be a shining future for her. A member of the village council in a time of unparalleled plenty, her childhood best friend by her side as her husband and lover, and Old Kerwyn there to give out his kernels of advice wherever needed.
Where was that glittering future now? Where were the fruits of her labour?
They had turned to sand that slipped through the cracks in her hands, and ashes in her mouth.
But there was still a chance to salvage something. Arwen was here. She may have been acting in desperation, aye, but it wasn't like there was any other path open to her. He was nothing at first; faint glow out of the corner of her eye, a shadow cast against the oaks and firs, a single loose thread of the tapestry that had been his life.
But he was persistent, and so was she. She was learning.
She learned not to look directly at him, not while he was so skittish. She learned that the food she left out at night remained untouched come the morning, save whenever a few starving animals found it, but the things that mattered to them were taken.
A bronze bracelet she had made for him, a small wood carving of a dog he had loved as a child, a silver brooch in the shape of the Jackdaw he had once worn religiously; they all were placed at the shrine, and all were gone the next day. In their place had been a small antler-bone hairpin, one he had stolen from her and wore in his hair constantly when they were younger. Now it seems she had it back.
Her offerings seemed to give him some sense of courage, or at least he now understood she would not abandon him to half-formed memories as everyone else had.
If ever she approached he fled, but at least she could look upon him in the treeline now.
It was strange at first. She withdrew from public life more and more, not that she'd cared much for that across the last two years, and instead filled her days longingly gazing at the treeline, waiting for her lover's visage to appear.
Whether or not he did she would head to the shrine every night at the hour of the hound and relight the candle, replacing it as needed with a new one. There was a small puddle of hardened tallow now, having dripped slowly down the rocks and staining the ground.
She was certain she could fix this, change the cards fate had dealt, if only she remained persistent.
That was the key; she had to keep trying, keep extending her hand to him as one would a battered hound to earn its trust.
She could fix this.
I have to fix this.
Every night as the hour of the hound came she would sit and wait by the lit candle, and she'd not move until the hour of the crow was nigh, giving him time to decide if he would join her.
He'd yet to come to her side, or to let her to his, but he came slightly closer over time. It was simply a matter of patience, and the reward was to be reunion.
She'd seen his face last night as she'd lit the candle. He'd hung back, deeper in the forest than usual, but she surmised it was only because she was closer to him than normal as well.
His eyes were so filled with sorrow and unshed tears he looked as though he was in actual pain, his strangled gasps and gurgled cries carried on the wind to her ears.
She chastised herself; of course he was in pain, he'd waited alone in the cold for two years now.
She had as well.
Fate had given her a second chance here. It wasn't perfect, but few things ever are.
She had her second chance, and she wasn't going to squander it.
He was waiting for her out there, in the wild domain of the Jackdaw-God he so loved.
She wouldn't make him wait much longer.
Two nights later she made a different sort of offering. She'd managed to find something from a trader from Brythonia; a shard of one of the Greystones. Now, such material was extremely illegal. It didn't matter which island you were from, even the borderline savages of Wesvoy knew this to be true; you did not take chippings from the Greystones. If you found any, you bloody well returned them.
Of course, that didn't stop people hoping to make a small fortune from taking tiny pieces of rock from those strange, ominous stones. She flipped the small fragment in the palm of her hand. It was odd. Cool to the touch with strange blue veins running through the grey stone, she could only imagine what the actual Greystones themselves looked like. With it's power, she had been assured, she would be as one with the magics that coursed through it. Unpredictable, sure, but maybe, just maybe, it would also make her more approachable to him. She wasn't going to pretend to know how it worked, something about levels of energy needing to reach an average or something.
But even if she didn't know how or why, it worked. She let out a small gasp as she approached him.
From so close a distance she could finally make out every little detail of his agony; the tear marks down his cheeks, the unnatural pallor of his skin, even the erratic twitching of his oxygen-starved muscles.
It was not any of that which truly horrified her, though. Not in the slightest.
What horrified her was that the cut at his throat was not the mangling of a wild animal, nor the marking of an unfortunate accident.
It was a clean cut, deep and wide.
The bastards had slit his throat in the woods and left him to die.
Why? WHY? What had he ever done to them? He was different than them, and in their childish, pathetic minds, that had made him deserving of death. How many in the village knew? Did they tell anyone? Was anyone in on it?
Would anyone care?
Of course not. All the people who cared about him were either dead or gone.
Except for her.
She would end this. One way or another, she would end it.
No, I can't.
It wasn't that she couldn't kill them. It wasn't that she didn't want to kill them. Quite simply, she knew that killing them wouldn't bring him back.
But he was already back, wasn't he?
She could be with him. Not now, but tonight. The hour of the hound, as ever they'd meet. Once more they'd spend a night in the wilds with each other.
After that? They would have eternity to figure it out.
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They said this wasn't him, not how she would remember him anyway.
They were fucking liars.
So what? He'd been rendered a shard of what he once was, the pain of his final moments etched into eternity with the form he'd taken. Did that mean he wasn't actually him?
Even if they were right, it didn't matter. He might not have been whole, but it was still at least a part of him.
It was all that was left of him. It was all she had left of him.
She steeled herself and closed the remaining distance between them. Now she was but a step away from him. That's all it would take. One more step and they'd be together, as they always had been.
Something in the back of her mind protested. Some small part of her knew that she wouldn't be coming back if she walked with him. She had other friends, family members who she'd be leaving behind. Could she do that to them?
She looked at the pained expression on his face, the throat slit open and the dark blood staining his porcelain skin. He was so pale, more than he had ever been in life.
A guttural attempt at speech gurgled from his bloodied mouth, and any thoughts of leaving him here fled her. How could she even think of leaving him in this state? They were meant to be together, no matter what. Isn't that what they'd promised each other? What she'd promised him? To wait for his return? How could she renege when a second chance had been given to them?
He'd waited to be with her long enough. Just as she'd waited for him.
She leaned forwards and hugged him.
His own arms came around her, trembling as they did so.
He was so cold.
She looked up to meet his eyes.
They were still pained, of that there was no doubt, but there was now a spark of warmth in there as well.
He smiled down at her, that same sweet smile he'd given her when they'd first met, the smile he'd had when he was made a man grown, the smile she'd kept as hers the day he'd left to hunt.
She was never leaving him again.
She moved out of the hug, fear in Arwen's eyes as she moved. She gave him an apologetic smile as she slipped one of his hands into her own.
"Don't worry. We're to be wed, aren't we?"
Ghostly tears slipped down his cheeks as he nodded.
"They say that in Wesvoy a man and woman are wed when they make a life for themselves together."
She wiped a tear from his face with her free hand, and he shuddered at the warmth on his pallid skin.
"We've been wed for a very long time. Come on. Do you know where we'll go now?"
He shook his head, another word garbled through his ruined throat.
"It doesn't matter. Wherever we go, we'll go together, won't we?"
He nodded and garbled out a noise that vaguely resembled a mixture of gratitude and pining. She smiled in response and squeezed his hand.
They stepped forwards together, hand in hand, and dissipated in the wind.
The breeze blew the candle out, and all that was left of the two of them was a single rock stained with wax.
A tragic disappearance, a lonely girl, and a half-melted candle atop a solitary stone that was soon to be forgotten; the only evidence they had ever lived at all.